Shared Air

For a holiday treat, we bring two new stories of Richmond, each about a new way of seeing and representing things that went on to have large-scale impact on our national lives. One tells of a young woman, Irene Langhorne Gibson, who embodied a new ideal of American Womanhood and possibility. The other is about [...]

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One of the things that seems to describe Richmond is Movement – horizontal and vertical. Frank Sprague’s trolley moved us from place to place, and his elevator moved us up and down. But we’re talking metaphors here, also. Vertical movement describes social growth and change, and we have buckets of that too. (Visit the Facebook [...]

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“Paying the meter of a parking space enables one to lease precious urban real estate on a short-term basis. What is the range of possible activities for this short-term lease?”

PARK(ing) Day is Friday September 18, 2009.
Born out of Rebar’s creative exploration for how urban public space is allocated and used, PARK(ing) Day has become an [...]

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Of all the Conversations on City Centers and Economics, Transit Stops and Transfer Hubs, Flood Zones and Flex-space, Vacant “Big Box” and Heat Island Conversions, Need to Feed the Street, Labor Lags and Layoffs, or Connecting Communities to Schools and Education to Learning…this “beets” them all, green thumbs down!

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Richmond VA:  Capital City, River City, and now the first city in Virginia, and likely the United States, to have a major urban park system preserved in perpetuity under a conservation easement.

Signed into law on 29 May 2009, the Conservation Easement places about 280 acres of parkland, including the James River Park System, Great Shiplock [...]

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We mentioned Portland’s $150 million transportation stimulus bonanza here last week. Well, here’s PBS’ documentary explaining what the Oregon city of similar size and geography to Richmond has been doing to earn it, and how they’ve had to tackle the transport, land use and energy economics and mindsets that worked in 1957 but no longer [...]

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Majora Carter’s very cool Sustainable South Bronx has a website. This link is to the basics of green roofs and their effect on reducing city heat islands and storm-water runoff and, yes, energy costs. Here’s a look at their Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (B.E.S.T.) program, charged with training for green jobs in building sectors and [...]

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Simon is writer/creator of The Wire and Homicide, and earned his chops as an ex-Baltimore Sun beat reporter. He testified to Congress last week and Democracy now has the killer transcript and video. A snip:
I was [bought] out of my reporting position in 1995. That’s well before the internet began to threaten the industry, before [...]

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Clayton Homes is one of Buffet’s bets for the 21st century portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway-owned companies. Site is here with cool options and a pricing/design configurator and plenty green specs and purty renderings of ints/exteriors – 1 bed and 2 bed base prices of 73K and 93k. Using the interactive thingy, I came up with [...]

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Philadephia car-freedom ain’t free no more. The Illadeph blog has updates and a late-Friday bad news email to the previously free basic membership service–was pay for what and when you use, nothing more. Near as we can tell, the service is healthy and well-used (50k members), it’s just that the founders got booted when their [...]

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