Shared Air

“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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A very nice slide show with essay on Forest Hills Gardens via Slate. The finishing paragraph, snipped below, is so sensible, so self-evident and also deeply about long term value and community sustainability. After 100 years, despite fashion and whim, FHG works in so many layered ways that hit-and-run development does not that you wonder [...]

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Ryan Avent @ Atlantic Magazine points out an economic reality I think regional leaders are ill-equipped to see or seemingly lack the courage to respond to. And that’s either a shame, or poetic justice, because while only playing a land use game for 30 years (all the while resisting the idea of regionalism and its [...]

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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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Every morning I wake up to cars driving by on the highway less than a quarter mile away from my room. Recently, the Richmond Times Dispatch (our local White newspaper) published a news article (link below) about a repair project on Hwy 64. The article said “The $43.3 million I-64 project will repair and resurface [...]

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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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His latest column, “Build it, and they will come?” is one-half exasperation and one-half folding to what he percives to be a better hand…
It’s time to end this long, drawn-out debate over the best site for a new baseball stadium in Richmond.The Shockoe Bottom location represents the only real momentum we have toward a ballpark. [...]

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Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.
It seemed sadly appropriate that I thought of that quotation about rich people and then mangled it for this post’s headline about the below article. Sad and appropriate because the original, a dialogue claimed by Ernest Hemingway between him and F. [...]

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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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