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The blogosphere lost a favorite netizen this week. We’ll miss you, Inkblot, master loll cat and patio prince. It seems Inkblot was sent to cat heaven by a coyote, in the middle of a neighborhood where everything in your field of view in every direction except the sky is there because of a conscious human [...]
Archive for the ‘Urbanism’ Category
July 7th, 2012
The California Senate voted another tranche of financing yesterday , keeping the state’s high speed rail project alive. There’s a cartoon to be drawn in which the program is a maiden tied up in the middle of a freeway with the highway/automobile industry approaching, or maybe it’s a train being switched off a track leading [...]
March 23rd, 2012
Category: Built Environment, Energy and Environment, Policy Analysis, Technology and Society, Urbanism
Last fall the Economist had a short feature on traffic circles that I only noticed today. I was about to riff on how wonderful they are, and how underused in most of the US, but I’m already walking back the post I had in mind. For drivers, and people who breathe air, they are pretty [...]
March 11th, 2012
A nice little book leads us to ponder some large questions about improving American cities.
December 5th, 2011
Category: 501(c)(3), Arts and Cultural Policy, charity, NonProfits, Rhetoric and Framing, Uncategorized, Urban policy, Urbanism
(cross-post with nonprofiteer.net) Had a fascinating conversation recently with Margy Waller, a special advisor to Cincinnati’s ArtsWave, which leads the nation in evidence-based approaches to advocating for arts funding. Ms. Waller had reached out to correct my misunderstanding (and therefore misreporting) of ArtsWave’s efforts, noting that the argument is not that the public should fund [...]
November 30th, 2011
Category: Urbanism, Watching Conservatives
Jason Epstein’s Introduction to the recently-published 50th Anniversary edition of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities makes this powerful intellectual connection: Death and Life … [is] about the dynamics of civilization, how vital economies and their societies are formed, elaborated, and sustained, and the forces that thwart and ruin them…Her sympathies are with the [...]
November 26th, 2011
Category: Policy briefs, Urbanism
In the northeastern cities best known to me (Boston and New York), small multi-family buildings whose owners live in one of the units are a common housing form. The classic types are, respectively the triple-decker and the brownstone row house. Interestingly, these physical forms became owner-occupied rental housing (OORH) from opposite directions: the three-deckers were [...]
October 17th, 2011
A listserv that several RBCers belong to has had a discussion about why the ancient meme that cities are evil, unAmerican congregations of overeducated snobs, while folks in small towns are decent, commonsense types who look out for each other and embody real virtue, persists. To the point that no candidate for office boasts about [...]
June 5th, 2011
Category: Psychology, Urbanism
KQED aired a nice reflection on our dog park. It’s very hard to spend time there without smiling a lot. Some dogs, like pugs and X-doodles, just have a direct line to the human smile reflex, but all the dogs are in heaven and show it. Dogs are made to run, so being off-leash causes [...]
May 21st, 2011
One of the pleasures of living in the East Bay is the off-leash dog park at Point Isabel, where we will go with ours later today. On the way home, the devil has placed a temptation. If there’s a parking place in the shade, we can stop at Costco and load up on staples at [...]