October 2009
10 posts
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Public Space Wednesday(ish): Mill Ends Park
We’re going from the widest road in the world to the smallest park in the world. It’s like a public space freak show up in here. Mill Ends Park, in delightful Portland, Oregon, with an area of 452 square inches (a circle with a diameter of two feet).
The park’s creation story comes from Dick Fagan, a columnist for the Oregon Journal, and goes something like this:
He looked...
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Houses, all the same? →
Julia Baum took pictures of houses with the exact same plan in Santa Clara, CA. The differences are striking.
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Public Space Wednesday: Avenida 9 de Julio
Avenida 9 de Julio is the widest street in the world — the width of an entire city block. In my personal experience, it’s impossible to cross it all in one light. Instead, you cross one of the frontage roads and maybe the central artery. On the second light you complete the trip.
While this may seem like a symbol of cars run amok, but both sides of the avenue are vibrant pedestrian...
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Can a City Be Too White?
I just read The White City by Aaron M. Renn over at New Geography. I think he did a great job at tackling an important issue — the lack of racial diversity in progressive cities in the US. I have my own ideas on this topic, and while I didn’t agree with every assertion made in the article, I was nodding along until the very last paragraph:
These [progressive] cities have never been...
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Best College Towns: New York, San Jose, Boulder,... →
I’m not really sure about their methodology, but they put Ithaca at the top of the small cities list so it can’t be all bad. (Go Big Red!)
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Helmets
This post does a great job summing up my feelings on bike helmets. They’re not particularly useful and keep people away from cycling. Instead of running ads telling kids to wear bike helmets (like in the aforementioned post), we should be advertising the fact that cycling is mainstream. Copenhagen, of course, is already doing just that.
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“The days of just funding highways, doing all these things individually, really...”
– Sec. of Transportation Ray LaHood