community

Photo by Michelle Chu

There’s a green cabin in the woods just west of Leesburg, Virginia, where tarts bake in a convection oven and jams warm on a hot plate. A morning newspaper sits under a designated rock outside, dropped off by the neighbor. Old hunting targets sprinkle the yard and taxidermy adorns the walls. Inside, a young couple is creating a new home, filling an old cabin with music and words.[read more]

...As a writer consumed by the power of community and neighbors and homes, I am distracted here for all the right reasons. I am distracted by recreating the pool games we played as kids and by hilly runs full of dramatic mountain overlooks, by a visit to a nearby lake in the pouring rain and by stories of architecture and stories of home. I am distracted...[read more]

'Yes, Mr Shapps - I'm feeling better already!'Imagine a health service where nobody bothered to share learning nationally or internationally about which treatments worked and why. Imagine a health service where it was considered entirely unnecessary to explore the causes of sickness, as long as local GPs and hospitals were given free...[read more]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) is offering up to $1.8 million in new grants for urban green infrastructure projects that both improve water quality and support community revitalization. Projects that support the restoration of canals, rivers, lakes, wetlands, aquifers, estuaries, bays and...[read more]

From time to time, a single image captures the look and feel of city life, and successfully depicts an urban place where people come together. This morning, I had the opportunity on the “Place Matters” radio show to explain the role of photography in placemaking, as a tool to better define the personal, contextual experience of a...[read more]

Source: http://www.npsp.sa.gov.au The concept of community well-being is one of the frameworks for community assessment along with other concepts (e.g. local community quality-of life studies, community health or community capacity). Measuring well-being in a community is vital to knowing how that community is faring; it therefore...[read more]

We've been hearing a lot about optimism lately. David Cameron last week invoked the British bulldog spirit in a speech that suggested all we need is strong leadership (his leadership) and to stop being 'soggy'.So how's it looking out there in the real world? Have we got cause for a new wave of optimism?Look at the big picture...[read more]

Image source: Author's blog

I was quoted in the lead article by Michael Totty in Monday's Wall Street Journal on "How to Build A Greener City." The article (and quote) leads off a special section, including the following articles:An Apple Tree Grows in SuburbiaThe Urban Quest for Zero WasteTesting Their Metals (on reducing industry material use)Building Owners Want...[read more]

A group of people who are happy. Is this your neighborhood association board? It should be. You either pay exorbitant amounts of money to it or you have moved to a community on purpose to get away from it. You probably want to get rid of it, especially if you want to tear out your front yard or save for retirement without watching that $...[read more]

"Driven by desire, participatory design is a 'collective bricolage' in which individuals (clients, users, designers) are able to interrogate the heterogeneity of a situation, to acknowledge their own position and then go beyond it, to open it up to new meanings, new possibilities, to 'collage their own collage onto other collages,' in...[read more]

This week I’m adding something new to the blog, a more in-depth, quick facts way to start applying principles I discuss on the blog directly back into the community. This week’s theme was education, so I’m revisiting  steps we need  to bridge the gap between our schools and the community. Here are five of those steps: Host...[read more]

  I believe one of the indicators of a healthy community – the kind of place that is likely to be loved and endure – is good evidence of creative expression.  Whether it’s painting, photography, music, dance, sculpture, performance or something else, people like being around artists who inspire not just our rational selves but...[read more]