The obscure Washington DC includes me

Caption: Richard Layman, a bike path planner, led the charge to preserve the Washington Coliseum, where the Beatles played their first stage concert in the United States. Layman's blog is "Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space."

From the CNN Travel story, "Welcome to obscure Washington, D.C."

The author of the piece, Mike Ahlers, had an awesome camera as well as a synchronized flash device.  The light in the old arena, now used as a parking garage, is not very good.  I am amazed he got such good photos.

Links added this week

I wouldn't claim that I actively check the links in the right sidebar to keep them current as there are more than 2,000 links, the last time I counted, which was many years ago.  But I do fix them as I find out about problems.

But I do go through from time to time and reorganize, add and augment categories, and change things up some.  I realize that each week I should do an entry summarizing the links I've added during the previous week.

For example, under Great Urban Journalism the Squandered Heritage series of articles on historic preservation and demolition from the Chicago Tribune were from 2002-2003 and the old section link no longer works, but these links do:

• Squandered Heritage Part 1: Search and Destroy (Chicago Tribune)
• Squandered Heritage Part 2: Demolition Machine (Chicago Tribune)
• Squandered Heritage Part 3: Alternatives (Chicago Tribune)

I continue to add to the Parks, Waterfronts & Rivers section, including:

• Green Places Magazine (UK)
• GreenSpace (UK)
• Inst. of Parks and Green Space (UK)
• Playworks

I am still reworking the transit links, for example I separated out Bus Transit Technology from Transit System Operation, which lists third party contractors like Veolia, updated some links, and added a couple new ones, although I wouldn't consider it to be a complete listing.  The Dr. Transit sections need more systematic reorganizing still.

I renamed one section Infrastructure & Utilities and am including links on both undergrounding powerlines and government owned utilities such as:

• American Public Power Association
• Michael Likosky (NYU)  

And in the section on Architecture, Urbanism and Revitalization Links:

 • Intercultural Urbanism and Contemporary Urban Anthropology.

which are authored by University of Denver professor of anthropology Dean Saitta.  The syllabus for his class, Culture and The City, looks to be pretty interesting.

In Food, Gardens, Agriculture, Markets, & Forestry:

• Chicago Food & Nutrition Network (national section)
• From the Bay, For the Bay (Chesapeake Bay) (local section) 

And in both Tourism and Dr. Transit (General):

• Travel & Tech Report (IGLU Cruises)

Finally, in Historic Preservation:

• Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy

I think that's it.

Comments and blog notice

I used Haloscan, as of today, it no longer exists.  I've copied the archive of comments and I will work to get them back into the archived posts.

Thanks to a blog, the Blogger Classic Template Store, which archived the code of the "Blogger Classic" templates, I was able to fix the code.  Thanks for being farsighted and saving the code.

And "darts" to me for not saving a back up copy of my template before I changed the code.

Top 20 International Urban Planning Websites 2012: Giants of Urban Planning Online: this blog at # 20

Well I have that Groucho Marx problem of not wanting to be a member of a club that would choose me as a member, but certainly I am appreciative of the Global Site Plans website picking this blog as worthy of a listing as one of the best international planning blogs "in the world."

I will say that I see two blogs missing that I would definitely include, Transport Politic and Urbanophile, and of course there is so much great work out there that we can easily find 3 more to round out a top 25 (or 30 or 50...).

That's still good company.

Blogging

I am incredibly swamped with responding to proposals to certain bicycle facilities projects for the next month or so (one proposal in and presentation later this month, one proposal due in two weeks--the day after the other presentation with its own presentation next month, another proposal due in just under one month, the day the second presentation is scheduled for, etc.) so my blogging is going to drop precipitously.

So that means read:

- Urbanophile

- Transport Politic

- Streetsblog

- Human Transit

- the Atlantic Magazine Cities blog

and the aggregators of interesting articles:

- Planetizen

- Reconnecting America's Other Side of the Tracks.

In the DC region,

- Washcycle for bicycling

- Washington City Paper Housing Complex blog

- TBD On Foot blog

- Greater Greater Washington.

Of course, there is plenty of other great work out there and it's impossible to keep up...

Best wishes for a productive and successful 2012

Scan of a new year's card from the Center for Jewish History, NYC.

OK, an HTML coding question

I need to tweak the widths of the padding/margins on this webpage, so the sidebar doesn't kick to the bottom. I don't know enough about the various pieces of this page to be able to fix it myself. I keep trying, but unsuccessfully.

The basic issue is that the width of the main body of text is 400 pixels but it usually runs around 425, and the sidebar is 220 pixels, and the total width of column + sidebar is supposed to be no more than 692 pixels.

What I want to do is instruct the page to make the margins on either side (the big green bars on either side of the white stuff) smaller, so that the column and sidebar runs next to each other.

Anyone who can shed light on this?

Below is the all relevant code (I think).

Thanks.

#wrapper {

margin: 0 auto;

padding: 0;

border: 0;

width: 692px;

text-align: left;

background: #fff url(http://www.blogblog.com/moto_son/innerwrap.gif) top right repeat-y;

font-size:90%;

}

/* Header */

#blog-header {

color: #ffe;

background: #8b2 url(http://www.blogblog.com/moto_son/headbotborder.gif) bottom left repeat-x;

margin: 0 auto;

padding: 0 0 15px 0;

border: 0;

}

#blog-header h1 {

font-size: 24px;

text-align: left;

padding: 15px 20px 0 20px;

margin: 0;

background-image: url(http://www.blogblog.com/moto_son/topper.gif);

background-repeat: repeat-x;

background-position: top left;

}

#blog-header p {

font-size: 110%;

text-align: left;

padding: 3px 20px 10px 20px;

margin: 0;

line-height:140%;

}

/* Inner layout */

#content {

padding: 0 10px;

}

#main {

width: 400px;

float: left;

}

#sidebar {

width: 220px;

float: right;

}

/* Bottom layout */

#footer {

clear: left;

margin: 0;

padding: 0 20px;

border: 0;

text-align: left;

border-top: 1px solid #f9f9f9;

background-color: #fdfdfd;

}

#footer p {

text-align: left;

margin: 0;

padding: 10px 0;

font-size: x-small;

background-color: transparent;

color: #999;

}

Parks issues

(Image from the M.V. Jantzen series in Greater Greater Washington. See item 3 below.)

1. State park systems around the country have been roiled due to budget cuts.

The New York Times has a broad piece about this, "In State Parks, the Sharpest Ax Is the Budget’s," focused on Washington State. The Sacramento Bee has an excellent running section of stories about the budget cuts faced by the state park system in California, including

• Editorial: Parks plan is murky, needs clarity
• STATE OF THE STATE PARKS: Park maintenance databases, photo galleries, stories.

A couple years ago, Arizona closed massive numbers of parks as well (see "Arizona decides to close most state parks" from the Los Angeles Times). New York State parks are faced with cuts, etc.

2. City and county park systems have similar problems in terms of cutbacks, although citizens tend to be supportive of parks taxing initiatives. The Sac Bee has an editorial about this in terms of the Sacramento County system, "Editorial: Board needs to move quickly to save parks," as an example. From the article:

Last May, the Board of Supervisors decided to explore a range of options for a different governance and financing structure with the aim of putting a measure on the November 2012 ballot. They charged a grassroots working group to identify options for securing "adequate, stable, long-term funding" for parks.

The group presented its recommendation last week (www.sara riverwatch.org/grassroots.php), after it spent a year conducting meetings, raising private funds for park consultants – including the Trust for Public Lands and Dangermond Group – to study options, and polling voters in February.

I will definitely check out the recommendations.

3. M.V. Jantzen, in Greater Greater Washington, has an interesting series of pieces "I Wish This Were... in Dupont Circle, part 1" "I Wish This Were... in Dupont Circle, part 2," and "I Wish This Were... in Dupont Circle, part 3" about revisioning Dupont Circle. While the third entry isn't about the park in the circle per se, all raise the issue of re-visioning urban parks, which is something I have been writing about for awhile, partly because so many of DC's parks are under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, which isn't accustomed to running parks to serve city residents, and because DC clearly doesn't take the parks mission seriously, since the city doesn't have a parks and recreation master plan.

4. I hope that the various constituencies in Dupont Circle could see these articles as a spur, a call to action, to organize an urban parks and neighborhood revitalization initiative to help make the area even better, and to help energize a city movement for parks improvement more generally.

5. All these threads have encouraged me to create a new category of links in the right sidebar called "Parks Planning" currently, but will be renamed to "Parks, Recreation, Rivers, and Waterfront Planning" and I will gradually resort current links in other sections and add new ones to the section.

Recently I also created a Health/Public Health section and I probably need to start breaking out bicycling and walking from general transportation as well.

And I will probably begin adding more links to reports etc. within sections. Even if the links go bad, they can probably be recovered through archive. org, which is the only way I seem to be able to maintain links to various DC Office of Planning publications that have been otherwise lost through the horrific "upgrade" to the DC Government website that has ended up removing links to thousands of documents. E.g.:

• Thrive: A Guide to Storefront Design in the District of Columbia
• Trans-Formation: Recreating Transit-Oriented Neighborhood Centers in DC: Design Handbook

Subscribing to blog posts

After getting queries over the years about this, I finally looked into it, and figured out how to add an email subscription option. (It wasn't very hard actually, I apologize for the delay.)

A link to the email subscription option is near the top of the right sidebar.

You can also do it here:

-- Subscribe to Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space by Email

Computer crashed...

The night before the Bike Summit (yesterday), my computer crashed, so blogging will fall off a bit in the meantime.

Happy holidays

Residual religious training leaves me somewhere between agnostic and atheist, but I like religious architecture such as cathedrals and stained glass windows. I certainly believe that you can be ethical through humanism, without having to rely upon religion-based moral and ethical systems. Be that as it may, Christmas trees and holiday displays can be attractive.

Some of these images are from the Internet. The tree and the train display are at Union Station. The creche photo is from Massachusetts Avenue in SE Capitol Hill DC. The ice skating rink is in Silver Spring. The Schwinn Bell Choir will give you downloads of holiday songs produced with bicycle bells. I wish I could have photoshopped the "Give" poster (at Borders) to read spend. The house with the Christmas decorations is down the street.

Happy holidays!

Top 50 Urban Policy Wonk blogs

The Public Servant Blog includes this one on its above-mentioned list. The list of 50 blogs is categorized thusly:

- news and commentary
- urban planning
- transportation
- green and sustainable living
- poverty and homelessness.

THANKS!

Blog stuff

I have been writing a lot less for awhile, because I had been spending 5 hours/day traveling to and from my job via public transit and bicycle, and that cut into my "free time." Plus over the last month especially, I had been focused on wrapping up the Western Baltimore County Pedestrian and Bicycle Access Plan, which had a drop dead due date of 6/30--as did my term as bicycle and pedestrian planner, which was a grant funded position co-terminate with the production of the plan.

It'll be a few days before I start blogging again though, partly because despite the efforts of computer technicians, Verizon technicians, etc., my home-based Internet access isn't working at the moment, and it may be some time before it does.

Thanks to Kaid Benfield

(Thanks to Andrew A. for letting me know about this.)

Kaid is the director of the Smart Growth Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. In the media column in the March issue of Planning Magazine, published by the American Planning Association, Kaid mentioned this blog first as a resource that 'make[s] me think in new ways.' He also said that 'you don't have to be a local reader to learn from his blog.'

That's always been my intent. To focus on processes, systems and "meta-learning" so that best practices can be:

(1) indicated -- figured out in terms of structures, processes, frameworks, etc.
(2) duplicated -- once you figure it out, you repeat the process somewhere else, successfully
(3) replicated -- after the best practice has been evaluated and repeated then it is able to be "diffused" more widely in other places, congruent with the framework, so that best practices work according to the local conditions, which are unique but still comparable across spatial and other conditions elsewhere.

DC is a great place to figure out things. (But so frustrating.)

One because we often do things so half-a**** that if you are good at figuring things out, you can't help but understand gaps in both formulation and execution. Two because DC is a strong market region, but DC is weaker than other jurisdictions in this metropolitan area, but in turn is stronger than other center cities that aren't too far away (Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, Pittsburgh) so it allows for comparisons between strong and weak real estate markets. Third, because of the velocity of change. Things happen fast. My joke is that working on these issues in DC is like working in "dog years"--a dog lives the equivalent of 7 years in one year. Well, if you think and pay attention and are constantly learning and evaluating, you can learn a lot more than one year's worth of revitalization knowledge--if you are paying attention and are good at analysis.

Even in college I used to joke that you can learn more from dysfunctional organizations (then I was referring to student organizations as opposed to the University proper, and especially the student government) than from well-functioning organizations.

One more learning: that practitioners tend to not be very good at generating "meta-learning" and "meta-theory"--figuring out how and why they are successful (or not).

That's why I joke that I am too interested in application to be able to be fully happy in academia, and too interested in applying theory to (and extending) practice to be fully happy out in the field.

Changes on commenting on the blog

I had to "upgrade" or at least change from Haloscan, because the software company is discontinuing support.

I began using Haloscan because I thought trackbacks would be important, and back then Blogger didn't offer such a feature. Of course, I never got the hang of doing trackbacks or had the time to focus on it. (It takes too much time writing.)

So I upgraded to whatever this new system is, mostly to retain the database of past comments.

I probably would have just switched back to blogger comments, if I could have figured out how to capture the database of comments and switched them over. Or like many services (i.e., Technorati) which just junk the old when they "upgrade" I could have done that, condemning past comments to the ether, but I didn't think that would be right.

So I haven't figured out how to get comments to tally on screen so that people know that someone has commented and it is worth clicking on the comments link to read them. Now, you should check each post.

For me, when I am at work, the firewall on the network prevents the comment box from properly opening, so I can't respond except when I am at home. We'll see how that works.

I could end up switching back to Blogger.

been away

and not able to blog (laptop has major virus issues that I haven't been able to get fixed). I'll be able to get back to the swing of things on Thursday.

World Streets blog

Is published by the New Mobility Agenda, which is based in Paris. I've been asked to join as a contributor (I am active on a couple of the New Mobility e-lists; the lists are very good, with a preponderance of participants from outside of North America, which extends perspectives significantly). Although I am most likely to reprint entries there that originate here.

World Streets blog

In the left sidebar there are links to many of the considerable information resources compiled and codified by the New Mobility Agenda.

Camera died

so I bought a new camera (but cheap one, with very limited zoom capabilities) to take photos while at the conference... In all likelihood I won't be able to upload photos while I am traveling...

Posting

The National Main Street Conference starts Sunday. I'll be traveling there as well as preparing to make a presentation. And I have some other things going on too, as well as the production of a "final" draft of a commercial district revitalization study for a community on Maryland's Eastern Shore. So I haven't been blogging much and I am not likely to for awhile (my laptop is replete with viruses that I haven't had a chance to get removed--a few iterations of Avast haven't been enough to rid the computer of the problems.

blogging...

I will be away and my laptop has some pernicious viruses (I don't want to ask a friend to help fix it because the last time this happened it took two people 5 hours to fix, and that's too much to ask of any friend) so I am not sure whether I'll be able to blog much over the next few days.

There's plenty out there to read. City Skip has some good links (I spent a lot of time yesterday poking through Brand Avenue), but so do so many other blogs. the transport politic is very good. The Overhead Wire is a good way to stay up on transportation too.

But my regular almost daily blogreads are Streetsblog, BeyondDC, Greater Greater Washington, and Washcyle. (Plus many hardcopy newspapers and the City Desk blog from the Washington City Paper, especially "Loose Lips Daily." )

Plus planning reports. I need to work my way through the Seattle Urban Mobility Plan and some reports on the Creative Rural Economy from Prince Edward County, Ontario, among others...

Books... Brand Avenue lists some, including one I didn't know about, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World, and books that I have but haven't finished (picked up the first edition, in hardback of Kevin Lynch's Site Planning at a used bookstore in Silver Spring).