The Goodspeed Update

Years before creating his award-winning designs for urban plazas and parks, legendary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin studied trees. Street trees, to be precise. In a meticulously detailed article for an architectural magazine, he sketched the patterns, colors, and shape of their canopies, leaves, and seeds, noting nuisances or special features in loving detail. In a […]

What does one of the country’s best selling beers have in common with a label of vodka so obscure it barely registers two dozens mentions in Google? Turns out, judging by the large number of empty containers on the street, they’re both top sellers in my neighborhood.
After its launch in 1997, Steel Reserve High Gravity […]

Design work has begun for a new Carter G. Woodson Park, located in my neighborhood one block from the Carter G. Woodson house at the intersection of Rhode Island Avenue, Q Street, and 9th Streets NW. According to the project’s manager at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who is overseeing the planning, the project […]

Part 5 of my South Africa series.
To begin this week’s final post on South Africa, let’s consider this satellite image of most of metropolitan Cape Town, population roughly 2.9 million. This map depicts an area some 40 miles across.

Next, this map of the economic geography of the city from a city planning document shows the […]

Part 4 of my South Africa series
Imagine a public transportation system that combines the low cost and fixed routes of a bus, with the frequency and availability of a private taxi. The system would be idea: convenient, low-cost, and predictable. There’d be no fear the driver was taking you for a ride, and catching one […]

Part 3 of my South Africa Series
The lack of progress bridging the social divides in South Africa has not been due to political will. In addition to a variety of political rights (many which Americans will be familiar with from our Bill of Rights), the South African Constitution includes workers’ rights to join unions, a […]

UPDATE: This meeting has been canceled. If, like me, you received a post card about it in the mail please disregard it.
Next week the D.C. Public Library will start the first round of public meetings connected to the redesign of three neighborhood libraries: the Benning Neighborhood Library, Tenley-Friendship Neighborhood Library, and Watha T. Daniel/Shaw Neighborhood […]