The National Park Service is launching a public process to create a new plan for the National Mall. The process will be kicked off next Wednesday, November 15 at a daylong symposium at the Naval Heritage Center at Navy Memorial where a rotating panel will discuss the mall in the context of the “needs of […]
Considering Washington’s Triangle Parks
Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for the city of Washington included radial avenues named after states superimposed over a grid of lettered and numbered streets. Inevitably, the intersection between the avenues and the grid result in a number of small triangular lots, and many lots with at least one acute, wedge-shaped corner. (This has resulted in many […]
Auto Availablity in Seven College Towns
Percentage of total households reporting “no vehicle available” on question H44 on the 2000 Census, with total number of occupied housing units in parentheses: Ithica, NY (10,253) – 24.6% Berkeley, CA (44,955) – 17.0% Charlottesville, VA (16,851) – 14.2% Madison, WI (88,845) – 11.8% Chapel Hill, NC (17,932) – 11.3% College Park, MD (6,046) – […]
Do You Live in ANC 2C02?
In Washington, D.C. the lowest level of elected government are the city’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. Created in the 1970s, they were designed to connect the city’s neighborhoods to city government. These bodies are notorious for their NIMBY tendances and colorful personalities. I’ve long wondered why it seemed like the ANC in my neighborhood never seemed […]
Cemeteries, Parks, and Turning Lanes
This week we briefly touched on the topic of the history of New York’s Central Park in the course I am a teaching assistant for here at the University of Maryland. Although the course is in Landscape Architecture and we examined Frederick Law Olmsted’s design, I thought it was important to mention a bit of […]
Urbanism and Silicon Valley
This week the Times’ Randall Stross examined the persistent creative fertility of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley, concluding It’s Not the People You Know. It’s Where You Are. It turns out close physical proximity makes it easier for entrepreneurs to get venture capitol, find employees willing to work for equity shares, and even get a law […]
How Do You Create a Popular Blog?
There’s plenty of sources for advice for new bloggers. However, there’s precious little quantitative data about what factors are the most important to building readership. Among the most obvious quantitative factors — posting frequency, number of external links, blogroll size, and simple longevity — which are the most important? In general, are there statistical relationships […]