Professional sports stadiums in the United States, as controversial as their funding mechanisms have become, have historically been transformative elements to their surrounding environment. They can induce a once fertile stretch of farm field to become clad with hot oil-fused asphalt for personal vehicles to lay, or can spawn dense, mixed-use communities which urbanists obsess about during their repeated […]
As a very long overdue follow-up to my original post, I’d like to announce an update. Cyclegating is still happening this Saturday! After a couple months of back-and-forthing with the University of Minnesota, the City of Minneapolis, and various other quasi-public entities, I concluded that the easiest way to put on the event this year […]
Some of the greatest places have some of the greatest names. The Grand Canyon is fairly self-explanatory–it’s a canyon, and it is rather grand. Coney Island, with its imagination-inducing name referring to an isolated floating group of processed meats, juxtaposes the lighthearted, artificially-flavored entertainment district in New York. Then again, some great places have ambiguous names, barely describing the locales geography in […]
Everyone is a bit of a hypocrite sometimes. Don’t worry, it’s okay to admit it! Nobody is perfect. As long as you at least attempt to change your actions to match your words, society will learn to love you again. I’m an urbanist–there is no doubting that. I live in a dense neighborhood next to four main transit lines. […]
It seems that the Pedal Pub fiascos can’t catch a break in 2015. Update: 12 riders hurt in pedal pub crash; car's driver arrested, Minneapolis police said http://t.co/42dEBAXYdc pic.twitter.com/cHKXQRWxDa — Star Tribune (@StarTribune) June 25, 2015 On Wednesday night, several unfortunate souls were caught in one of those “car accidents” on the Hennepin Avenue Bridge while […]
Like previous mass shootings, last week’s terrorist attack in Charleston, SC left me–and the rest of the country–heartbroken. What was even worse in my mind is that in the year 2015, even with the apparent progress that this country has made on the race relations front, there are individuals out there that still hate fellow humans […]
I don’t know about you all, but I was certainly starting to feel a teeny bit restless that someone somewhere wasn’t proposing dropping 9 digits of money on some quasi-public stadium in Minnesota. After all, we were on a clip there for a while where a new stadium was going up about every 3 years, […]
Fellow Minneapolites, let’s stop being our northern humble selves for just a quick second and truly boast a fact that we’ve known for a while now: we live in the best biking city in America. Bicycling Magazine crowned us champs in 2010. WalkScore’s Bike Score doesn’t list us because we don’t have a large enough “population”, but […]
Austin, TX is a pretty cool city. I was recently visiting the liberal heart of the reddest state, and was able to peruse the streets of the city during a warm & humid afternoon. In many senses, Austin and Minneapolis are eerily similar: both cities contain major world-class research universities, a growing knack for progressive urban design, […]
When I visited Minneapolis in 2006, I remember thinking that the North Loop’s Town Place Suites hotel was in the middle of a ten-block wide paper processing plant, and that the brand new Guthrie Theater in the Mill District was like a extraterrestrial meteor that left a massive crater of parking lots in its vicinity. My dad and I met […]