Links from The Overhead Wire to urbanist news from around the country/world. This week: reforming the community engagement process, the shrinking urban drugstore market, and the unfolding ecological collapse of the Great Salt Lake.
As Minneapolis Parks & Recreation works on the Cedar-Isles Master Plan, it’s important to get engagement from a broader group of park users.
Building community happens when we open our eyes to what’s around us.
Saint Paul’s historic Rondo neighborhood is a thriving, diverse community and home to many immigrant families and Black-owned businesses. It’s situated between University Avenue and the METRO Green Line to the north and Selby Avenue to the south. Black churches, businesses, and schools set down roots in the area in the late nineteenth and early […]
On July 23rd, Centerpoint Energy closed the Midtown Greenway without providing any advance notice to the users of the trail. No signage was put in place in advance of the closure, and they did not notify the Midtown Greenway Coalition. They simply erected barricades and ripped up the trail. The detour provisions provided were wholly […]
Around the country, people advocating to build abundant homes are asking how Minneapolis did it. Why is Minneapolis the city passing a comprehensive plan that ends exclusionary zoning and allows triplexes everywhere? There are a multitude of reasons why. We’ve long had an active urbanist community, fostered by discussion on streets.mn, a nationally recognized bike […]
streets.mn usually covers paved, metro-area streets, but this weekend, the action is on the gravel roads. The first DAMn gravel race has just concluded with cyclists starting in South Dakota at midnight on August 5, riding across the narrowest bit (240 miles) of Minnesota on gravel roads and ending in Wisconsin by midnight August 6. […]
By the next Sunday Summary, the annual picnic will be over and I can summarize what you missed. Wouldn’t it be more fun to join us at The streets.mn Summer Picnic is July 15! (and the short, informal meeting with the board beforehand) than just read about it later? A short holiday week means a smaller haul of […]
In a recent post, Jason Brisson highlights the conflict between “top-down” planning, where experts provide the direction for a project, and “bottom-up” planning, where community members drive (ha, ha, drive, get it?) the project. I do not think this is an either/or issue where technocrats tell a community what it needs versus a community, no […]
Dear planners: I love you, but our meetings suck. That might hurt a little to hear, but the good news is I’m here to tell you why it’s not our fault (entirely), why we suck (specifically), and how we can do better. I am a regional transportation planner. Before that, I worked in the sales world for […]