This article about the idea for “Airport City” to be developed between Detroit Metro and Willow Run Airports, I-94 and the Detroit-Chicago railroad corridor has been sitting in my “to blog” pile for awhile.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Michigan economy and what the possibilities are, including what it would take to get people […]
Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite writers, is now blogging. In this post he writes about criticisms of his positive understanding of the Canadian universal health care system.
In the comments on my about-face on health care, a number of people make the familiar criticisms of the Canadian system. Care is rationed. You wait […]
My cousin is the first of the five cousins on my Mom’s side of the family to get hitched and pregnant. A recent ultrasound caught the baby making a plea for the world s/he is about to join. S/he’ll fit right in.
I am very open-minded on animal rights and animal welfare issues. The way we treat animals (who have the capacity to suffer) for our human ends deserves serious scrutiny and debate. For over a year I chose a vegetarian diet in large part because I abhor the way animals are often treated to […]
I think Jane Jacobs, and my planning friends who dig Jane Jacobs, will dig this map of the “regions of influence” of U.S. cities:
The size of a city doesn’t seem to correlate to the size of its influence region, though most of the large areas (which are mostly rural and in the west) seem to […]
ArborUpdate, an Ann Arbor area news blog I help operate recently posted an article on a clash provoked by white supremacists marching through a neighborhood in nearby Toledo. Google lead the racists to ArborUpdate, where they began to spew their hate in the comments thread. Rather than deleting comments and engaging in a […]
Today I called the Met Council hotline for advice on our landlady issue. The counselor confirmed that if the lease does not explicitly forbid (or even mention) pets, she has no grounds to evict us. He recommended we write her a letter explaining that we intend to stay and we are within our […]
Ed del.icio.us’d this article in the Pittsburgh City Paper. They discuss the lack of bus schedules posted at stops and call for “tagging” stops with schedules as a public service. I had a similar idea for Ann Arbor: get some downtown maps, make some “you are here” arrows, and wheatpaste the maps and […]
At the invitation of blogger and county clerk Larry Kestenbaum, I and other local bloggers attended an informal meeting with Democratic city council candidate Eugene Kang and his campaign manager. Kang is 21, will be a University of Michigan senior, and is running the Democratic primary in the second ward. His opponent in […]
Murph also writes about his semester project report, called “People’s Place.”
General idea: ground level People’s Food Co-op, below-grade dedicated food co-op parking, second floor public parking, 3rd-5th floors have 40 co-housing units (25% permanently affordable through a land trust), usable green / garden roof. Note no parking included for the residential - they can buy […]
