The morning sun wakes me. It is warm but no longer carries the burn of summer; the orange light is pleasant, inviting. I wake gradually, as does the dog. The cat is stretched out on the wood floor in a bath of warm light. He half opens a single eye to watch me walk...
{click image for source} There are interesting stirrings afoot in the United States these days. From the Tea Party movement to the current Occupy Wall Street protests, Americans are making themselves heard. These two populist uprisings are generally thought to have...
{click image for source} There are a million different definitions of what makes a good neighborhood, but perhaps the best ones are also the simplest. Gil Penalosa and the nonprofit organization 8-80 Cities posit that if cities are safe, accessible, and enjoyable for...
A couple weeks ago I posted about merits of replacing a second car (or even a first car) with a bicycle. Bicycles are big right now in the worlds of urban planning and placemaking, for many good reasons. As mentioned before: bikes are affordable, they don't add to...
Join Uprise Art Collective on Thursday, August 18, from 8-midnight at the Ivory Lounge (1413 Main Street) for their first collective show featuring art of various media, including painting, sculpture, book art, music, and more! From their website: Uprise Art...
{image source} Anyone who's read this blog from its inception knows that we at Laurel Park Management are big supporters of bicycles and the folks who ride them. To clear up a quick issue of nomenclature, I tend to use cycling when I mean higher speeds, longer...
{image source} Tomorrow at 2pm the Banyan Theater Company will host the final Sarasota show of Animals Out of Paper, the award-winning play by Rajiv Joseph. Here's the description from This Week in Sarasota: Using the Japanese art of origami as a metaphor, Animals Out...
{image source} NEW YORK (AP) — America's cities are beginning to grapple with a fact of life: People are getting old, fast, and they're doing it in communities designed for the sprightly. To envision how this silver tsunami will challenge a youth-oriented society,...
{image source} Walkscore.com, the top online evaluator of a neighborhood's walkability, has given Laurel Park a rating of 85 out of 100, good for 3rd place (mere percentage points behind downtown and the Rosemary District) among Sarasota's 31 ranked...
Some places just feel right. The buildings, the street, the proportions, the trees, the aesthetics, the uses—in some places they all converge to create little nuggets of urban perfection. Certain medieval Italian vias and French boulevards come to mind, but so do many...
