Issue #5 – Community
This week’s selections reflect on community and it’s expression in the built environment.
CONTENTS:
• Eld Street Revives!
• Quilts
• The Genius of Place
• Bay City
• Funk It Up
NEWS AND NOTES:
Highly recommended: Andrew Sullivan, writing for New York Magazine, brilliantly explores community, polity and the U.S. Constitution in his article Can Our Democracy Survive Tribalism?.
A reminder – Chapter & Verse renews this spring at Koffee? in New Haven, March 23rd at 7:30 pm. Join us to hear local writers read new work! If you would like to share your own poetry or prose please submit your piece to Silas Mullins, by March 17th. Submission requirements here.
Cover:
Plate 12, Atlas of New Haven, Connecticut 1911; published by Cassuis W. Kelly.
Digitally enhanced by Bruce Wujcik.
All photographs and images courtesy of Bruce Wujcik
Eld Street Revives!
Or Does It?
In the spring of 2005 I had just returned from a year at the University of Oregon, and I was relieved to be home. My studies in landscape and urban design, especially a semester spent designing for the town of Bay City, Oregon, had made me newly, keenly aware of the very different relationships people have with landscape, and the ways these ideas are reflected in the built environment.
Quilts
Red Paper Quilt & Orange Paper Quilt
by Deborah Zervas.
These two pieces were first exhibited with the “Transparency” exhibit at Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library
January 2003
The Genius of a Place
Bruce has been lamenting something for quite a long while – the loss of the local. He remembers vividly the differences encountered town to town, as a boy in Denora, Pennsylvania; Holden, West Virginia; and Mayfield, Ohio. The stories of his youth are rich with details that put you in those places and nowhere else. Here is his remembrance of Holden:
Holden sits at the head of an Appalachian valley,
Bay City
This is the presentation I made to residents and officials of Bay City, Oregon officials, in response to their request for a re-design of a vacant lot in the middle of the town.
Proposal for Bay City Town Square and Patterson Creek Park
“Bay City needs a place to welcome visitors, and celebrate community. It also needs places for recreation – walking, running, biking, playing – and others for informal gatherings like picnics and group events.
Funk It Up
The field of landscape architecture covers design at many scales: residential, park, campus and city, and region also, especially if you consider planning as design. (I do.) One focus of mine is community design, an aspect of urban design. My work concerns questions of participation: What is the appropriate level and kind of citizen involvement? What are appropriate roles for experts in a democracy? How can accord be achieved in diverse communities? Following is a report on the first of my public space experiments in Hamburg,
