Posts Tagged ‘community’

August 04, 2010

The Phoenix Tree and Shade Master Plan: Restoring the Urban Forest

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Yesterday, I posted this quote on the Blooming Rock Facebook Fan Page: ‎“One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.” – Clarence Darrow and I learned from Jo Marie McDonald, vice president of the Phoenix Community Alliance, that there is actually a Tree and Shade Master Plan in place for the City of Phoenix. The first step of this Master Plan is to raise awareness. To help with this, every Wednesday for the next month, I’ll be featuring parts of this document on the Blooming Rock blog. With the crippling budget cuts, the City is too understaffed and…

August 02, 2010

Critical Mass Phoenix Makes Room for Bikes on the Street

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet When I asked Mayor Phil Gordon at a community breakfast a year ago about the lack of bike lanes in Phoenix, he told me bikers should use the canals. Really Mayor? That’s your answer to why we have almost no infrastructure in place for bikes in this city? What if bikers want to use the roads, like everyone else? What if the canals don’t take people where they need to go? Biking has been flagrantly dismissed as a viable mode of transportation by our city ever since its modernization. Finally there’s an event in town that takes a stand…

July 28, 2010

Phoenix Planning Manager Carol Johnson Reveals the Strategy for Downtown and the Light Rail Corridor

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Below is my conversation with Carol Johnson, the Planning Manager at the City of Phoenix about what’s next in terms of codes, walkability and making our city more livable on the whole: Blooming Rock: What’s your position in the city? Carol Johnson: My title is Planning Manager. I oversee our long range planning division, that includes the planners that staff that Village Planning Committees. We have 15 Village Planning Committees which are like mini Planning Commissions throughout the city to help break it up into more manageable pieces because we’re over 500 square miles. There used to be one…

July 21, 2010

Kevin Kellogg on Preservation and What Phoenix Could Learn from Boston and San Francisco

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Yesterday, I posted part I of my conversation with Phoenix’s Urban Laureate for 2010, Kevin Kellogg. Make sure to check it out if you missed it. Today, let’s continue with part II: Kevin on why historic preservation is important: Obviously I think we should be preserving our historic buildings. It’s a travesty what’s happened so far. It just never ends. Something’s older than 10 years old and we just tear it down. It really makes it hard to be unique. We just don’t have the mentality, it’s a throw-away society. If we’re going to save buildings it’s because we…

July 20, 2010

Kevin Kellogg, the 2010 Urban Laureate, on the Delights and Challenges of Phoenix

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Last week, I had the pleasure of talking with Phoenix’s urban laureate for the year, Kevin Kellogg, about all sorts of things about Phoenix. He’s a native of Arizona, went to ASU’s School of Architecture, later traveled the world for six years, went to Harvard for graduate school and came back to be a faculty member and an urban designer with the Joint Urban Design Program at ASU. While at ASU in the early 90s, Kevin was a part of some pretty major visioning projects in the Valley that have now come to fruition such as the design charrettes…

June 02, 2010

The After Hours Building – Well Intentioned, Well Executed

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet What I love about the After Hours building is that it is sustainable because it is well-designed. In fact, it’s an example that good design and green design are actually synonymous. The merzproject is the architecture firm behind this building and they deserve a great deal of credit for getting lots of little things right. They deserve even more credit for getting the BIG things right though. But before I go any further I want to give the owners of After Hours, Russ Haan and Mike Oleskow the bulk of the credit for this incredible project. Without their vision…

May 10, 2010

Another Phoenix Infill Lot Wasted on a Circle K

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet I’ve been driving by this new building in construction the past few months. It’s on 11th St. and Indian School. My first thought when I found out what it was was – oh great, all we need in this city is another Circle K. There’s hardly anything getting built nowadays and for good reason, we have way too many existing buildings waiting to be reused. And one of the few new buildings is a Circle K – a brand new gas station and convenience store? Convenience gas stations are, as you might know, the bane of our Phoenix urban…

November 30, 2009

A Sense of Community for the Rugged Individuals of Phoenix

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet One of the most highly prized values of our nation is “rugged individualism” and nowhere is this more apparent than in our very own city – Phoenix. Many of us have come here to get away from our old tired communities and to start life anew. Maybe it’s because of our bad experiences with the communities we grew up in that we seem to shun any semblance of community in our newly-adopted city. But where does that leave us rugged individuals? Surely we can’t rely wholly on ourselves? Surely there are times we need help from others. Who do…