Yesterday, Karen and Charlie came over and planted a Gingko they got my wife for her birthday. What’s peculiar about this to me, is that I was going through the Thompson and Morgan seed catalog Saturday, and had highlighted Gingko. Ask and you shall receive.

Both Karen and Charlie are involved in green architecture. In light of the recent successful effort to keep Wal-Mart out of town, Charlie’s thinking of running for local public office. I asked if they’d be willing to guest-post here, and they were both enthusiastic. So they may be the first to join, but I have many other folks in mind as well.

This morning I found this post on TOD about the framing of debate around downtown revitalization efforts and the ubiquitous parking issue. My first thought is Ithaca, which has a pretty vibrant pedestrian mall, and then I thought Boulder, which also has something similar, I think. I was in Boulder once, ten years ago, but that’s my memory. So then I think, is it only way-liberal college towns that can do this?

The mall model is interesting: surround a covered “commons” with acres of free parking and kludgy traffic patterns. I think the key thing is that the mall is covered, making it shoppable in all weather, especially around Christmas. I haven’t seen many covered outdoor pedestrian malls, but maybe they’re out there. They’d have to accommodate both cold winter and hot summer environments, perhaps the cover being removable in summer.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Sustainability, Gardening, Transportation, Smart Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.