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About AlissaMWalker

AlissaMWalker is a writer living in Los Angeles.

AlissaMWalker’s website:
www.facebook.com/people/Alissa-Walker…


  • Member since: 2007
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On 2009-10-30 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 3
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Welcome to the (Recently-rebranded) Neighborhood

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on October 30, 2009 at 4:05 pm

Welcome to the (Recently-rebranded) Neighborhood

I just spent a week in New York spitting out the portmanteau poetry of urban branding. SoHo! NoHo! TriBeCa! NoLiTa!—all innocuous neighborhood names picked to boost property values and spur development. Of course, some names don’t stick as well. The neighborhood north of Madison Square Park is aching to be known as NoMad (or sometimes, the ill-fated NoMaS). The area everyone still calls Hell’s Kitchen was supposedly deemed the less-fire-and-brimstone Clinton (where, as it abuts Chelsea,…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Cities , Design
  • Tags: Greenwich South , new york
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On 2009-10-08 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 3
  • 1

GOOD Design SF: Solving City Problems, Creatively

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on October 8, 2009 at 8:31 am

GOOD Design SF: Solving City Problems, Creatively

Last Wednesday, about 200 of San Francisco’s most active and engaged citizens gathered at SPUR’s new Urban Center for GOOD Design SF, one of the final events held as part of AIA SF’s month-long Architecture and the City festival. I was lucky enough to moderate the evening, where  six teams of designers presented solutions to six urban problems, proposed by representatives of local government, business, and media, who were also in attendance.

This was the fourth GOOD Design…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Cities , Design
  • Tags: san francisco
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On 2009-09-25 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 1
  • 2

Grand Rapids Masters the Art of Urban Engagement

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on September 25, 2009 at 1:10 pm

Grand Rapids Masters the Art of Urban Engagement

Everyone told me they had never seen the streets of Grand Rapids, Michigan so crowded at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday. I watched in awed agreement as artists hauled massive scrap metal-and-concrete block sculptures onto sidewalks, patrons primped trays of cheddar and chardonnay, and volunteers donned bright red “Ask Me!” shirts, grinning proudly in their new roles. The whole city, it seemed, was preparing for that evening’s launch of ArtPrize, the new annual art competition…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Cities , Design
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On 2009-09-22 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 3

Join Us for GOOD Design SF on September 29 in San Francisco

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on September 22, 2009 at 2:29 pm

Join Us for GOOD Design SF on September 29 in San Francisco

We know—and we suspect you do as well—that design can solve problems. And what better problems to solve than the ones that face our own cities? Last winter, we had seven designers present solutions to Los Angeles problems at GOOD Design LA, the fantastic event that closed out our month of goodness, GOOD December. After another event in collaboration with Art Center College of Design, and an appearance at CEOs for Cities’ annual meeting in the spring,…

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  • Filed under: Blog : GOOD Events
  • Categories: Design
  • Tags: AIA , art center , ceos for cities , san francisco
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On 2009-09-14 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 4

A Design Revolution Hits the Road

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on September 14, 2009 at 10:56 am

A Design Revolution Hits the Road

The first time I met Emily Pilloton was a year-and-a-half ago, at a grungy bar in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, when I was in town to cover the Compostmodern design and sustainability conference. A few of the local environmentally-minded had gathered for drinks and I needed no introduction to the woman to my left:  Pilloton was an accomplished designer and editor for Inhabitat. But moments after I met her, Pilloton told me this would be one…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Design
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On 2009-09-01 AlissaMWalker GOODmarked

LA’s Farmers’ Market Celebration Is Thursday, and the Deadline for Our Contest Is Tonight

On 2009-08-28 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 9

Portland Creatives Find New Ways to Work Together

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on August 28, 2009 at 2:23 pm

Portland Creatives Find New Ways to Work Together

Portland, Oregon—the misty evergreen Shangri-La for the young, the creative, and the progressive—has an interesting problem. Its miles of bike lanes, its rock-bottom rents, its deep vats of craft brews are all far too good. Yes, Portland has actually made itself too attractive. According to one study that compared May of 2009 with May of 2008, Oregon’s unemployment has grown faster than any other state in the country, 3 percent. For large metropolitan areas in…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Design
  • Tags: Cities , portland
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On August 27, 2009 AlissaMWalker Discussed

Project: Redesign Your Farmers’ Market

  • and said:

Hi Hilde, You can definitely submit something that you already designed. You can make your submission by sending an email to projects[at]goodinc[dot]com, all details above in the Requirements section. Thanks!

On 2009-08-14 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 4
  • 3

Putting Urban Planning In the Hands of the People

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on August 14, 2009 at 5:33 pm

Putting Urban Planning In the Hands of the People

Last spring I moderated a panel at GOOD’s offices here in Los Angeles. about public transportation and the community. As discussions about public transit and Los Angeles often do, it got pretty heated towards the end as the panelists and a few members of the audience argued about what was most responsible for preventing the construction of a major subway line running from downtown to the Pacific Ocean: a sluggish government, our auto-ingrained culture, the…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Design
  • Tags: Cities , los angeles
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On 2009-08-11 AlissaMWalker GOODmarked

America’s “Favorite Farmers Markets”

1 2 3
On 2009-10-30 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 3
  • 4

Welcome to the (Recently-rebranded) Neighborhood

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on October 30, 2009 at 4:05 pm

Welcome to the (Recently-rebranded) Neighborhood

I just spent a week in New York spitting out the portmanteau poetry of urban branding. SoHo! NoHo! TriBeCa! NoLiTa!—all innocuous neighborhood names picked to boost property values and spur development. Of course, some names don’t stick as well. The neighborhood north of Madison Square Park is aching to be known as NoMad (or sometimes, the ill-fated NoMaS). The area everyone still calls Hell’s Kitchen was supposedly deemed the less-fire-and-brimstone Clinton (where, as it abuts Chelsea,…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Cities , Design
  • Tags: Greenwich South , new york
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On 2009-10-08 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 3
  • 1

GOOD Design SF: Solving City Problems, Creatively

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on October 8, 2009 at 8:31 am

GOOD Design SF: Solving City Problems, Creatively

Last Wednesday, about 200 of San Francisco’s most active and engaged citizens gathered at SPUR’s new Urban Center for GOOD Design SF, one of the final events held as part of AIA SF’s month-long Architecture and the City festival. I was lucky enough to moderate the evening, where  six teams of designers presented solutions to six urban problems, proposed by representatives of local government, business, and media, who were also in attendance.

This was the fourth GOOD Design…

Read & Discuss
  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Cities , Design
  • Tags: san francisco
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On 2009-09-25 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 1
  • 2

Grand Rapids Masters the Art of Urban Engagement

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on September 25, 2009 at 1:10 pm

Grand Rapids Masters the Art of Urban Engagement

Everyone told me they had never seen the streets of Grand Rapids, Michigan so crowded at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday. I watched in awed agreement as artists hauled massive scrap metal-and-concrete block sculptures onto sidewalks, patrons primped trays of cheddar and chardonnay, and volunteers donned bright red “Ask Me!” shirts, grinning proudly in their new roles. The whole city, it seemed, was preparing for that evening’s launch of ArtPrize, the new annual art competition…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Cities , Design
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On 2009-09-22 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 3

Join Us for GOOD Design SF on September 29 in San Francisco

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on September 22, 2009 at 2:29 pm

Join Us for GOOD Design SF on September 29 in San Francisco

We know—and we suspect you do as well—that design can solve problems. And what better problems to solve than the ones that face our own cities? Last winter, we had seven designers present solutions to Los Angeles problems at GOOD Design LA, the fantastic event that closed out our month of goodness, GOOD December. After another event in collaboration with Art Center College of Design, and an appearance at CEOs for Cities’ annual meeting in the spring,…

Read & Discuss
  • Filed under: Blog : GOOD Events
  • Categories: Design
  • Tags: AIA , art center , ceos for cities , san francisco
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On 2009-09-14 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 4

A Design Revolution Hits the Road

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on September 14, 2009 at 10:56 am

A Design Revolution Hits the Road

The first time I met Emily Pilloton was a year-and-a-half ago, at a grungy bar in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, when I was in town to cover the Compostmodern design and sustainability conference. A few of the local environmentally-minded had gathered for drinks and I needed no introduction to the woman to my left:  Pilloton was an accomplished designer and editor for Inhabitat. But moments after I met her, Pilloton told me this would be one…

Read & Discuss
  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Design
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On 2009-08-28 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 9

Portland Creatives Find New Ways to Work Together

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on August 28, 2009 at 2:23 pm

Portland Creatives Find New Ways to Work Together

Portland, Oregon—the misty evergreen Shangri-La for the young, the creative, and the progressive—has an interesting problem. Its miles of bike lanes, its rock-bottom rents, its deep vats of craft brews are all far too good. Yes, Portland has actually made itself too attractive. According to one study that compared May of 2009 with May of 2008, Oregon’s unemployment has grown faster than any other state in the country, 3 percent. For large metropolitan areas in…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Design
  • Tags: Cities , portland
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On 2009-08-14 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 4
  • 3

Putting Urban Planning In the Hands of the People

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on August 14, 2009 at 5:33 pm

Putting Urban Planning In the Hands of the People

Last spring I moderated a panel at GOOD’s offices here in Los Angeles. about public transportation and the community. As discussions about public transit and Los Angeles often do, it got pretty heated towards the end as the panelists and a few members of the audience argued about what was most responsible for preventing the construction of a major subway line running from downtown to the Pacific Ocean: a sluggish government, our auto-ingrained culture, the…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Design
  • Tags: Cities , los angeles
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On 2009-08-10 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 2
  • 4

How Design Can Help Farmers’ Markets Feed a Growing Demand

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on August 10, 2009 at 8:43 am

How Design Can Help Farmers’ Markets Feed a Growing Demand

A century ago, you probably wouldn’t have spent your Saturday morning lugging local produce back from a farmers’ market because chances were, like the other 95 percent of America, you lived on a farm. But today the numbers are flipped:  Now most of our country’s population lives in cities, and less than 1 percent of our population are farmers. For any major city, it’s the same story: As our food production slips further and further…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Design , Food
  • Tags: Cities , Farmers' Markets
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On 2009-08-05 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 8

Read All About It: Newsprint Still Delivers

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on August 5, 2009 at 2:17 pm

Read All About It: Newsprint Still Delivers

A few weeks ago, a stack of newspaper landed on my doorstep, the first time I’d seen the medium get delivered to my home in years. It wasn’t the newspaper, but a newspaper nonetheless:  the Arkitip Intel Newspaper Supplement, Vol. 1, gathers contributions from the art journal’s 20 bloggers on a 64-page, 22 x 11-inch broadsheet publication. They even put together a beautiful video about its production, starring a real, live printing press.

Arkitip has always striven to make…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Design
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On 2009-07-24 AlissaMWalker posted
  • 2
  • 4

Walking for Walking In Los Angeles

  • Posted by: Alissa Walker
  • on July 24, 2009 at 7:56 am

Walking for Walking In Los Angeles

“Walking in L.A.” is a pretty decent 1982 song that’s more famous than it deserves to be. This is due to a signature lyric which has become somewhat of a call-and-response whenever anyone mentions Los Angeles and walking. What’s that, you’re going for a walk? Nobody walks in L.A.

That statement is, of course, categorically untrue:  Every day, millions of people in this city use some combination of mass transit and their own two feet, the…

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  • Filed under: Blog : Design is a Verb
  • Categories: Design
  • Tags: Cities , los angeles
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1 2
On August 27, 2009 AlissaMWalker Discussed

Project: Redesign Your Farmers’ Market

  • and said:

Hi Hilde, You can definitely submit something that you already designed. You can make your submission by sending an email to projects[at]goodinc[dot]com, all details above in the Requirements section. Thanks!

On August 10, 2009 AlissaMWalker Discussed

A New Angle

  • and said:

He cites Project M, an awareness initiative to underwrite water meters and city-water installations for residents of Hale County, Alabama, who often don’t even realize they’re drinking polluted water. GOOD profiled this project in 2007 but, Drenttel complained, failed to report how many water meters got installed. “The journalist in me wants to know that,” Drenttel says.

The journalist in me, who wrote the piece for GOOD, turned in my piece in to be published before the designers who created Buy a Meter had even left Alabama and unfortunately couldn’t include any information about the installation of water meters. I can definitely see Bill’s comment read as a criticism of print publications–we all hate the imposed but necessary deadlines that come with producing a magazine–but to dismiss GOOD’s brand of journalism as uniformly ‘rah-rah’ (as if that’s a bad thing) seems to go against the type of writing I expect to see on Change Observer.

I consider the Project M story to be the turning point in my career because it was the moment I realized my writing could be part of the solution. I traveled to Alabama and spent a week “sharing the sweat” with the designers, who at that time were struggling to make even the smallest impact in a town that seemed to have insurmountable problems. In the two years since I wrote it, I have written stories with updates from Pam and the designers, and lectured widely about the impact this group had on the community, including the difficult pressures that HERO has faced due to some local citizens who are less-than-sympathetic to the cause.

I’m not sure it was necessarily easy love, but reporting that story gave me a opportunity to become an advocate and a conduit for a cause that I thought was important, extending my role far beyond that of a traditional writer. And especially when I was speaking with some of the people who lived in mobile homes covered with an inch of rust-colored dust who didn’t have access clean water, it certainly felt like tough journalism to me.

On July 24, 2009 AlissaMWalker Discussed

Walking for Walking In Los Angeles

  • and said:

That’s great to hear, Fanny, thanks. And for sure, Kyla, there will be lots more events with different routes (there were a lot of stairways we didn’t hit). Dan also leads regular mini-stairwalks, as do lots of other people in other neighborhoods. Watch the Big Parade site!

On August 21, 2007 AlissaMWalker Discussed

Real World Studio

  • and said:

To see the website the Project M designers created, and to donate to the cause, go to buyameter.org

On 2009-09-01 AlissaMWalker GOODmarked

LA’s Farmers’ Market Celebration Is Thursday, and the Deadline for Our Contest Is Tonight

On 2009-08-11 AlissaMWalker GOODmarked

America’s “Favorite Farmers Markets”

On 2009-08-10 AlissaMWalker GOODmarked

Project: Redesign Your Farmers’ Market

On 2007-08-20 AlissaMWalker GOODmarked

Real World Studio

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