What the educational outpost on the site of the old Ambassador Hotel can teach Los Angeles about learning, public space, and community.

Schools in Los Angeles are getting lots of attention lately. You might have heard of Steve Barr, a sort of educational desperado, whose Green Dot Schools wrested away several poorly-performing schools from the Los Angeles Unified School District and transformed them into educational powerhouses. But what Barr did for these communities is far more than that.…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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…