“A popular website and now a bestselling book, Atlas Obscura is a guide to many of the world’s most unusual places. Serena Altschul discusses some of the awe-inspiring destinations with two of the guide’s creators, Josh Foer and Dylan Thuras.”
Tags: place, tourism, video, geo-inspiration.
Source: www.youtube.com
Anne Hidalgo says she wants to cut the number of cars in French capital by half as part of campaign to tackle pollution
Source: www.theguardian.com
The world’s biggest cities are struggling to maintain access to congested downtown areas and still ensure that the downtown maintains it’s historic sense of place that generate so much tourism and concentration of cultural amenities. Pollution is driving cities to change as the private automobile as the default mode of transportation becomes less feasible and unsustainable as cities expand to be far larger than they ever have been before.
Tags: urban, environment, pollution, urban ecology, France, place, tourism, Paris, megacities, transportation.
“Conor Knighton is winding up his year-long journey through our National Parks. He’s returned with a backpack full of picture postcards, along with some thoughts.”
Source: www.youtube.com
This last summer, my family went to five national parks on our cross-country journeys. I love exploring the wonders and beauties in our National Parks, so this man’s 2016 voyage to see all 59 National Parks makes me incredibly jealous. My grandparents took me to Yellowstone and Yosemite when I was young. These trips inspired in me a deep awe for the wonders of this Earth. So go discover someplace new to you this year.
Tags: place, tourism, video, geo-inspiration.
Full of ornate stonework, cemeteries are beautiful places both to mourn the deceased and celebrate the lives of those who have passed. Yet there is more to these places than carvings of skulls, crosses and crossbones. A snapped rose branch, for instance, indicates a life ended too soon. Wheat, meanwhile, signifies a life fully lived, then taken by
Source: 99percentinvisible.org
Cemeteries are great places for students to analyze the cultural landscape, learn about the heritage of the local ethnic and religious groups, and think about spatial relationships in on a smaller scale. This is a great guide to some of the intentional symbolism embedded in cemeteries–field work for students can start in the local cemetery.
“Jane Jacobs lacked formal training in city planning but became an urban visionary who promoted dense, mixed-use neighborhoods where people interacted on the streets. She also became the nemesis of New York master builder Robert Moses. On our inaugural episode, we’ll explore Jacobs’ legacy and how the ideas and ideals of ‘St. Jane’ hold up today.”
Source: www.slate.com
How do you create a sense of place? How can you make a neighborhood more vibrant and meaningful to the residents? These are questions that central to city planners, community organizers, activists, home owners, renters, business owners, and a wide range of local stakeholders. The Placemakers podcast has many episodes on these topics worth listening to, starting with the one about Jane Jacobs, a leading urbanist who was a proponent of “The Cheerful Hurly-Burly” of the “zoomed in” city life who fought against Robert Moses’ more sterile “zoomed out” spaces of transportation flows. In another podcast titled “the quest for the perfect place,” the series explores new urbanism and the ideas that have shaped the movement.
Tags: place, neighborhood, urban, planning, urbanism, podcast, scale.
“Washington may be the political center of the free world, but its 670,000 residents don’t have a say in the national legislature. What they do have is a nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives. Eleanor Holmes Norton can introduce legislation and vote in committee, but she can’t vote on the House floor. Over the course of 13 terms, the ‘Warrior on the Hill’ been fighting to change that.”
Source: www.slate.com
If you haven’t discovered the podcast “Placemakers” you are missing out. In this episode, they explore the competing political context of Washington D.C. Since this podcast ran, the citizens of the district voted overwhelmingly for statehood, but since the governance of the district operates more at the national scale then on the local level, statehood is not happening anytime soon.
Tags: place, podcast, political, autonomy, scale, Washington DC.
“Food insecurity has a high correlation with increased diabetes rates. In Chicago, the death rate from diabetes in a food desert is twice that of areas with access to grocery stores.”
Source: www.dosomething.org
Food deserts are places where residents have limited access to healthy food. Here is a great map from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture that shows low-income census tract that are more than one mile from supermarkets and rural areas that are more than 10 miles from the nearest supermarket. Esri has also produced a food desert map that shows where unserved people (farther than 1 mile in urban/10 miles in rural) live in poverty. For a household with a private automobile, distance to a supermarket isn’t that crucial an issue, but without an automobile, this lack of healthy food available becomes a significant challenge for residents that live in this neighborhood.
Tags: food, urban, poverty, place, socioeconomic, food desert.
A decade ago, a tornado wiped out the small town of Greensburg, Kansas. But the town decided to rebuild—as a totally green community. Ten years out, has the green rebuilding program been successful, and is this a model that might be used by other towns? Or is going green harder than it seems?
Source: www.slate.com
If you haven’t discovered the podcast “Placemakers” you are missing out. The entire series centers around the challenges that confront different types of communities and the opportunities to improve the way things work. They present “stories about the spaces we inhabit and the people who shape them. Join us as we crisscross the country, introducing you to real people in real communities—people who make a difference in how we travel, work, and live. You’ll never look at your community the same way again.” And yes, that sounds like a whole lot of applied geography to me.
Tags: place, tornado, weather and climate, planning, podcast.
A map produced by real estate website Estately found the weirdest town name for every state in America, including Booger Hole, WV, and Old Roach, CO.
Source: www.thrillist.com
I know, I know. You have a better name that should be on this map of strange toponyms. Having driven MANY times from San Diego to Utah, I’m kind of partial to Zzyzx, CA…just because. What’s you favorite toponym? What value is there is having a strange name for a town? How does a place name contribute to the local sense of place?
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 