Good morning, RVA: Steps toward NoBro, climate algae, and some great urbanist events

Good morning, RVA! It’s 57 °F, and today: Rain! This is not a drill or a joke. You can expect a real and legit amount of rain throughout most of the day.

Water cooler

Today at 3:00 PM, the Planning Commission will hold a special meeting to consider the six North of Broad ordinances that fall within their purview. You can see the full list on the Commission’s agenda(PDF), but they’re all related to transferring City-owned property, closing right-of-way, and updating zoning. This is a public meeting, so you are, of course, welcome to come on down to Council Chambers and tell the planning commissioners all of your thoughts and feelings—I’m sure they’d love to have you. I don’t know if the Commission plans on making their final call on these papers today, but, and this is just speculation, I do think they will ultimately pass them all. If it were me and I had strong feelings either way about NoBro, I’d focus on City Council. That’s just me, though!

Michael Paul Williams at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a column up about the Virginia Women’s Monument and the future plans to honor slave-holders (and an officer in the Confederacy!) 💸 with life-sized bronze statues. He puts it well here, and I totally agree, “This new slate of monuments — from the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial to Mantle, the Virginia Indian Memorial, to the women’s monument — are overdue responses to race and gender exclusion. But we are honoring slave owners and slavery defenders at a women’s monument where 230 potential alternatives are etched in glass.” Related, Susan Shibut, with the Capital News Service, has some photos of Monday’s unveiling ceremony and the new statuary.

I don’t know what her actual beat is, but I enjoy how every piece I read from the Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong teaches me about a fun new way climate change is ruining our planet. Today, I learned that, due to the warmer temperatures and lack of rain, we’ve got “the largest blooms of algae in the James [River] in several years.” Algae, while small, choke out plants and fish and “can be accompanied by blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, often called ‘blue-green algae,’ which can harm human and animal health.“ Cool.

Also at the Virginia Mercury, Robert Zullo reminds me of The Bowl That Shall Not Be Named and how we’ve done nothing to prevent further use of it in the future.

Somehow, I’ve never noticed this tiny adorable building on Arthur Ash Boulevard before, and, thanks to /r/rva, I can’t stop thinking about what interesting things you could put in it.

Look at all of this cool, nerdy, urbanist stuff going on tonight! First, Gallery5 will host a Richmond & Land Use happy hour, which sounds awesome, right up my alley, and what I eventually turn every happy hour into anyway. It’s also in the World Cafe format, which I’m just a huge fan of. Second, VCU will bring Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted, to the Siegel Center tonight at 6:00 PM. This book has had a huge impact on Richmond, and is VCU’s Common Book this year. The two events do overlap, so choose wisely.

This morning’s longread

Jane Jacobs’s Street Smarts

From a couple years ago, a look back at Jane Jacobs and her Very Important To Urbanist Twitter book, The Death and Life Of Great American Cities.

Two core principles emerge from the book’s delightful and free-flowing observational surface. First, cities are their streets. Streets are not a city’s veins but its neurology, its accumulated intelligence. Second, urban diversity and density reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. The more people there are on the block, the more kinds of shops and social organizations—clubs, broadly put—they demand; and, the more kinds of shops and clubs there are, the more people come to seek them. You can’t have density without producing diversity, and if you have diversity things get dense. The two principles make it plain that any move away from the street—to an encastled arts center or to plaza-and-park housing—is destructive to a city’s health. Jacobs’s idea can be summed up simply: If you don’t build it, they will come. (A third is less a principle than an exasperated allergy: she hates cars, and what driving them and parking them does to towns.)

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