Jane's Walk Phoenix

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Creating Community in the Urban Desert

Those who pay close attention to my Twitter and Facebook bio, or who have received an email from me, may have noticed that my ‘tagline’ is “creating community in the urban desert.” This evolved from “lost in the urban desert when I first arrived in Phoenix to ‘finding my way through the urban desert as I began to connect with others.

Photo credit: Modern Phoenix on Facebook

In recent months, I have given a lot of thought to what my passion is. When I started digging, I came up with three main areas that I keep returning to: my background in public policy, my interest for urbanism and my exploration of social media. After sleeping on these for a couple of nights and tossing them around in my mind, a common thread emerged: Community.

Many of you will see this as a given, in fact I’ve been called a community activist and community leader for a while now, mainly for my organization of Jane’s Walk, CenPho Camp and other similar events like the upcoming Park(ing) Day.

However, I never really bought into these labels. I was doing the things that I do for myself, to better my life. Any community benefits were secondary to my desire to create the type of city that I wanted to live in. You may say that my inner Gordon Gecko was in charge

But as I’ve talked with people who have been part of these events, I have realized that they have become far larger than simply an outlet for my personal ambitions. They have become an opportunity for people to connect to each other and deepen their connection to the place where they live. They are about building “community” into everyday life. These events not only have provided an outlet for the incurable urbanist inside me, they have offered opportunities for others to connect to one another in a deeper, more meaningful way.

This observation is on target with what the Knight Foundation discovered with their interesting Soul of the Community research: that how attached we feel to our community matters. We feel more attached when we have opportunities to connect with others in our communities and feel good about our physical surroundings—how our community looks and feels.

Thus, after much reflection, I am beginning to accept the title of community activist or leader. After all, a community is little more that an empty shell without tangible activities and leadership, and I am more than glad to help!

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JaneScore—Coming to a neighborhood near you? (JanesWalkPhx)

Posted on JanesWalkPhx on June 21, 2010.

Photograph by Modern Phoenix

By now, most people have heard about Walk Score, the tool that calculates how walkable a neighborhood is and ranks it on a 100-point scale. Developed by Seattle developer Mike Mathieu and others, it helps quantify walkability and promote its value in the real estate industry.

Despite being widely hailed, there have been many complaints about its implementation. Walk Score initially failed to account for transit options (since fixed). But perhaps more importantly, it uses a simple metric that measures only than distance between an address and local amenities. It does not include any measure of the walking environment or the amenities itself.

The implication being the if things are close together, it is easier to walk from one place to the other. This simple metric fails to note, however, if the walk is along a neighborhood street with sidewalks or a major arterial. It also fails to note if the local store is a big box super store or a farmers market.It also didn’t take into account the safety and crime levels of the neighborhood.

Don’t get me wrong, WalkScore is still and amazing service that in 90% of the way there. It easily tells the difference between a car dependent suburb and a burgeoning downtown hub. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement.

The is where JaneScore comes in. This is a proposed new measure that will account for not just whether neighborhoods have amenities like groceries, schools, and shops, but also whether they have economic and aesthetic diversity. According to Publicola:

[T]he Preservation Green Lab’s Liz Dunn and Walkscore’s Matt Lerner have recently been tossing around a cool idea: the JaneScore. It would be a metric that counts all the subtle features that make for a healthy urban neighborhood, as famously articulated by the late Jane Jacobs.

The key attribute is diversity. In my interpretation, the JaneScore would focus on measuring diversity in a wide range of elements, such as building width, height, condition, style, and age; commercial space use, size, and rent; housing unit type, cost, and tenant demographics. Metrics to rate the vitality of street life would help round out the score.

This is an ambitious undertaking as quantifying an amenity’s quality is a lot more involved that simply employing Google data. But the rewards will also be greater. As mentioned in Grist:

…it would help separate gentrified neighborhoods from economically varied ones. It would separate squeaky clean new neighborhoods from more eclectic historic ones. If JaneScore gets built out, it could yield heaps of information about the various flavors of urban living, which has great potential to be sustainable living.

JaneScore is not the only initiative in this area. Household Opera pointed me to Walkshed, a tool similar to Walk Score but with controls you can adjust to specify your greater or lesser need to be near various amenities:

…so if you really want tree cover and parks but would rather not live near a bar, or if public transit is a must but you don’t particularly care about hardware scores, you can adjust your map accordingly and it’ll show you a nice “heat map” of your city, with the most promising areas shaded in green. And it takes street connectivity and barriers to walking (like highways and rivers) into account. Alas, it’s limited to New York and Philadelphia right now, but I really hope the concept catches on.

While JanesWalkPhx is partial to the JaneScore idea for obvious reasons, I hope that at least one of these idea goes mainstream. But even if they don’t, they have already made a valuable contribution to the study of urban neighborhoods. Just by being proposed, these initiatives make us urban advocates think of what we really mean when we talk about walkable neighborhoods. And that discussion is, of itself, a good thing.

Dense, Walkable Urban Cities Create YIMBY Neighbors (treehugger.com)
Walk Score – Every House Has One (agentgenius.com)
How Walkable Is Your Neighborhood? (trueslant.com)

JaneScore—Coming to a neighborhood near you? (JanesWalkPhx)

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Jane’s Walk Phoenix featured on RalLife.com

My friend, Nick Bastien, who participated in last years Walk, wrote this great post on this year’s Jane’s Walk, complete with a short video interview. Enjoy, and be sure to check out the original at RailLife.com

Jane’s Walk is back in Phoenix for a second annual stroll through the city. This year, the walk will focus on the Warehouse District just south of downtown and we’ll be learning a lot of cool things about the history of these buildings, the area, and what might be next for this part of town. I personally think the warehouse district has a TON of potential for some great things and am excited to learn more from Yuri about the neighborhood. This past week, I caught up with Yuri to talk about Jane’s Walk. Check out this video, straight from the horse’s mouth!

What: Jane’s Walk Phoenix

Date: Saturday, May 1, 2010

Time: 9:00am – 11:00am

Location: Meet at amenZone in the Warehouse District 106 E. Buchanan St

You can register for Jane’s Walk on Facebook and follow their updates on Twitter.

I can tell ya’ that we had a lot of fun at last year’s Jane’s Walk and I know this one will be pretty darn cool, as well.

Below, you will find a map of the area we will be covering on Saturday. Depending on which direction you are traveling from, there are a couple of different light rail stations for you to use. From the north or west, use Central/1st Ave or Jefferson/3rd St. From the east, exit Washington/3rd and head south a few blocks. Yeah, I guess you could drive, but what’s the fun in that?

View Jane’s Walk Phx 2010 in a larger map

To learn more about Jane’s Walk, feel free to check out their site. The best way to learn is to participate, so I hope to see you there…

These are some photos from last years walk…

If you want to learn more about life along Phoenix light rail system, be sure to check out RailLife.com. it’s filled with great information!

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Walk this Way: Jane’s Walk Phoenix is profiled in Sunset

What started with a Twitter conversation with a somewhat incredulous magazine editor (you mean people actually WALK in Phoenix?!?) almost six months ago has finally become a reality. The current (January 2010) issues of Sunset magazine includes a feature on a Jane’s Walk Phoenix. The article covers why I brought the walk to Phoenix as well as some of the encouraging developments in out downtown core. It also mentions Artlink Phoenix‘s First Friday Art Walk, the Morin House, Modified Arts; features a photograph of cycling ‘bodega’ HoodRide in Roosevelt Row; and highlights comments from my friends (and walk participants) Catrina Knoebl and Jeremy Mudd.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, Jane’s Walk is an international “street-level celebration” of Jacobs’ legacy and ideas. The walks honor the legacy and ideas of urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs who championed the interests of local residents and pedestrians over a car-centered approach to planning. They do so by combining the simple act of walking with personal observations, urban history and local lore. It is a means of knitting people together into strong and resourceful communities through bottom-up approaches and neighborhood involvement. All Jane’s Walk tours are given and taken for free. Anyone who has an interest in the neighborhoods where they live, work or hang out can lead one of these walks.

I hosted the inaugural Jane’s Walk in Phoenix last May (2009). During the walk, about 35 people joined me as we explored and rediscovered the core of downtown Phoenix, including the historic Roosevelt neighborhood, Roosevelt Row and the arts district, ASU’s Downtown Phoenix Campus, the new Civic Space Park and other key areas of downtown Phoenix. For more information, including background on Jane’s Jacobs, photos from the walk, local coverage of the walk, and various other details, you can visit my Jane’s Walk Phoenix website.

Special thanks go to editor-at-large Allison Arieff for writing the great article, and photographer David Fenton for the amazing photographs. I would also like to thank all of those who participated in the Jane’s Walk event in May 2009 as well as those who came out for the photo shoot in September; the event and the article would not have been a success without you. Plans are already under way for Jane’s Walk 2010, with an expanded slate of events, including a ‘Jane’s Ride.’

You can check out some scanned pages of the article below, but I strongly suggest you make a trip down to the local magazine rack and pick up a copy for yourself. Sunset is a great publication deserving of your support. Besides, in addition to the feature on Jane’s Walk, this month’s issue has a lot of cool content, including a short profile of Helen and Jan of Sweet Republic ice cream.

Cross posted on the Jane’s Walk Phoenix website.

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My Personal Brand According to Twitter

Twitter is probably my favorite social media tool. It is short, direct and honest. I find it is a great tool for following the latest news, tracking the ideas and activities of friends and other interesting people and allowing me to share my own thoughts and links.

Recently Twitter introduced a lists feature. This allows us to segment the people they follow on Twitter into groups. These lists have been useful in organizing people and organizations that I follow by sector, geography, content, activities and other categories. However, what I find even more interesting is how Twitter lists help show how others see me. In other words, my personal brand. While we all have an image of our selves that we try and project to others, what matters most is how other perceive us. The names of the Twitter lists that you appear on gives you a useful pool of information about how your personal brand is perceived by Twitter users.

Through social media strategist Jason Baer’s site, I found out about a tool created by Joseph Jaramillo . This tools allows you to pull the words out of the lists that your followers have grouped you in. Using this list, you can create tag cloud at Wordle.net.

Here are my results from this exercise:

According to my Twitter followers it is evident that I live in Phoenix and am involved in downtown and social media (and am even considered a ‘local celebrity’ by someone!) What I find most interesting about this list, however, is that despite my efforts to brand myself as an urbanist, this effort is not really reflected in how others see me. Part of this is due to the fact that I post a lot of my urban related comments under my JanesWalkPhx account. While I initially started this account to promote the Jane’s Walk event in May, it has since morphed into my urban persona, and is where I discuss and share my thoughts on urban issues. I now an seeing the drawbacks of this approach to my branding. As a result, I will begin posting more of my urban content under my name to strengthen that aspect of my personal brand.

Now if only somebody could do the same thing for social interactions. I would love to see what others thing of my personal brand through how I come across in face-to-face interactions!

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From Car Spaces to People Places: Park(ing) Day is coming to Phoenix

Following up on the successful Jane’s Walk Phoenix in May, a couple of friends and I are organizing another ‘place making’ event on Friday, September 18th.

PARK(ing) Day is an annual, one-day, global event that promotes green and urban public spaces as community activists, neighborhood leaders and urban planners step up to the curb, put a quarter in the meter, and transform curbside metered parking spots into temporary public parks. The event helps people review the way we use our streets and creates diverse conversations about how we can make sustainable cities. PARK(ing) Day is based on the idea that putting money into a parking meter is like renting a public space.

Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities wrote that a city that is safe, prosperous and worth living in, one must start with “lively and interesting streets.” With this end in mind, Park(ing) Day Phoenix is an opportunity to create community, engage the public and begin a dialogue on topics ranging from city parks and public space to the environment to mobility options and community improvement projects.

The Park(ing) Day PHX spaces will be located next to ASU Downtown, on 1st St. between Polk St. and Fillmore St. between 7 and 9 a.m.

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