Weekend Linkages: Floored

...hut-ins (Podcast) (@edburmila) May 17, 2021 City, Suburb, Server Farm: the Urban Geography of Amazon A private bar where you can drink, hug, and ditch masks? Welcome to Risky Business in North Hollywood Crime App Citizen is Driving a Security Car Around L.A. and Won’t Say Why Build your own bamboo dome-like structure with giant grass’s zome building kit Why are our cities built for 6ft-tall men? The female architects who fought back Narrative Napa...

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We’ve taken the flowers out of our hair

...xus SUV at a filling station in Berkeley. More exciting to us was discovering that our base of operations in the Mission was a mere block from the infamous Symbionese Liberation Army safe house where heiress Patty Hearst became urban guerrilla Tanya. We have a feeling we’ll see the return of revolutionary noms de guerre in the coming few years and when that happens we’ll see Tom ditch the SUV for two wheeled transit on Berkeley’s many bicycle boul...

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An Echo Park Weed Salad

There’s nothing like a little urban blight to produce an excellent salad. While not impoverished (not unless you consider dilapidated $600,000 bungalows a sign of destitution), our neighborhood ain’t exactly Beverly Hills, meaning that in terms of landscaping it’s a little rough around the edges. And the edges–parkways, cracks in the asphalt, neglected plantings were, on this warm February day, overflowing with weeds. Edible weeds. We explored th...

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In Praise of Disorder

...untry club presents just the right level of civic inattention to allow the urban homesteader to get away with many of the illegal projects profiled in this blog: greywater, backyard poultry, and front yard vegetable gardening, to mention just a few. Ideally you have a balance between order and disorder–neither gunfire nor the prying eyes of city inspectors. Where I’m staying in Houston, with its flocks of loose chickens, packs of feral dogs, and b...

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The Horror

...d committed bike commuter Will Campbell (his mileage indicates that he’s got the Kool-aid in those bottle cages), has smacked down Cato institute stormtrooper Randall O’Toole in an ongoing debate on cycling in the pages of the L.A. Times. Urban Velo #5 is available for download and it’s free. Lastly, Commute by Bike has some tips on how to ride in cold weather without opening the wallet for expensive clothing. Here’s this morning’s Vitus californi...

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