Recommended resources from our Community Empowerment survey

in Environmental Justice

Recap of our Best practices in Community Empowerment series.

We created a page to list those resources that were recommended to us by these friends of Our Blocks who helped us prepare for the “Someone’s Done That Already: the Best Practice of Using Best Practices” session of the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp on Empowering Communities.

Thanks again to Kevin Harris, Richard Layman, Diane Dyson, Matt Singh, Christina Holt, Colin Gallagher, Lisa Palmer, Julian Dobson, Kevin Harris again, Mat Dryhurst, David Crowley, Barbara Pantuso, Paul Lamb, Rebecca Sanborn Stone, and Brian Fier.

Click on the image to see the full Recommended Resources page.

Recommended Resources

in Environmental Justice

These resources were recommended by these Contributors who participated in our Best Practices in Community Empowerment project. The descriptions below are mainly direct quotes from the Contributors. You can browse all the articles in this series here. Click here to view all resources in our database, and to recommend your own.

More to follow …

Best Practice resources from Richard Layman

in Environmental Justice

This is the second installment in our Best practices in Community Empowerment series.

Richard Layman, author of  Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space, is an urban/commercial district revitalization & transportation/mobility advocate and consultant, based in Washington, DC.

On the practice of hoarding/sharing best practices, Richard says: Most people think their communities are unique. Of course every place is unique. But for the most part, as systems, neighborhoods and cities operate similarly, regardless of location, although specifics vary depending on their place within their own metropolitan region, and whether or not the region is a strong or weak real estate market. By working with the ideas and best practices from other places, we can significantly reduce the time we need to improve our own places, and in turn we can contribute our learnings outward, to others in similar situations.

These are the Top 5 resources Richard recommends, and why:

Project for Public Spaces – PPS’s “How to Turn A Place Around” workshop and their “Place Game” (pdf) are great tools for improving the quality of life in communities, working from the ground up. Their monthly e-letter always has good articles.

Asset Based Community Development Institute – They publish a wide variety of workbooks (in print and online) about ground up community development that are focused on empowering people and harvesting social and organizational capital, not just money.

Community Economic Development Handbook by Mihalio Temali – Step by step guide to commercial district revitalization and local business development.

Smart Transportation Guidebook – Integrating land use and transportation planning is key to successful communities.  This guidebook provides a new framework for thinking about transportation (roads) in terms of land use context, whether the road serves the community or is important regionally, and roadside, roadway, and operating speed characteristics.

Bringing Buildings Back by Alan Mallach – This book focuses in a practical way on rebuilding value in neighborhoods and buildings, to counter disinvestment and abandonment.

This is a very short list of Richard’s favorite resources. He also sent me this link to a longer list he put together for a presentation he made last week for a workshop in Baltimore on placemaking and transit at the neighborhood level. Also check out all those links to great resources in his blog.

Next up: Diane Dyson

“Built Environmental Justice” is the joke of the day…

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Ask Richard Layman of Citizens Planning Coalition, Washington DC, who recently sent us an inspiring e-mail (we hope you don’t mind us sharing this on our site):

Community building isn’t just about organizing, it’s about vision and having some sense of what are the components of “livability,” what makes a great neighborhood and a great city.  In other words, it’s hard to organize and build community when you don’t know what you want.  (Hence my joke since 2002 that I work on “built environmental justice.”)  This comes down to urban design, the quality of civic assets (parks, libraries, schools, recreation centers, etc.) that serve citizens, transportation, housing, viable commercial districts, etc.

At Our Blocks, we are humble in our efforts to provide the best known resources available and are very grateful for the insight that Richard has brought our attention to. Please take a look at the list below for valuable links/books that Richard highly recommends (I included a short caption for each link). Enjoy:

1. Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (a greatly influential book on the subject of urban planning in the 20th century)

2. Cities: Back from the Edge by Roberta Gratz and Mintz (a book about downtown revitalization)

3. The Living City by Frank Wright (an innovative book of Wright’s Architecture career focused upon the nine basic building types found in the living city)

4. Cities in Full by Steve Belmont (a book that offers possible remedies to revitalize urban areas)

5. City: Rediscovering the Center by William Whyte (currently out of print; book provides an engaging look at the variety of human interactions which make downtown vibrant)

6. Deepening Democracy by Wright and Fung (book that brings together cases of what the authors call ‘empowered participatory governance’, in which popular political participation becomes a vehicle for equity and efficiency)

7. Project for Public Spaces (a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public places that build communities; PPS also offers training courses available online). PPS offers a workbook, How to Turn a Place Around, which is a must have for every urban designer and landscape architect.

8. Neighborhood Planning (web site that provides neighborhood planning resources)

9. Urban Places and Spaces (Richard’s blog that offers over 2,000 links on various subjects concerned with urban revitalization)

Personally, I think PPS is a wonderful organization and I am looking forward to read, “How to Turn a Place Around.” Thanks again, Richard, for a dose of your great knowledge!