Food carts. We love ‘em. And here in Portland they’re practically a way of urban life. There are even blogs out there like Food Carts Portland that are dedicated to carts throughout the city…telling people what’s new and where the best food is located. There are even sites that map out the location of the carts and link to each one’s website. It’s a great way to activate a street or enliven the edge of a parking lot and provide affordable lunch time eats for the downtown professionals.

Now, there is a new site that has popped up here in Portland that wants to help give a personal spin on the carts. The site is iheartfoodcarts.com and while it is located in Portland, the site hopes to extend beyond the Oregon borders to encompass the entire food cart culture. The site is calling for food cart stories and pictures to publish a type of magazine, something based solely around the love for urban carts. So you have thoughts to share, check it out. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

image via msconnections

What will become of the 1.7 mile deep-boring tunnel project that is expected to cost at least 4.2 billion dollars that the voters of Seattle voted down, only to be ignored. Amongst the major protest regarding the tunnel an interesting site has emerged called tunnelfacts.com. In addition to trying to point out the reasons for the tunnel being the wrong decision for the city in dealing with the viaduct, it has a very compelling page that displays graphically what can be done with the money being used for the tunnel.

People’s Parking Lots (@peoplesparking)
This new blog find reminded me why I signed up for Twitter in the first place, once I finally got over my hatred for it. Through Twitter I realized that the author of People’s Parking Lot(s) is also a fellow blogger on Sustainable Cities Collective and we are NW neighbors.

Keith Harris’s great Seattle-based blog devoted to taking over unused urban spaces and parking lots is an inspiration. I love to see others eyeing these blights on the urban landscape and trying to take the spaces over for something productive. From coverage on urban right-of-way guerilla gardening to late night dance parties put together in an effort to raise awareness of empty, unused spaces, there’s lots of good reading.

Harris also has another blog called Green Housing Collective. Links have been added to the sidebar to the left for future linkages. Go check it out and show your love!

I always find some fabulous bits of randomness this way, like this video of three foley artists reimagining silent films. A quote from the clip…“The center of sound is silence. At the heart of the sound process is not making sound”.

“The Noises Rest” from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.

Today I happened upon 43 Folders which I had actually found before but this was the first time I’d really paid attention to it. The most interesting thing is that I recognized the name of the blogger, Merlin Mann. The blog itself is about “finding the time and attention to do your best creative work”, which I suppose is quite funny as I had originally thought I was off wandering through irrelevant tangents and instead I find myself stumbling across something that provides advice on time managmenet for the crazy creative types. Go figure.

So this Mann guy, I know him better from his ties with one of my favorite groups The Long Winters out of Seattle (go see them live if you ever have the chance, you’ll have the best of times) and he also took some pictures of the band I used in an interview I did back in the day with lead-singer John Roderick for a music website (which oddly lost all it’s sense of punctuation) prior to the much better one I have been writing for the last few years now.

43 Folders is insightful but most importantly, intelligently entertaining and funny. Mann also contributes to many other things including the far less relevant but no less entertaining blog, You Look Nice Today, an audo-based journal of Emotional Hygiene, written by people like Mann, aka hotdogsladies along with Adam Lisagor, aka lonelysandwhich and Scott Simpson.

What does this have to do with anything? Nothing really. Well, perhaps that you can’t run away from time managment? ;-) I guess that’s my cue to tackle that list.

“You eventually learn that true priorities are like arms; if you think you have more than a couple, you’re either lying or crazy.”
-Merlin Mann

If you haven’t seen it already, Jason King of Landscape + Urbanism has started up a spin off blog aptly called Veg.itecture, dedicated to his love (and perhaps obsession ;-) with vegetated architecture. He’s already begun posting on some new and exciting projects and concepts. I’ve added it to the side bar links. Go check it out and show some love!

It also seems we have the same thoughts on the artfully designed yet not so user-friendly, Thomas Balsley pine forest roof garden.

The new Hood Canal Bridge connecting the Olympic Peninsula to the greater part of Washington State has opened back up after the replacement of the new east truss. While it was only supposed to be a six week closure and even ended up opening to the public early, it’s a pretty big deal for those that live on the west side of the bridge, which I wrote a little bit about in an earlier post because it can feel like being cut off.

The greatest thing that the Washington State Department of Transportation did during this process was take advantage of every avenue available when it came to keeping the public up to date on the project. There was a dedicated website with links to a constantly updated and interactive blog, video cameras, a flickr photostream and they were even tweeting. But they didn’t simply inform, they entertained…the blog was actually funny! The public followed along because it was interesting, they felt like they were part of something and more than anything, they greatly appreciated the effort put forth by those who kept everyone up to date minute by minute as the project progressed. Instead of being angry and upset about the inconvenience, people were thankful and following along with the construction. Comments poured into the blog with overwhelming positive responses and thank you’s.

Following along with the construction work and looking through the photos really made me appreciate all the forms of communication we have available to us these days. And also that we have a way to put a human (and humorous) face on agencies that the public typically gets frustrated with simply because they don’t feel well informed.

images via WSDOT

And now, I’m off for a few days to head up to the Olympic Peninsula via the newly opened bridge for an extended weekend of super fun camping at my favorite spot of all time up on the Straight of Juan de Fuca.

image via Lisa Town

A few years ago I was walking around downtown Portland with colleague who was not only from out of town, but out of this country and upon seeing the Max, the streetcar and the small blocks he said “Wow, Portland is an amazing city! It’s so European!” That comment kind of made me realize how cool it is to walk around your own city and see it through a new pair of eyes. You notice things you took for granted because it might be part of the daily commute or the typical scenery and it all starts to blend in. You know the city has a nice walkability and human-scale to the downtown core but you don’t always stop to analyze the details of how things really work and why.

I was excited to see that Forth Worthology , a site focused on traditional urbanism, smart grown, transit and sustainability based out of Fort Worth, Texas was documenting a trip to Portland which ended up being in six parts with lots of great commentary and photography. The great part about it is that Fort Worth is a completely different world than Portland so the insights and details noticed around the city were some things that I had never even seen before or walked by and never gave a second thought too. It reminded me of how I need to get out more and do some serious walking and beefing up of my local photo library.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the six part series which I have included links to each part below. So check out the links and enjoy a look at Portland through the eyes of a Fort Worth-based urbanist.

Part One: Transit

Part Two: Bicycling

Part Three: Ira Keller Fountain

Part Four: Parks, Plazas, and Squares

Park Five: Food Carts

Part Six: Small-Scale Infill

Portlandize is the blog of a “computer scientist gone artist/musician/writer who has a great desire to add a little bit of beauty to the world.” The blog focuses primarily on the streetscape and transportation with oodles of photography, video and great observations with a biker bent. This blog is fabulous for documenting the world of a biker in Portland. It’s definitely worth starting at the beginning and reading through all posts. It’s fabulous and definitely my newest fave! I love how he manages to catch great situations like people parking right overtop the new bike box.

He also has a flickr account with a plethera of fabulous photographs of biking around Portland. Here’s one of his most recent videos shot in late April where he got up early and decided to ride around the waterfront trail with a video camera before work. Love it! He rides past the construction site of the new waterfront amphitheater and market plaza which is currently partially open to the public. (I’ll be posting some stuff on that site soon) Check out the video, it’s a lovely morning ride:

And while we’re on the topic of documenting cities from the pedestrian point of view, I want to mention another one of my favorite blogs which, while not new, hasn’t been mentioned on here yet. The blog Citywalker is from Lydia Heard, an urban planner and avid walker living in Seattle. The blog states very simply “I like to walk in cities”. She has documented many places through her travels but most of all, she keeps a close eye on the emerald city from the view of a person on foot.

This is also a blog very much worth starting from the beginning. She also has a massive flickr account with over 37,000 photos from around the world. Not only does she make keen obersvations about the world revolving around the urban pedestrian and fabulous details many people might normally miss but since she is constantly documenting through photographs, she can makes observations through time like her post on the cleaning up of Seattle’s alleys: Evolution of an Alley.

image via Citywalker

Emergent Urbanism is the blog of Mathieu Helie, a Canadian urbanist with an interesting degree combination of a Masters in Urban Planning and bachelor’s degree in Economics and Computer Science. His interest in cities is therefore a bit more scientific in approach looking at systems, organization and the science of emergence. From the site: “Urbanity is the cooperation and mutual-support of large numbers of people in close proximity. It is inevitably emergent, and to understand the science of emergence is the key to inventing the first fully emergent urbanism, capable of resolving all the complexities of a 21st century, sustainable city.”

In his latest post, A Pattern Language for New York Streets, Helie writes about a topic related to my most recent post about New York City streets. The NYC Department of Transportation has published its street design manual, a project lead by “traffic anti-planner” Janette Sadik-Khan who is also responsible for the most recent pedestrian mall through the closure of parts of Broadway to vehicular traffic.