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Steve Mouzon

@stevemouzon

Aug 29

Agricultural outdoor rooms on the edge of a neighborhood can provide fruits and vegetables to neighborhood restaurants, but there is a hidden benefit that might be greater. Ask children “where does food come from,” and the overwhelming answer is “the grocery store."

Few children living in town know any farmers at all, and much of our food now comes from outside our nation’s borders. Bio-intensive agriculture is “good-neighbor” agriculture, requiring far less industrial equipment but more farmers for the same acreage.

It is essential to Agrarian Urbanism, because industrial-scale farms can’t fit into a neighborhood and would annoy the neighbors with the sound of heavy equipment at daybreak, the smells of large-scale agriculture, and the spraying of a host of chemicals.

Read 18 tweets

Steve Mouzon

@stevemouzon

Jul 23

There are countless good bones in American downtowns across the country, but they're seldom connected to enough good tissue to be filled with life. This thread is on the Downtown Top Ten things needed to make downtowns thrive. And none are the usual suspects.

I've omitted stuff everyone else talks about because you already know that. This list starts with #10, which is the easiest to do, and works up to #1, which is the hardest to accomplish, but the most important. It might take a few days because there's a lot of important stuff.

But first, unless your town is based on a retirement economy, it's essential to attract young talent. Do you know what's important to them, and how they choose where to live and work, or are you depending on decades-old Chamber of Commerce strategies written by old folks?

Read 32 tweets

Steve Mouzon

@stevemouzon

Jul 16

The big purple Bin 612 building welcoming you to the Cotton District immediately intimates that you're entering a place that's not normal. Built incrementally from a shabby mill village after the mill closed & beginning a dozen years before Seaside, it's audacity incarnate.

@KarenParolek

The Cotton District is home to the greatest new collection of both Core and Upper Missing Middle Housing types I'm aware of anywhere in America. Many are three-story walk-ups. @KarenParolek, @DanielParolek, and @johnthebad would love to share a day here. I'd love to join them.

I discovered the Cotton District completely by accident on an architecture student recruiting trip to Mississippi State in the mid-90s. Predating the New Urbanism by a dozen years, they were rescuing old mill housing and building 1- and 2-story Missing Middle Housing back then.

Read 10 tweets

Steve Mouzon

@stevemouzon

Nov 2, 2021

I have COVID. Posting this in hopes my experience might be helpful to someone else. And before saying anything else, this is huge: one thing is certain about this disease, and that is that everything else about it is uncertain. So there are no guarantees of anything.

Symptoms began a week ago this morning but assumed it was allergies. But I’m fully vaccinated so COVID symptoms could be light. I had to fly to a speaking engagement Friday so went to get tested before travel. But taste & smell were fading that morning. The test confirmed it.

Wanda tested negative, so as soon as we got home, we sequestered into two work spaces and two sleeping spaces. I’ve worn my mask to protect her ever since when in the same room. We immediately boosted our intake of supplements known to be helpful, like Vitamin D.

Read 17 tweets

Steve Mouzon

@stevemouzon

Sep 7, 2021

Wanda and I married after my first year in architecture school, and soon thereafter she asked me the most searching question of my career so far:
(This story begins - but doesn’t end - here: originalgreen.org/blog/2020/myst…) 1/

“Why is it that you refuse to design anything anyone else I love would love?” “Do I?” “Of course you do!” “How do you know?” “Have you ever listened to non-architects talk about architecture?” “Our professors tell us we’re supposed to educate the client.” 2/

“Well, if you’d stop and listen to the people, they might actually educate you.” I had no answer, but took it to heart. And while I did a fairly good job of designing stuff the professors liked, I soon realized that I had no idea how to design things non-architects would love. 3/

Read 61 tweets

Steve Mouzon

@stevemouzon

Jul 24, 2021

The left image is Renaissance Florence; on the right is an Atlanta interchange, shown at the same scale. This was my first image to go viral, thanks to a repost by Lloyd Alter at Treehugger. For weeks, I had to keep proving that the scale was the same; I still have proof. 1/

The Florence image is +/- 40 blocks left to right; the Atlanta image, is 4. In Florence, most streets are 10-15 feet wide, with only the largest over 30. Most are paved inexpensively. In Atlanta, most rights-of-way exceed 500 feet, at millions of dollars per mile.
2/

In the Florence image, over 95% of the land is occupied by private property or civic spaces and buildings. In the Atlanta image, most of the land is wasted due to a highly inefficient land use pattern. 3/

Read 6 tweets

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