STRONG Salem is for everyone who wants to help and participate in getting Salem, Oregon, to quit chasing Growth Ponzi Scheme plans and instead become a resilient, fiscally responsible place that lives by the wisdom that "Communities exist for the health and enjoyment of those who live in them, not for the convenience of those who drive through them, fly over them, or exploit their real estate for profit."
Best how-to for life stories
Oral History Workshop
Jan 23, 2014 01:00 am
When you're 64 wouldn't you like someone to ask you about your life story and then preserve it? When you're 24 wouldn't you like to learn what really happened back in the day? Here are some great tips for interviewing and archiving these stories, including two chapters packed with a hundred great sample questions to ask. Technology makes this easy to do. I've done regular video interviews with my children as they grew up and with my parents and in-laws. One of the smartest things I've done. This book hadn't been published then (and it's the best of a half dozen on the subject), but if I had read it then I would have done a better job. Right behind me, my high-school age son is now capturing oral/visual histories, and he found this book extremely helpful too.
-- KK
The Oral History Workshop
Cynthia Hart, Lisa Samson
2009, 180 pages
$11Sample Excerpts:
Even in interviewing, though, some silence can be a virtue. Particularly if the interviewee is discussing something difficult, a breath of silence implies, "Tell me more, associate further, give me the links to this experience, fantasy, or anxiety."
So, though in preparing for your interview you'll likely focus on what you'll ask, don't forget about the power of a well-chosen pause.
*
Broad questions have a way of eliciting vague answers. Instead of "Tell me about high school," you might start with a smaller, more specific question: "Who were your best friends in high school?" A "little" question about a childhood game could reveal a big truth about a family dynamic. Aim for a combination of broad and specific questions to get the full story.
*
What insights have you gained about your parents over the years?
*
Begin each recording by identifying the time, place, and names of the participants. This will serve as a journalistic "time stamp."
…
To give audio recordings a visual context, take still photographs of your interviewee (and if possible of the two of you together) at the interview location.*
Before you finish an interview, ask yourself, "Is there one last question I need to ask in order to achieve what I'd hoped for?" Then ask the interviewee: "Is there anything that you would like to talk about?" or "What have we not discussed that you feel is important for me to know about you and your life?"
*
Describe a typical family meal in your childhood home. What was usually on the menu? Who sat where around the table? Did it matter to you?
What is the best gift you've ever given someone? The best gift you've ever received?
…
If you could take only one last trip, where would you go and with whom? What would you do?
What's the biggest mistake you ever made? What did it teach you?
Who are your three closest friends? How are they different from one another, and why is each so dear to you?
Here's the solution to underused parking structures: convert them into places for people to live in instead of storage spots for cars.
We Need to Design Parking Garages With a Car-less Future in Mind
Eric Jaffe, The Atlantic
The Joni Mitchell song "Big Yellow Taxi" rues the day they paved paradise to put up a parking lot. But on East 13th Street in Manhattan, they're doing the reverse. The New York Post reports that a developer has turned a former Hertz garage into an uber-luxury residential building, complete with rooftop foliage (and, yes, parking spaces for tenants). What's most interesting is that the developers decided not to raze the garage but merely to renovate it:
"It has very good bones," says [Dan Hollander, managing partner of DHA Capital] of the garage. "There are over 10-foot ceilings, good columns and the property is 67 feet wide — that's what really attracted us to it."
There's a growing belief among architects and designers that all urban parking garages should be built with these "good bones," which will allow them to be re-purposed in the future. For a variety of reasons, from higher gas prices to greater densification to better transit options, city residents will continue to drive fewer cars. As a result, we'll eventually require fewer parking lots. The ability to adapt a structure rather than tear it down will save developers time, money, and material waste.
"As the auto culture wanes we're going to have a lot of demolition to do, which is unfortunate," says Tom Fisher, dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. "If we're going to build these [garages] let's design them in a way that they can have alternative uses in the future. With just a few tweaks that's really possible."...
Krystina Gustafson looks at the coming "tsunami" of store closures as North America transitions to the "next era in retail".
"Shoppers will likely see an average decrease in overall retail square footage of between one-third and one-half within the next five to 10 years, as a shift to e-commerce brings with it fewer mall visits and a lesser need to keep inventory stocked in-store, said Michael Burden, a principal with Excess Space Retail Services."
Wells Fargo analyst Paul Lejuez believes "it makes more sense for a retailer to have half the number of stores they once thought appropriate, and instead concentrate on a small store network and e-commerce business."
Subject: Strong Towns Update for 01/22/2014
Reply-To: Strong Towns <marohn@strongtowns.org>
Saying no for the sake of yes.
Jan 22, 2014 05:00 am | Gracen Johnson
You have to be willing to say no to the bad if you want your city to be built with the good, especially with the development incentives rigged as they are today. Sometimes this can create pro and anti-development factions in your city. A tool to diffuse that animosity is to remember that every time you say no to a proposal, you could be saying yes to something better.
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