I know they are sites of capitalism, but when I go to the mall, I’m there to find things I need to make my own tools of system dismantlement and comforts through the storm. As we re-examine many of these spaces, they will thrive only if we see them as
By Kristen Jeffers
Essay/Kristen's Mind/media/mental health/migration/Money and the City/Moving and Migration/placemaking/planning/Politics of Place/urbanism
Are There Really Too Many Planners in Certain Metro Areas?
Recently, I was made aware of and responded to this series of threads on Twitter, that among my colleagues in the D.C. area, there’s a concern over how many practitioners of place, especially planners, exist in the metro area and how many folks want to be planners by name, versus just
The One Key Reason Those Scary Housing Discrimination Maps Are Still True
The night before I wrote this post, I got a present. The present was that the National Geographic website dropped some of the HELOC residential security maps, commonly known in the profession as the redlining maps, into an article, highlighting the amazing work done by the Mapping Inequality Project. If you
On a Woman and Her Bikes
Anyone who’s owned at least one bike, even if it was just a tri-cycle, has a story. As I’ve added to my fleet recently, here’s my story. It was Christmas of 1988. I can’t spell out any other details, but there’s photographic evidence, snapped by a parent of mine really being geeked
By Kristen Jeffers
Cities/Cityreads/Essay/Family and Place/Greensboro/Kansas City/transit/Transportation/urbanism/walking
From an Ambassador to Kansas City (Excerpt from Triad City Beat Fresh Eyes Column)
Roughly six weeks ago, after loading almost all of my worldly possessions into a moving truck, relatives helped me pack the rest into two cars and we departed our southwest Greensboro home at about 5 a.m., navigating the freeways past my father’s gravesite at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, on
Why I Love Conferences
It is that time of year again when many of us who blog and write and speak gather at industry conferences. Or is it always that time of year? Back in the day, maybe you went to your state American Planning Association (APA) conference or the big national one. Architects had
Love Outside the City (or at Least the City Block)
If you read this on the Sunday morning upon which it made its appearance on the internet, I’m about to sit down next to my mom and my grandmother and my great-aunt, with a multitude of family in the midst and praise the Lord in the only way we can
Greensboro, A Love Letter
Dear Greensboro, Hey, it’s Kristen. How are you? Wait, yeah, I know there’s a lot of you to go around, but in my head, the sum of your whole is the skyline buildings and the trains and scrubby trees that I see right outside my window. To be honest, it’s
