Kyla Fullenwider has a new blog called Walking Distance over at Good. In this post she offers 10 ideas for enhancing the community spirit of your neighborhood. From most challenging to least, here they are. Be sure to click through for the entire post.
1.Turn your front yard into a farm.
2. Start a neighborhood time bank.
3. Make every Sunday a block party.
4. Start a bowling league.
5. Leverage social media for you library and other neighborhood resources.
6. Throw a potluck with your neighbors.
7. Bring back hide and go seek.
8. Build a community treehouse.
9. Install a bench in front of your house (and create other types of informal public spaces).
10. Say hi to your neighbors.
A neighborhood tree house is a great idea. We build them for developers sometimes who want to attract families with children to their new projects. Check out our website for ideas…
Dave,
Thanks for posting this – your blog posts are always really interesting. As a SemHeights resident as well, I love the idea of having Sundays for block parties. I’m hoping the new Sunday Morning Market will get some folks out of the house this Sunday and to start reconnecting.
We put a couple of concrete stools outside of our shop on the street to see what would happen a few months ago. Most of the people that sit are waiting on the bus, but every once in a while somebody just takes a break there and it’s cool to see people using them. It seems like a lot of our public spaces are not so relaxation friendly – like those seats in the airport that are designed so that you can’t possibly nap in them!
-CharlesH
Thanks for visiting Charles.
One of my urban design fantasies is to launch the 10,000 Benches for Tampa initiative. I want to have artists and designers create unique bench designs and sprinkle them around the city. The slogan for this venture would be – A walkable city is a sittable city.
Perhaps once school is over I’ll start looking into it seriously and see what the restrictions are on helping the city construct more benches.