Street Talk With Special Guest Dan Burden

STREET TALK with special guest DAN BURDEN !
Simply put, Dan helps communities find their hearts and promote walkable communities.

Mon. Mar. 10, 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Dan Burden, founder of Walkable Communities , consultant for Glatting Jackson

NOTE LOCATION: @ Adaptive Environments showroom, 200 Portland Street, next to North Station, Boston click for directions…

If you’ve never heard Dan Burden give a presentation, you really don’t know what you are missing. In the realm of LivableStreets, Dan is a hero.

Once called the “Johnny Appleseed” of livable communities, Dan drives forward as confidently as if he were entering his own neighborhood, and talks about his work and his vision of the slowly emerging, post-sprawl America. People’s optimism about improving their communities often
wavers when they talk about the clutter, confusion, and congestion they see through their windshields. It falters again when they reach inside themselves to describe the absences sprawl imposes on their lives: It steals time, choice, and proximity to others–not just open space. We
are not only farther away from schools and shops, from friends and neighbors, from fields and woods; more and more of each day is given over to a tense, effortful, unnourishing, and for now unavoidable in-between-ness. This townless, countryless, road-bound running around stretches us thin; our bodies are in motion-but what is there around us to anchor our hearts and minds?

Burden is part of the suddenly arrived profession that promotes new kinds of communities. He is one of a (small but growing) group of itinerant designers and facilitators are now crisscrossing the country conducting workshops with local residents. They’re exploring the possibilities of changing streets and buildings in ways that would add pleasure and reassurance to cities and towns. Does a city become more lovable as it becomes more livable? Can we find a balance between cars and people? What about the even trickier balance between land and cars and people? Can developers and local officials move from blueprints to “greenprints,” so that a town’s growth plans add green space to people’s lives, instead of taking it away? These are a few of the many questions that Dan tackles. But it’s not easy. “I tell my audiences that Schopenhauer long ago defined the three stages all new ideas go through: ridicule, violent opposition, and acceptance,” says Burden. “I’ve never yet seen a single step skipped in any community.”

Beer and home-brewed soft drinks provided courtesy of Harpoon!

For more information:
http://livablestreets.info

Add to Reddit.

Tweet