(This will appear in the 10/7/09 Capitol Hill Times.)

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I just signed a contract with Wilderness Press to produce a walking guide to Seattle.

Of course, Capitol Hill and First Hill will be major locales in it.

After all, The Hill is one of America’s finest examples of a walkable neighborhood. You’ve got residences (in a variety of styles and price points), shopping, dining, entertainment, schools, churches, parks, medical facilities and more, all within a healthy stroll along sidewalked, tree-lined, lighted streets. Add the Hill’s adjacency to downtown and you’ve got the state’s biggest concentration of jobs, major stores, and tourist/scenic attractions.

The Hill also has extensive bus transit, both within the neighborhood and out to downtown, the UW, and the south end. (And there’ll be a light rail station on Broadway sometime in the next decade.)

Civic advocates, such as the Seattle-based Feet First, have long touted the many benefits of walkable neighborhoods. Such places foster a greater sense of community, bringing people into face-to-face interaction even if they don’t live or work in the exact same building. They save on energy and other natural resources.

And they offer more intangible benefits as well. Neighborhoods with a lot of foot traffic are simply more “alive” than places where everybody’s stuck inside either a building or a vehicle.

So it’s natural to find officials in other localities trying to figure out how to add the magic of walkability (and bikeability) to what have heretofore been car-dependent suburbs.

One local example: “The Landing In Renton.”

Out by the Boeing and Kenworth factories, where Cirque de Soleil used to be, and where Clay Bennett once claimed he wanted to put up a new sports arena for just a gazillion taxpayer bucks, a different kind of suburban district is forming.

Some of its retail blocks (particularly the Target and the Fry’s electronics superstore) are built in traditional strip-mall style, with storefront entrances recessed behind giant moats of parking.

But other blocks, including a “main street” intersection, are built direct to the curb, with storefronts opening straight onto real sidewalks.

There’s also a block-long apartment monstrosity, also built to the curb, with indoor/underground parking. A second apartment complex of this type is currently under construction, despite the nationwide building slump.

The Landing, in its current form, is a good start. But it’s not enough. Sidewalks, by themselves, do not a neighborhood make. The Landing’s developers know this. On their web site, they promise that by the time the whole project’s done, it’ll be a real pedestrian-friendly place. “Wide, vibrant sidewalks—lined with lively cafes, dynamic retail shops and cozy residential buildings—will encourage pedestrians to stroll throughout the varied streets. A collection of restaurants surrounding a strong retail core will create a venue vibrant enough to be a year-round destination.”

Until then, The Landing might be a nice place to shop, but it’s not quite the stuff for a walking-tour book. It’s a collection of your basic suburban strip-mall and big-box chains, designed and arranged a little differently.

Even when The Landing is complete, it’ll be something manufactured from scratch, representing what one developer/landlord believes are the shops and businesses and housing-stock types a neighborhood needs.

But traditional urban neighborhoods like Capitol Hill didn’t just grow organically either. They were planned and platted and nurtured by zoning laws. Much of Seattle’s urban cityscape was essentially built up from scratch in relatively short timeframes (from a few years to a few decades). Every building and block in our town has evolved since it was built, but they all were built by humans.

Places like Capitol Hill can be built again. Perhaps not with the same materials (those old houses and apartments used a lot of no-longer-cheap ingredients, including labor), but with the same sense of scale and vibrancy. Will they?

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Back to the walking-tours book:

I already know plenty of spots on Capitol Hill to send the book’s readers to—Volunteer and Anderson parks, Lakeview Cemetery, 15th Avenue, Broadway, Pike/Pine, St. Mark’s, the mansions. And on First Hill there’s always the SU campus, the Stimpson-Green Mansion, St. James, the Frye Art Museum.

Where else should I send the book-buying walkers?

Let me know at walking@miscmedia.com.

Arcade, the Northwest architecture and design quarterly, devoted its summer issue to environmental themes.

But instead of hyping new “green” buildings and products, many of the issue’s essays (guest-edited by Charles Mudede and Jonathan Golob) propose a world with fewer buildings and products.

Granted, this year we’re not adding too much to the total world supply of them.

This is particularly the case with California professor Barry Katz’s closing piece, “The Promise of Recession.” Katz remembers how past designers such as William Morris sought to influence the world by promoting an honest, simple aesthetic. Then Katz imagines a near-future in which “every act of production and consumption stabilizes, or even adds to, our collective natural assets.”

This, he believes, means a lot fewer new products (of all kinds), hence a lot fewer people employed to design those products. But there would be work for “post-designers.” Some of these would revamp the already-built world to be more sustainable and more nature-friendly. Others would devise “an ecology of information, thinning the festering datamass and rehabilitating the printed page.”

Similar themes are posited by Golob in “Green On Wheels.” He argues that today’s gasoline-powered automobiles are just about as efficient as they can ever be, when you figure in the costs of refining and transporting the fuel. No, Golob avers, “carrying about two hundred pounds of human being in four thousand pounds of boxy steel, glass and aluminum” is an activity whose time will soon pass, by necessity, whether we like it or not.

Also in the issue:

• Three fantasy illustrations by Jed Dunkerly, depicting speculative attempts at “Engineering the Environment”—using sky-bound sprinkler systems to rain on farmland, using offshore “wind rigs” to alter air currents, and using construction cranes to plant fully-grown trees.
• Nicholas Veroli on the meaning of “catastrophe,” and whether any situation (including the present environmental crisis) can be called one before it’s past-tense.
• Erin Kendig on Krazy!, a book documenting last year’s Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit exploring the surrealistic sides of comics, animation, and related arts.
• Jim Cava reviewing Tony Fry’s book Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Cava agrees with Fry’s assertion that the constant making and selling of what Cava calls “unnecessary consumables” is bad for the planet, no matter how “green” any individual product is claimed to be. Fry and Cava insist we need to redesign our whole consumerist culture, not merely individual consumer products.

If we take Fry’s case (and those of the other Arcade contributors) seriously, the human-built environment will change. It’s not just unwise to keep going the way we’ve gone this past century, it’s impossible.

The only question is what we’ll change into.

…poses the musical question: What if our planet wasn’t such a benevolent mother after all?

…“What’s a green job anyway?”

…with phosphates: Remember, when Cascade is outlawed, only outlaws will have sheeting action.

“Sun screen lotion threatens coral.”

• “Skitch”: Once, it was the name of Johnny Carson’s first bandleader. Now, it’s a dangerous X-treme sports stunt.
• The historic building that houses HistoryLink is getting upscaled, beyond the fiscal reach of many of its current tenants.
• One group’s plan to help solve the debate over a new 520 bridge: Put an on-ramp where the Museum of History and Industry is now.
• The NY Times discovers one small slice of Boeing’s employee-club culture. Wait ’til they discover the Boeing employees’ psychic fair…
• Now available to the future-conscious who’ll become part of the past: “Eco-friendly burial options.”

…I’m skipping the morning-headlines thang on days when there’s not much interesting to pass on. Today, we’ve got a few items:

• Certain Pokemon valentine cards were recalled, after some of the heart-shaped lollipops attached to them contained metal fragments. Looks like Team Rocket has finally won a battle.
• Could the world’s oceans soon become beyond saving?
• Real headline: “State patrol to drivers: 911 not a traffic hotline.”
• Evergreeners: Not all as passive as the old stereotype.
• The state’s new plan for replacing those four obsolete ferries? Replace them with three new, smaller boats.
• Your help is needed in a one-time census of Puget Sound octopi.
• Sleazy corporate lawyers want access to a car-crash victim’s old MySpace page.
• A Starbucks barista plans to donate a kidney to a loyal customer. Let’s hope this doesn’t get into the next employee manual.

• Congress passes BushCo’s economic stimulus. O, wouldst that we had an economy that didn’t so desperately require incessant stimulation. And yes, some commentators have already used the dirty-joke possibilities inherent within that.
• Are biofuels actually worse, emissions-wise, than petroleum products?
• On the other hand, it is possible to run an entire fringe theater production on human energy, including the lights.
• Some dude from the Natl. Assoc. of Realtors claims Seattle area housing prices may be “too low.”
• Sen. Clinton in Seattle: “…If we get our focus right in America there is no stopping us.”
• Sen. Obama in Seattle: Later today. (He’s just been endorsed by Gov. Gregoire.)
• Sen. McCain in Seattle: That’ll be $2,300 to get in.
• Gov. Gregoire: Our economy’s still fab.
• Gangs are setting up shop in the exurbs, AKA meth-lab country. Included in the linked story: “An all-white chapter of the Black Gangster Disciples is working the Bothell area.”
• Another day, another ferry out of service.
• A load of newly minted Canadian quarters got spilled in a truck accident. These days, that’s real money.

…mighty blustery day, here’s what’s nooze:

• Obama, Clinton, and one of them Republicans: They’re all coming to town to cajole caucus goers.
• Local house prices somehow held their own.
• Boeing’s 787 flies in June—this time they’re sure.
• There’s one less indie dairy operation in Western Washington. Wilcox Farms plans to leave the biz.
• Delta and Northwest sitting in a tree…
• The all mail-in ballot? Not yet, in King County.
• Beyond every formerly-new computer, TV, and cell phone lies the wonderful world of potentially toxic e-waste.