Good morning, RVA! It's 13 °F, and that is a no-joke winter temperature! For most of today, you can expect highs at or just above freezing. Things will warm up a bit throughout the week.
Water cooler
Friday night, a driver hit and killed Grayland A. Brooks, 62, on the sidewalk of the 2300 block of Chamberlayne Avenue. This fatal crash occurred just a couple blocks north of where a person was hit and killed on the 900 block of Chamberlayne Parkway this past November. Chamberlayne, particularly the section south of Brookland Park Boulevard, is incredibly fast, incredibly dangerous, and needs immediate redesigning. What will the City do now that two people have died along this stretch of road? Improve the lighting? Slow traffic? Will they study the area? Anything at all?
Police are still looking for the driver, who fled the scene in a silver four-door 2001-2005 Lexus LS 430.
Well, Monday’s Lobby Day passed without physical violence, which feels, honestly, miraculous. However, I wouldn’t call what happened yesterday peaceful or, just because no one died, some sort of courageous display of democracy to be held up as a model for others. Thousands of people invaded Richmond, bristling with weapons for the sole purpose of intimidating citizens and legislators because things didn’t go their way during the last round of elections. Folks—myself included—were terrified, stayed home from work if possible, and worried about the safety of friends and family whose responsibilities took them Downtown. Throughout the week leading up to Monday, I got emails from institutions and officials warning me about the possibility of violence and asking me to stay away Downtown if at all possible. The Virginia Center for Public Safety cancelled their event honoring the victims of gun violence—an event they’ve hosted for the past 28 years. A large portion of my yesterday was spent, not with my family, but pull-to-refreshing Twitter, anxiously locked into seeing what happens when you put thousands of White men with assault rifles in a confined urban space. None of that felt peaceful. It felt terrorizing, which, of course, was exactly the point. However! I am incredibly thankful that, at least as of right now, The New Dem Majority seems undeterred in their work to pass the most chill and common sense of gun-safety laws, and we should celebrate that. Actually, we should do more: If you’re represented by a legislator who supports the handful of new gun-safety bills, send them an email thanking them for sticking up for what’s right. Yesterday their office was literally under seige because of their beliefs, and that most likely felt scary and awful. They could probably use some positive feedback. Related: You can can read this column by Lori Haas, Virginia Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and look through some photos from yesterday, both in the Virginia Mercury.
Gregory J. Gillian at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Virginia Center Commons has new owners 💸. The Shamin Hotels folks are deeply involved in both this project and the already-in-progress work to redevelop the old Cloverleaf Mall site, which is interesting. The latter is turning into a pretty nice little urban village just over the city line (that’s begging for better bus service), and I wonder if we can expect something similar at this new VCC site? If you live up that way, keep your eyes open for a public charrette to weigh in on the development’s future.
The City’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee will meet today at 1:00 PM and consider a couple of interesting papers (PDF), including a handful of the streets for all legislation, a long-awaited Airbnb ordinance (ORD. 2019-343), and, mysteriously, they’ll discuss “GRTC Board Changes.” Hmmmm.
Here’s an important thread on /r/rva: “Please where are the pretzels”. Soft pretzels are totally my thing, and I agree with the original poster that I need more soft-p options in my life!
Richmond Public Schools will hold a second session to collect community feedback on naming the new middle school on Hull Street. If you’ve got ideas, you can stop by tonight from 6:30–7:30 PM at Elkhardt-Thompson Middle School (7825 Forest Hill Avenue). This is your final opportunity to weigh in on this particular renaming!
Ultra late notice on this one, but Maymont will host a Community Planning Workshop titled The African American Experience Circa 1900 today from 4:00–6:00 PM. They’re looking for you to “share your ideas and experiences during a community discussion to help plan for a broader, more in-depth African American narrative at Maymont.” I’m interested in how the larger park, outside of the mansion zone, can add the context of Black lives in the 1900, and I am definitely looking forward to reading whatever PDF results from this process.
This morning's longread
The case for ... cities that aren't dystopian surveillance states
Dang Cory Doctorow can write! Lots for urbanists to think about from this piece about surveillance in cities.
There’s nothing wrong – or new – in the idea that we should sense what’s happening in our built environments and alter how our systems perform to respond to those sensors’ observations. There’s nothing objectionable about adding more trains when the system is busy, or recording accurate usage data to inform our urban planning debates. The problem is that the smart city, as presently conceived, is a largely privatised affair designed as a public-private partnership to extract as much value as possible from its residents while providing the instrumentation and infrastructure to control any civil unrest that such an arrangement might provoke. Far from treating residents as first-class users of smart infrastructure, they are treated as something between gut flora and pathogen, an inchoate mass of troublesome specks to be nudged into deterministic, convenient-to-manage patterns.
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