Thor S.

Recent Actions

• Commented on The Weekly What If: What If We Turn Austin Into A Continuous Playground And Outdoor Gym?
  In our quest for convenience and comfort, have American planners, architects, and landscape architects done TOO much engineer fitness out of our daily routines? 49 of 50 states have populations where over 20% of their populations are overweight. Not everyone...
• Commented on The Weekly What If?: What if children became our judges, our litmus test for whether we’ve done a good job of designing our streets and cities?
  Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, cites research that the average distance an American child travels from their home has shrunk to 1/9th of what it was in 1970. I was born in 1974 and thankfully my...
• Commented on The Weekly What If?: What If Austin Used Mimes To Shame People Into Being Better Users Of Our Streets? Part Two In A Two Part Series.
  Not a month goes by without a "Road Rage" story on the nightly news. So after nearly a century of Civil Engineering, why do our roads lack civility? One problem is our national "windshield perspective" that is reified by America's...
• Commented on The Weekly What If?: What if we transformed our street use culture by Making Austin Weirder?
  I love the pop-up and DIY nature of these community experiments. As a planner, we often talk about "community building" and "social capital" but seldom do we take the the time to create the conditions for these small, simple, and...