Since 1987, Lisa Schamess has worked with a variety of nonprofit organizations concerned about the quality of communities and the rights of individuals. Her clients have included the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Institute of Architects, Smart Growth America, and several administrations of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In the 1980s, when Lisa was a rookie staff assistant at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, she assisted in the Critical Issues Fund, a visionary program that supported the then-new growth management effort, which gave rise to the Smart Growth movement. Lisa was a founding staff member of the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership, which led the fight to recraft federal transportation funding for all modes of transportation, not just highways.

Lisa's current clients include the National Vacant Properties Campaign and Conference of Minority Transportation Officials. She also contributes to Planning magazine and the Beliefnet web site, and teaches rhetoric and literature in her spare time at Emerson Preparatory School.

Samples of Lisa's recent work are on the web at these addresses:

The Returning City: Historic Preservation and Transit in the Age of Civic Renewal
Written for the National Trust for Historic Preservation
--Part 1
--Part 2

Blueprint Buffalo
written for the National Vacant Properties Campaign

Columns for Beliefnet

Last year I had the pleasure of working as team editor with the National Vacant Properties Campaign on their report and recommendations to key organizations in the City of Buffalo to address widespread vacancies in the urban core and nearby suburbs. The result, Blueprint Buffalo, is helping the region move forward. There's no shortage of good ideas in Buffalo. One of the most compelling is Queen City Farm. Filmmaker John Paget created this beautifully vivid film about the citizens' group whose inspiring and pragmatic vision has prompted them to ask the City of Buffalo for a cluster of derelict houses and vacant lots, including a breathtaking old Queen Anne style home, "for the creation of an urban farm and transformational development." "Queen City Farm will transform approximately 2.25 acres of currently vacant lots into fresh nutritious food with sustainable farming techniques. A small portion of the farm will be cultivated for market to contribute to the local economy and financially sustain the farm; most of the acreage will be cultivated for distribution to low-income residents of the neighborhood and community." Transformational indeed. This film was produced and directed by Buffalo documentary filmmaker John Paget www.pagetfilms.com Featuring Aaron Bartley, Sheila Bass, Diane Picard, Samina Raja, Erin Sharkey, Tim Tielman, Cynthia Van Ness and more. I scooped up this video from David at Fix Buffalo Today (thanks, David, for posting this).

The National Vacant Properties Campaign was set up about five years ago "to provide everyone – individuals, advocates, agencies, developers, non-profits, and others – with information resources, tools, and assistance to support their vacant property revitalization efforts."

It is a terrific clearinghouse for information that is surprisingly hard to find. But it is so much more than that.

With the support of its partners and funders, NVPC has traveled to communities throughout the nation to meet with all parties concerned about vacant properties, from citizens to code enforcement officials to mayors to community development corporations and developers. From these meetings grow discussions, and from the discussions come ideas, and from the ideas NVPC's expert teams craft solutions.

And from the solutions come communities.

I'm privileged to be working with NVPC's technical assistance teams for my second year, helping to prepare action plans and strategies for cities and counties overwhelmed by potential property assets and big property problems: abandoned houses caught in limbo because of title problems, discount buildings picked up for a song on ebay and "flipped" by unethical outside investors, and neglected or underleased shopping areas that have seen better days.

(Haven't we all?)

This summer I have been helping the NVPC write and edit their a blueprint for reversing decades of depopulation and weakened market demand in Buffalo, New York.

Since I live in Washington, D.C., and just picked up a newspaper this morning that informed me my city has apparently grown by 31,000 people since (maybe) 1999, the biggest increase overall in 56 years, I can tell you: if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.

Saying Something Beautiful

This is the text of the paper I recently gave at the College English Association-MidAtlantic Group meeting at Montgomery College. Am still working on the concepts and documentation. Feedback is welcome! Email me with your comments.

Poetry Thursday Is Named Visiting Feature

Normally, this is only a feature at my blog.

But in honor of the recent conference of the Modern Language Association, which John attended and I had to miss, I hereby submit a CV.

Not mine. Mine is in the toolbar now, supposedly up and running.


Curriculum Vitae
by Lisel Mueller

1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.

2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into
confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of
course I do not remember this.

3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The
world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.

4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building
with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.

5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones
and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.

7) My country was struck by history more deadly than
earthquakes or hurricanes.

8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother
told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.

9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights
of adolescence.

10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun
and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed
behind in darkness.

11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually
I caught up with them.

12) When I met you, the new language became the language
of love.

13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry.
The daughter became a mother of daughters.

14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying
threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left
unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate
present.

15) Years and years of this.

16) The children no longer children. An old man's pain, an
old man's loneliness.

17) And then my father too disappeared.

18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my
childhood, but it was closed to the public.

19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone's face was younger
than mine.

20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are
breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.


From Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller, published by Louisiana State University Press. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Reprinted for educational use only. All rights reserved.

[via Academy of American Poets]

Carnival of Piers

My colleague at architecture and morality has launched a carnival of architecture and urbanism blogs here.

How it works:

Mainly, this "carnival" will be a resource for interested readers who wish to know what the blog world is saying about architecture, community and urban design, and related topics such as public spaces and commons, green space, development and financing, social behavior in designed spaces, vacant property policies...you get the drill.

You can visit the carnival on a regular basis. Or you can enrich it by offering up your blog posts on appropriate topics.

Even if you are not a blogger yourself, you can submit any interesting links you find (though they do need to be from a blog) via this form.

If you are unsure just how to do this, email me and I will be helpful.

Caveat: This is how it started for me, by being a passive blog reader. Before you know it, you want your own little corner of the Internet:

"It's deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace. And we're helping him get those things in our shabby little office."

But I digress.

More of the same here.

trackback to a+m

Bytes Might Smite Cites?

Greetings, Gentle Reader.

If you are visiting for some knee-slap and rib-tickle, then bustle on over to my blog, the truth hurts , and avail away.

If you are here for a sober and scholarly discussion of the state of practice in citing research sources, you have surfed to the right place.

I have five minutes before class, so this will be a rushed post, hopefully to be expanded later. My thesis, if you will, is this: the current standard styles, developed at great pains to provide the maximum credit in the minimum of space, are quickly being superceded by the greater flexibility and elegance of the hyperlink. Even in printed papers, the current wisdom about source citation is so deeply influenced by the (let's face it) superior citation capacities of the Internet, that the best among our scholars is hard pressed to catch up.

Case in point: phrases that have been popularized, such as "Gentle Reader" currently pass through a limbo during which they still must be cited in text, thereby stopping the flow or truncating the ending of perfectly good sentences all over the English-speaking world. At some point, however, these phrases become so lingua franca that no citation is needed, therefore impoverishing future usage for readers and writers who have no idea what the phrase originally denoted and now connotes.

How much lovelier is it to provide a hyperlink instead, which endures through the transitional stage of usage and beyond? In a click, there you have it: history, context, credit. Yet if you are rushed or simply want to enjoy the sentence on its own, you have a choice today's print-text reader does not: you can skip the link.

As a bonus, if you do click the link and then wander onward to find out more via Google or Dogpile, you get value added and wonderful fuzzy logic around the original idea.

All from one phrase. Kewl.

More anon.