Conference Ate my Brain

OK, so I haven’t posted in years. Here’s the condensed news…

I was up in Burlington, Vermont, a couple of weekends back, where all sorts of excellent things have been afoot for quite some time now involving these people. They are the biggest community land trust in the US and have developed over 1200 units of affordable housing, as well as community infrastructure like a legal aid centre and meals centre on Trust land. This is Burlington Cohousing, on Trust land – woohoo!

I also visited DUDLEY ST which those of you who have had to put up with my blathering over time would recognise as the folk I have been wanting to catch up with for some 8 years now. I would show lots more nice photos at this point, but the dodgy free WiFi in this hostel seems to stuff up the image uploading, which sucks quite a lot.

The AAG was large. Several times I restrained myself from getting into crowded lifts full of geophiles and exclaiming “ooh look! A spatial concentration! What an anomaly!” There were something like 7000 geographers in Boston for the duration and it got truly surreal here in the hotel, which was ground zero for the whole event. Roughly 1000 people got turned away from a session with Chomsky. There was a beautiful moment of crowd organisation where a hotel staffer called out “Chomsky on the left!”. As the geographers scattered on the winds, me new friend Sarah and I took off to Cambridge to get a load of the Dresden Dolls up to shenanigans in Newbury Comics on Record Store Day (yay!), which prompted me spending WAY too much money on CDs that are simply impossible to get in Oz. I don’t regret a cent. Tea and sandwiches followed, via Hootenanny, which nearly caused further eruptions of consumerism.

So now I’m in San Francisco and it’s damn cold and windy. Spent this morning at Bridge Housing, then went via the Ferry markets to the Northern California Housing Trust and wound up at Mariposa Grove, a cohousing retrofit in NCLT land. Oh boy does that site rock. I have mountains of photos which I will endeavour to get visible somehow…

Favourite architectural incongruity:

Argh. Now I’m on sodding reserve power as well. Good bye my pretties…

I’m melting….

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