Three big urban planning moves that could transform San Francisco.

Replacing I-280 with a surface boulevard would create many opportunities for improvement, including the creation of new green spaces that would help to link many neighborhoods together.

read more: SPUR’s report in the Urbanist, Issue 524 • June 2013.

previously: Ben Caldwell, a masters student at UC Berkeley’s Dept. of Urban Design, has a project analyzing the removal of the 280 Fwy. In place of the freeway, he proposes a new gracious Potrero Boulevard. 13.02.13.

“Play Streets For All,” a collaboration between Livable City, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, and public health organizations, will introduce a smaller-scale version of Sunday Streets, making it easier for residents to close a block or two to cars and open them up for play and community-building.

Kids playing at a Sunday Streets event in the Tenderloin. Photo: Bryan Goebel

The pilot program, which will be held in addition to regular Sunday Streets events, will target neighborhoods that suffer from high rates of childhood obesity and lack safe places for kids to play…

Sunday Streets organizer Susan King said four neighborhoods are set to see Play Streets next year: the Tenderloin, Chinatown, Bayview, and the Western Addition. The exact dates and locations, along with the rest of the Sunday Streets schedule, will be announced by early January, she said.

sf.streetsblog, 26.11.12.

Viet Nguyen, a young teacher at Garfield Elementary School, was struggling to teach his first-graders about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. On the board, he had written a quote about King’s hope that people of different races could live, work and study together, but he wasn’t sure how to best convey the ideas to his beginning readers.

While puzzling over the quote, he said, he made a classic first-year- teacher mistake and turned his back on the class. Behind him, he could hear his students whispering and trying to get his .attention. “Mr. Ngyuen! Mr. Nguyen!” He shushed them, but when the clamor grew too loud he turned. “Look!” they cried.

His tiny charges had lined themselves up so that a black student stood next to a Vietnamese student who was next to a Mexican American student and so on down the line. They had their arms around each other.

“They’d integrated themselves physically,” said Nguyen, who is Vietnamese American. “I almost lost it.”

This storybook classroom moment — Nguyen still beams when he tells the story six years later — could not have happened just anywhere. In many Bay Area classrooms, the racial composition is too unbalanced to pull off this sort of stunt.

sfgate, 31.05.2002.

a shared street in Germany.

…could include center islands to provide refuge, crosswalk signage, perhaps curb bump-outs. I’m in favor of any/all of those and more; planters, benches, trees, bushes, grass, bamboo — bring it on! Putting s#!t in the way will be the single best way to slow traffic. Slowing the traffic makes the street more pleasant to cross and to cycle on, and the more bikes and pedestrians there are, the slower the traffic moves — it is a positive feedback loop.

There Goes the Neighborhood! is a four day event that positions “the neighborhood” as a fluid institution of creative production, critical thinking and intersecting interests. Collaborations between artists, residents, small businesses, universities and local activists will culminate in a series of workshops, talks, installations, performances and tours that center around the North Park neighborhood of San Diego.

sunday 03 june: 3-7pm: Alt. Town Square workshops at the North Park Theatre parking lot

Workshops at the North Park Theatre parking lot examining the site as a potential green space. Join artists, architects and landscape architects for a series of workshops examining potential uses of the site and examining design strategies that go into designing a site like this. All are welcome. The events are free and open to the public. Light food and drinks provided.

Then join us for a walk through the neighborhood that will meet up with a neighborhood Block Party at the intersection of Swift and Landis near the I-805 overpass. This walk will be led by musician and artist Sean Francis Conway.

For more info about what is currently planned for the site check out: North Park Mini-Park and Associated Streetscape Improvements Project.

hmm… that looks interesting.

full schedule here.