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Yesterday I spent my Saturday at a meeting of the Phoenix organization, " Neighborhoods Connect ." The goal was to gather together neighborhood organizers and others interested in improving social life in Phoenix neighborhoods, to share experiences and examples of successful practices. The impetus for this first stakeholders meeting was to increase civic participation within the city of Phoenix. The State of Arizona has low levels of civic participation compared to other states, and the Neighborhoods Connect initiative grew out of several organizations  to improve civic participation, including " The Arizona We Want ", and the Center for the Future of Arizona. Of particular concern to the neighborhoods program is a recent Pew poll finding that only 12% of the people of Arizona believe that the people in their community care about one another. The organizer of Neighborhoods Connect, Susan Edwards, roped me into the organizing committee after reading some of the post...

The topic of relevance seems to be cropping up more frequently in archaeology. Our findings from the past are claimed to be relevant to contemporary concerns. I have no quibble with this viewpoint (Smith 2010), and indeed, my urban blog, Wide Urban World , is based on this premise. But the way the topic of relevance is used by most archaeologists today seems off the mark. The typical format is to assert, with little context or warrant, that some particular archaeological findings are relevant to some modern concern. This is usually done in an archaeology or anthropology journal, or other disciplinary work, in places that guarantee it will NOT to be seen by anyone outside of our field. As a result, such claims of relevance are irrelevant. If there is virtually no chance that policy-makers and politicians will read these claims, and even if someone in the policy world were to read our journals, the chances that our claims of relevance would be acted upon are nil. In this sense, claims of...

My Endnote bibliography database has just passed 23,000 entries. The reference that pushed it over this level is: Hillier, Bill     1996    Space is the Machine: A Configurational Approach to Architecture . Cambridge University Press, New York. I decided to do a quick, almost certainly inaccurate, list of the top ten authors in my Endnote database. There is not a way to do this easily in Endnote, so I just thought of authors I know I have cited a lot over the years, or whose work I follow, and recorded how many entries I have for them as author. I found these eleven with lots of entries: Gary Feinman:        102 works in my database William Sanders:      74 Kenneth Hirth:         73 Joyce Marcus            72 Tim Earle:                59 Richard Blanton: ...