“Depending on whom you ask, the Dallas Farmers Market is either headed toward an era of renewal or to hell in a vegetable basket.

City officials envision the market as a center for the senses: filled with dozens of new farmers selling fresh produce alongside cooking demonstrations and yoga classes, with live music wafting through the southeastern edge of downtown…

But one key change, which market managers say could begin as soon as Tuesday, is causing a near-revolt among produce wholesalers who often truck their goods in from out of state and deal them by night.”

“The nation’s waistlines and foreign trade deficits may be ballooning, but at Daytona Beach Farmers’ Market the homespun theme is buy American and eat healthier…

Farmers’ markets at about 60 locations around Florida are encouraging local growers, said Sharon L. Yeago, president of the Florida Association of Community Farmers’ Markets based in High Springs.”

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s analysis of The Gates.

From City Limits Weekly: Regional farmers may soon have a juicy market opportunity in the Big Apple: a wholesale farmers’ market in New York City.

See also the press release from the New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets.

from the Michigan Land Use Institute:

Yesterday, Louisville’s Mayor announced an aggressive public-private partnership to add thousands of acres of land to the city’s park system.

“The ‘City of Parks’ initiative would create thousands of acres of parks and paths outside the Watterson Expressway, in areas where land rapidly is being developed into subdivisions and shopping centers.”

“San Francisco would become the first city in the nation to charge drivers just for driving in its chronically congested downtown under a sure-to-be controversial proposal being aired today.

Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, chair of the San Francisco Transportation Authority, will ask the agency to study a downtown toll zone — whereby drivers would need to purchase a daily pass to drive in The City’s most congested streets — as a potential solution to the Municipal Transportation Agency’s woeful budget problems.

“The key issue here is if we can kill three birds with one stone — relieve congestion, clean up the air, and give money to Muni — we would have hit a home run,” McGoldrick said.”

An article in The New Republic compares PPS’s approach to creating successful streets to the quick-fix, face-lift approach of the reality TV series “Town Haul.”

“Dundas Square: Full Of Promise But No People

Award-winning Dundas Square opens this weekend, but have the architects sacrificed the comfy details that would make this a people place for the esoteric elegance taught in design schools?”

After reading one rave review after another, here is a different perspective on The Gates:

“From the beginning, Olmsted and Vaux strenuously opposed all attempts to introduce art into the park. In their Greensward Plan of 1858 - the competition entry that won them the commission - they wrote that while it would be possible to build elegant buildings in the park, “we conceive that all such architectural structures should be confessedly subservient to the main idea, and that nothing artificial should be obtruded on the view.” They considered art a similar distraction from the restorative purpose of the landscape and kept statues out of the park….

Jeanne-Claude has been quoted as saying that she thinks that Olmsted would be “very happy” with the installation. I doubt it.”