Looking to read something I’ve published outside this blog? Say no more. Below, an article I wrote while working at the Trust for Public Land back in 2005 and a book I published the previous year based on the findings of my masters thesis in Planning at the University of Cincinnati. Those links are to PDFs so make sure you have a PDF reader first before clicking.

Articles

Harnik and Varady, “Learning Virtually Everything About Your Park,” Parks & Recreation, National Recreation and Parks Association, September 2005.

This article grew out of another research for Peter Harnik at the Center For City Park Excellence where we were looking for park maps prepared by the park departments of the 55 largest cities in the U.S. While visiting all of those city park department websites, I thought I might as well index what other data they were making available and comment on who was communicating to the public more effectively than others.

Books

Varady, Aharon. “Bond Hill: Origin and Transformation of a 19th Century Cincinnati Railroad Suburb.” Cincinnati: Henry Watkin Press (2005).

In graduate school, I had the fortune of taking a course on planned communities, ie., intentional communities such as Shaker Village, Kentucky and New Harmony, Indiana, as well as factory towns like Benham and Lynch in the Appalachian valleys of Eastern Kentucky. Later on, while investigating the origins of a neighborhood nearby where I grew up in Cincinnati, I was amazed to discover that it had first been developed as a teetotalling housing cooperative. One of its founders was a freethinker and reader of Charles Fourier, an early philosopher of socialism. This discovery led to a full blown thesis project and, after graduating, a book chronicling the planning history of the Bond Hill neighborhood.