Lessons from our Street’s first Block Party in Decades

I’ve been wanting to hold a block party on my street to help neighbors get to know each other and build community spirit.  This post details how our street held our first block party in decades.  My hope is that other streets will learn from this on how to  hold their own block parties.

Walking the Neighborhood

I’ve being going on regular walks around Akron for over a decade and after a day spent working from home, I often feel like getting some social time.  While on my walks, if a resident seems open to talking I’ll often strike up a conversation.

When I’m on my own street and I see a neighbor, I test their receptivity  and mention the idea of the block party.  If I haven’t talked with them before I point out where I live on the street so they can tell that I’m one of their neighbors and this block party thing is “legit”.

We were able to get 49 attendees to the party, which is quite a high percentage of the neighborhood.

Talking to people in person

I talked with everyone on the street at least 2-3 times.  I don’t think I would have gotten the response I did without the personal touch.  I also got ideas from people on how to make the idea work.  I had the basic concept, but I didn’t have a location or date at the beginning.  The date and location came later after I spoke with people. [Read more…]

Citigroup Center

Engineering crisis of 1978 (from Wikipedia)

Due to material changes during construction, the building as initially completed was structurally unsound. William LeMessurier‘s original design for the chevron load braces used welded joints. To save money, Bethlehem Steel changed the plans in 1974 to use bolted joints, which was accepted by LeMessurier’s office but not known to the engineer himself.^[22] Furthermore, according to The New Yorker, LeMessurier originally only needed to calculate wind loads from perpendicular winds under the building code; in typical buildings, loads from quartering winds at the corners would be less.^[22][159] In June 1978, after an inquiry from Princeton University engineering student Diane Hartley, LeMessurier recalculated the wind loads on the building with quartering winds.^[159][f] He found that, for four of the eight tiers of chevrons, such winds would create a 40 percent increase in wind loads and a 160 percent increase in load at the bolted joints.^[22]

Citicorp Center’s use of bolted joints and the increased loads from quartering winds would not have caused concern if these issues had been isolated from each other. However, the combination of the two findings prompted LeMessurier to run tests on the structural safety.^[103] The original welded-joint design could withstand the load from straight-on and quartering winds, but a 75-mile-per-hour (121 km/h) hurricane force quartering wind would exceed the strength of the bolted-joint chevrons.^[99] With the tuned mass damper active, LeMessurier estimated that a wind capable of toppling the building would occur on average once every 55 years.^[162][161] If the tuned mass damper could not function due to a power outage, a wind strong enough to cause the building’s collapse would occur once every 16 years on average.^[162] LeMessurier also discovered that his firm had used New York City’s truss safety factor of 1:1 instead of the column safety factor of 1:2.^[99] [Read more…]

In a 2011 New Yorker talk, Malcolm Gladwell described the central role “legitimacy” plays in motivating people.  Previously, political theorists had focused on “deterrence theory” that treats people as rational actors who decide whether to follow the law based upon a weighing of the pros and cons of compliance.

Protesting Illegitimate Authority

Gladwell cites NYU Professor Tom Tyler’s work on “legitimacy”, and argues that people will fight to the death and even go on hunger strikes against an authority they feel is illegitimate, despite overwhelming penalties that deterrence theorists assume would be effective.

Gladwell identifies 3 factors in establishing legitimacy:

1. Does the authority grant one standing and listen to one’s petitions?
2. Is authority administered with neutrality or is there one set of rules for one group and a different system for others?
3. Is the system trustworthy — does it follow well-defined rules that are sensible and are not subject to arbitrary change?

[Read more…]