Jerusalem Horizontal Landscape Image showing Jerusalem stone in construction

Cream City Brick and Jerusalem Stone

By Tehila Cohen / What can Milwaukee’s Cream City brick and Jerusalem’s limestone teach us about how cities define themselves? Explore how local materials become symbols of identity, from Jerusalem’s century-old stone ordinance to Milwaukee’s iconic Cream City façades. Both cities have wrestled with growth, housing pressure, and modernization, sometimes preserving tradition, sometimes replacing it out of necessity. When we build the future, what parts of the past do we choose to carry forward?

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New green school yard at Leopold Elementary that includes a rain garden and community vegetable garden.

Leopold Green Schoolyard – Video Tour and Final Update!

For the last 6 years, 1000 Friends has worked with Leopold Elementary School to coordinate actions that would help create a more welcoming schoolyard and alleviate flooding issues on the blacktop. In the last few years, we started the Leopold Green Schoolyard Committee – made up of parents, staff, and community partners that is still […]

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Public Space Priorities

In our series on how to measure and interpret the sustainability and livability of our communities, we continue today on the theme of public space priorities. We know that walkability is important and that creating a better pedestrian environment improves the economy and vitality of our communities. Making choices for better walkability also goes hand […]

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Parking Space Or People Space?

As we continue our research into what makes a community healthy, sustainable, and livable, we can use maps and geographic data to reveal new underlying trends and identify areas where our communities need improvement. We are using our home base of Madison, Wisconsin, as our test case, but the types of analysis we are doing […]

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Paved Roadways or People Space?

An important element of livable communities is how much space we devote to different modes of transportation. It is no secret that most American cities strongly favor cars. This picture shows how much space in downtown Detroit is devoted to space for storing cars. Parking garages and lots aside, many streets have been engineered to […]

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Great Placemaking Idea #8: Programming Coordinator

For our very last placemaking recommendation for the impending redesign of the 700 and 800 blocks of State Street and UW’s Library Mall (and we think we have saved the most important one for last), we strongly encourage the City of Madison and the UW-Madison to work together to create a programming coordinator position for […]

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