Et Cetera

Exhibits: Flickering Treasures

From Flickering Treasures, Tyler Saunders, Traveis Howell, and Jawuan Maultsby practice football on the field that replaced the Royal Theater. Photo by Amy Davis.

The history of movie theaters offers "an amazing opportunity to talk about the transformation of an American city over 100 years," says Deborah Sorensen, a curator at Washington, D.C.'s National Building Museum. Its new photo and artifact exhibit, Flickering Treasures: Rediscovering Baltimore's Forgotten Movie Theaters, based on a similarly titled book from Baltimore Sun photographer Amy Davis, looks to do just that.

In 1950, when Baltimore's population peaked at nearly 950,000, it had 119 theaters. Today, the city of 612,000 is left with only five. Many factors have contributed to the decline: population loss, the increasing popularity of television and video, the decline of downtown commercial districts.

Davis has made it her personal mission to document Baltimore's extant theaters. Some are vacant, some are in ruins, some are now churches or stores, while a few still operate. Sorensen says excerpts from 300 oral histories Davis conducted with theater patrons, employees and owners, "breathe life" into the buildings and their role as neighborhood institutions. Theaters "contribute to a sense of place," Sorensen says.

Flickering Treasures runs from November 17, 2018, to October 14, 2019. Learn more and purchase tickets at bit.ly/2y0FsiB. Davis also documents her work online at flickeringtreasures.com.

—Jim Sweeney

Sweeney writes about architecture, art, and design from Rockville, Maryland.

Tech: Google's Environmental Insights Explorer

Google is building an interactive greenhouse-gas emissions inventory in partnership with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy. The Environmental Insights Explorer (insights.sustainability.google) has so far posted a database for five international cities, including Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. The tool provides a rundown of building and transportation emissions, rooftop solar potential, and NASA-powered 20-year climate projections. The company is also publicly releasing annual driving, biking, and transit ridership data collected by Google Maps and Waze for the first time.

The inventory is part of Google's broader sustainability program, which features resources like a solar savings calculator and a 2018 Environmental Report at sustainability.google.

Toolkit: Making Your Community Forest-Friendly

The Center for Watershed Protection has released a new resource to balance green spaces and development. Making Your Community Forest-Friendly: A Worksheet for Review of Municipal Codes and Ordinances helps communities review and revise their development regulations so future construction projects conserve and protect valuable trees and woodlands and encourage new plantings. Download the toolkit at bit.ly/2QqfSdM.

Ranked: America's Fastest-Growing Big Cities

Auditorium Shores Park in Austin, Texas. "Downtown Austin" by jdeeringdavis , Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Personal finance website WalletHub compared 515 U.S. cities of varying populations to determine where the fastest local economic growth is occurring. For specific rankings on population, income, jobs, and poverty rates, check out wallethub.com/edu/fastest-growing-cities/7010.

1. Austin (Auditorium Shores Park pictured above)

2. Miami

3. Seattle

4. Charlotte, North Carolina

5. Denver

Et Cetera is a curated collection of planning odds and ends. Please send information to Lindsay R. Nieman, Planning's associate editor, at lnieman@planning.org.