City sidewalks, busy sidewalks http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/1386454 Menasha residents speak out against sidewalks in Woodland Hills http://www.postcrescent.com/article/20110308/APC0101/103080426/Menasha-residents-speak-against-sidewalks?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|APC-News How to Turn Your Streets into Sidewalks http://www.good.is/post/how-to-turn-your-streets-into-sidewalks/ Street and Sidewalk Design http://conservationtools.org/tools/general/show/66 Ten Principles for Rebuilding Neighborhood Retail [pdf] http://www.uli.org/ResearchAndPublications/Reports/~/media/Documents/ResearchAndPublications/Reports/TenPrinciples/TP_NeighborhoodRetail.ashx Sidewalks serve many purposes. Children ride their bikes on them, people walk their dogs on them, some folks sell handbags and books on them, and still others use them as places to display their art. As municipalities find their budgets strained for a variety of reasons, some of them have held back on creating new sidewalks or maintaining existing ones. One place where the battle over sidewalks has come to a head is the town of Elmhurst, Illinois. Local residents in the Chicago suburb couldn't agree on whether there should be a sidewalk on Gladys Avenue, the compromise resulted in a sidewalk that ends in the middle of a block. This compromise annoyed many in the community, and it points to an ongoing debate about who should pay for these improvements-developers, communities, or homeowners. Local Elmhurst resident Susan Rose noted, "You have a lot of tension between people who have lived here forever and folks who have not. It's been fought block by block and on Gladys by half a block." The first link will take users to an article from this Tuesday's Wall Street Journal about the sidewalk brouhaha in Elmhurst. The second link leads to a piece from the Daily Gleaner in Canada about a local debate regarding who should be on the sidewalks as the weather improves in the coming months. Moving on, the third link will whisk users away to a piece from the Appleton Post Crescent about a local movement to keep sidewalks from being built in a nearby Menasha subdivision. The fourth link leads to a fine piece from the Good website about reclaiming streets for other uses. The fifth link will take users to a nuts-and-bolts type feature from the Conversation Tools website about how to create good streets and sidewalks that work well for a variety of purposes. The last link features a guide to rebuilding neighborhood retail from the Urban Land Institute.