About

Hey, thanks for stopping by.

I’m Bryan. This site is where I write short posts about whatever has been occupying my brain lately. Sometimes that’s cities and architecture. Sometimes it’s photos from a walk. Sometimes a book, a piece of music, or a stray observation that felt worth writing down before it drifted away.

By profession I’m an urban planner. I spend a lot of time thinking about how places work and how they could work better. Transit, public space, architecture, and landscape design have a way of sneaking into how I see everything else.

Outside of work I mostly like making things. Writing, photography, gardening, music, cooking experiments, tinkering with personal websites. The internet used to be full of small strange personal sites and I still believe that’s one of its best forms.

I grew up in the Great Lakes region and still carry a lot of Midwestern nostalgia around with me. These days I live in the Pacific Northwest with my family, where the forests are mossy and the tomatoes in my yard attempt a coup every August.

Why this blog is called Afterword

Some people publish their thoughts at theirname dot com. That makes sense.

I like the idea that a website can be something slightly separate from the person behind it. I’m a living thing that changes. This blog is just a small artifact that gets left behind as time moves along.

The afterword in a book is the reflective part that comes after the story has already happened. A pause to think about what it meant.

Most of what you’ll find here lives in that space.