Photo by Lisa Bunchofpants on Flickr.

Tonight (Thursday) is the next Greater Greater Washington happy hour! Also, mark your calendars for a Greater Greater Education forum with David Catania on the evening of December 9, and a late afternoon talk with me about growing civic engagement on December 5.

We’ve been rotating happy hours between DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and now it’s DC’s turn again. This month’s happy hour is at Penn Quarter Sports Tavern, 639 Indiana Ave. NW from 6-9 pm. It’s right across 7th Street from Archives Metro, a short walk from Gallery Place or Federal Triangle, and also on the 30s, 50s, 70s, D, P, and X Metrobus lines. There’s a CaBi station nearby at 6th and D.

You won’t see me because I’ll be spending my time putting a baby to bed, but Dan and the other editors and contributors are lots of fun!

After the jump: Stand up for King Street bike lanes Monday, and talk with David Catania about education on December 9 and me about civic engagement on December 5.

Defend bike lanes in Alexandria: The proposed King Street bike lanes in Alexandria have been coming under some intense and often crazy attacks. You can speak up for the lanes this Monday, November 25 at 7:30.

The Alexandria Spokeswomen, an organization working to make the city more bike-friendly for women, is having a happy hour just before the hearing at Daniel O’Connells Bar, 112 King Street, at 6. Have a few drinks and then head over to actually push for safer cycling infrastructure.

Talk about education with David Catania: Our sister blog Greater Greater Education is hosting DC Councilmember and Committee on Education chair David Catania for a forum on December 9. It’s 6:30 pm at the Hill Center, 921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE (Eastern Market Metro).

Natalie Wexler and Ken Archer will pose questions to Catania about education, and audience members can too. What would you like us to ask? Post your question suggestions in the comments.

Talk about the future

I’m giving a talk on Thursday, December 5 at 4:30 about “new dimensions of civic dialogue.” It’s part of a series of public talks by various people in planning organized by Georgetown’s new Urban and Regional Planning program.

I’ll talk a bit about how blogs (like Greater Greater Washington and others) have drawn more people into the process of civic engagement. However, I also want to spend some time exploring how we can broaden the conversation beyond just the demographic of our core audience. We need to be engaging with communities that have traditionally been neglected in the process, especially lower-income and minority neighborhoods.

The changes many of us push for, like adding housing opportunities and amenities like shops and restaurants, can and should benefit new and long-time residents of those communities as well. But we have to make sure they will, not just say so. We can’t just draw supply-and-demand curves and say that more supply will filter and keep housing affordable; we have to craft policies that actually ensure people with lower incomes benefit not just in the vague future but now.

And we have to understand what people want for their own neighborhoods. Greater Greater Washington has always sought to highlight voices from all around the region about what they want for their communities, and I’d like to do more to find these voices from our traditionally underserved communities.

If you’re interested in this issue, please come share your thoughts with me on December 5 at 4:30. You can RSVP here. That page says the talk is by Shyam Kannan of Metro, and my talk is on 12/12, but we switched, so I’m on 12/5 and Shyam is 12/12. (And go see Shyam’s talk, too!)