Exclusives
BLOG POST
Walkable vs. Unwalkable Airports
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman"> <p> I’ve read some airport-related planning literature about the interiors of airports and about their public transit connections. (For a good example of the latter, see <a href="/node/34842"><u><span style="color: #0000ff">http://www.planetizen.com/node/34842</span></u></a> ) But one other difference between airports relates to their exteriors: the difference between walkable airports and not-so-walkable airports. </p>
BLOG POST
Mad Tea Party At Our Airports
<p> On my coveted “Bane of Americana” list just behind my cell phone company's automated customer support option to “Press '3' To Stay On Hold” (not kidding!), is the so-called “Passenger Pick-Up System” at airport terminals. Instead of realizing a purported orderly and safe system, by forcing cars to circuit the entire loop road in an attempt to perfectly intercept with arriving passengers, airports are perpetuating a half-brained scheme reminiscent of Disney World's Mad Tea Party ride. </p> <p> <img src="/files/u20603/madteaparty.jpg" width="448" height="336" /> <br /> <strong>It's Always Six O'Clock At Terminal Eight! </strong> </p>
FEATURE
Histories of No History: Commodification and Urbanization in the American West
Josh Stephens reviews two biographies of cities, <em>The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of An American City</em> and <em>Reno’s Big Gamble: Image and Reputation in the Biggest Little City</em>.
BLOG POST
Shopping: An ‘Obnoxious Industrial Activity’?
<p> </p> <p> As James Howard Kunstler points out in <em>Home From Nowhere</em>, one of the tragedies of single-use zoning is that it branded shopping as an “obnoxious industrial activity that must be kept separate from houses”. Ironically, the places where most Americans shop today come pretty close to “obnoxious” and “industrial”.
BLOG POST
Top 10 Free Web Applications for Planning
<p> <br /> I had the opportuntity, at the 2009 national <a href="http://www.planning.org/nationalconference/">planning conference</a> in Minneapolis, to present (together with my colleague <a href="/blog/11">Christian Peralta Madera</a>) ten free web applications that can be used to support planning. <br /> <br /> Approximately 350 participants attended the session. Since the presentation, I've received over 100 emails congratulating us on the practical nature of the presentation, and requesting links to the websites we presented. Since our presentation was a hands-on demonstration, this blog entry outlines the ten technologies, and provides links to examples of the technology in practice and resources so you can experiment with the technologies. <br />
BLOG POST
Bike Lanes As Training Wheels
<p> A friend introduced me yesterday to rambunctious bicycling advocate Fred Oswald via a <a href="http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/05/_scott_shaw_the_plain.html">recent article</a> out of Cleveland’s press. Much debate swirls around his not-so-uncommon opinions. Mr. Oswald’s argument can be boiled down to two points: supporting a critical need for much more bicycling education on sharing public roadways with other vehicles, and fighting an industry-borne fallacy that breaking up streets with allocated spaces, such as bike lanes, is good for the biking community. The former is, of course, not contestable. We all agree that safety and training are absolutely critical to developing a strong and healthy bicycling community.
BLOG POST
Take a ride on the Scwebebahn
I’d been obsessed with it ever since I saw <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203632/"><em>The Princess and the Warrior</em></a>. (Between that and the funicular in <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085549/">Flashdance</a></em>, there is just something about bad-ass chicks that commute via unique transit.) So, when I found myself with an unexpected free morning in Essen, Germany, after especially cooperative weather for photographing the day before, I hopped on the S-Bahn towards Wuppertal to see the famed train. <p class="MsoNormal"> <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3405/3506113776_77e7083411_d.jpg" width="500" height="375" /> </p>
BLOG POST
Skills in Planning: Writing Content-Free Planning Documents
<p class="MsoNormal"> For many students graduate school is the time to learn how to write professional reports and memos. One of the skills many planning students seem eager to master is writing the content-free document. This kind of writing is a little tricky to do. Accordingly, in this last blog in my series on planning skills I provide tips on how to create sentences, paragraphs, and whole reports and PowerPoint presentations that convey the absolute minimum of important information. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <em>Titles </em> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> Titles should never reveal the actual content of the report. This is the guideline I find easiest to follow myself. </p>
BLOG POST
Meeting The Vanguard
<p> This past week I had the pleasure and honor of participating in the <a href="http://americancity.org/vanguard09/">Next American City's Urban Vanguard</a> conference. Held in Washington DC, the event brought 35 young urban leaders together from a wide variety of backgrounds. The magazine--one of my favorites--did an outstanding job organizing and running the two-day blitz of tours, events, networking opportunities, and intimate conference sessions. In an effort to keep this brief, I have outlined three highlights from the second day of the conference. </p>
BLOG POST
Snob-Free Sailing On The Cheap
<p> This extended holiday weekend is much anticipated personally because it signifies the return to a recreational activity that thrills me more so than any other. By this time most years the weather has warmed up enough to prevent any further delay in getting my cheap, little sailboat ready “for the season”. While there is very strong merit in, and a touch of <a href="/node/38336">previous discussion</a> on, the return to sailing vessels for the purposes of international commercial shipping, this Memorial Day weekend I rather turn to the merits sailing has as a sustainable, low-impact, and surprisingly cheap way of having fun and experiencing the splendor of nature first hand. Won't you please take a few moments to consider how a traditional form of waterborne transportatio
FEATURE
Making Grocers More Appetizing to Developers
Last week, Mayor Bloomberg's office announced an initiative to encourage developers to include grocery stores in new projects. Nevin Cohen, whose research focuses on urban food system, reviews the plan.
BLOG POST
Don't demolish a Mies van der Rohe building in Chicago
<p> <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rlhZCdZl2is/ShGQfdtBmQI/AAAAAAAAKqo/5Zv7aHqBTYU/s1600-h/IMG_7662_2+copy.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"> <div style="text-align: center"> <img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rlhZCdZl2is/ShGQfdtBmQI/AAAAAAAAKqo/5Zv7aHqBTYU/s400/IMG_7662_2+copy.jpg" /> </div> </a> </p> <p> See the building and the walls in the lower left? They're designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. They're part of the ensemble he designed at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Mies and his office designed this corner around the same time they were designing the masterpiece on campus - Crown Hall. </p>
FEATURE
The Future of Empty Car Dealerships: Results of the Planetizen Brainstorm
The results are in! We asked for you ideas for reusing the empty car dealerships cropping up around the country. Urban gardens? Flying car launch pads? These ideas may seem far out, but the number one answer may surprise you.
BLOG POST
When Spillover Parking Isn't So Bad
<p class="MsoNormal"> One justification for municipal minimum parking requirements is the danger of “spillover parking”: the fear that if Big Brother does not force businesses to build huge parking lots, that business’s customers will “spill over” into neighboring businesses or residential neighborhoods, thus reducing the parking available to the latter group.<span> </span>For example, if Wal-Mart doesn’t build a thousand parking spaces, maybe Wal-Mart’s customers will park at Mom’n’Pop Groceries down the street, thus reducing the parking available to Mom’n’Pop customers. </p>
BLOG POST
Opportunities (and Mindfulness) of the Emerging HUD Blueprint
<p> By any measure, the HUD that is now emerging from the shadows of eight years of amateur hour, is focused on the right things: markets, coherent roles for public and private sector alike, and energy efficiency. Indeed the emphasis on "urbanism" and "regionalism" illustrates that this administration "gets it". </p>
BLOG POST
Graduate School or Fight Club?: Finishing Up the First Year
<p> Last week marked the end of my first year of planning school. It’s been by turns enlightening, angst-ridden, sleep-deprived, soul-baringly revelatory, stimulating and intellectually crushing. </p> <p> The bulk of the second semester is occupied by a first-year workshop—kind of a studio with training wheels—in which groups are assigned a client for whom they do a site analysis, come up with alternative solutions and then suggest a final plan and way to implement that plan. You know, kind of like in the real world. </p> <p> And, like in the real world, sometimes folks don’t always get along as well as they should. </p>
FEATURE
Brainstorm: What Should Cities Do With Their Newly Empty Car Lots?
With the auto industry struggling and car dealerships closing shop, what future do you see for empty car lots? Vote on ideas submitted by the Planetizen community, or suggest your own.
BLOG POST
de facto Shared Streets
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"> Shared streets, the contemporary vernacular used to describe streets that have been intentionally redesigned to remove exclusive boundaries for pedestrians, bicyclists, cars, etc., work well within a special set of conditions.<span> </span>It is, in reality, just a new way of describing the original use of streets (see <a href="/node/38401">this previous post</a> for more on that).<span> </span>The most promising candidates for shared streets are those where traffic volumes are not too heavy, the route is not a critical corridor for vehicular through-traffic, activities and attractions along the street are plentiful, short distance connectivity is viable, and a critical mass of pedestrians (perhaps enough to pack sidewalks at certain times) exists.<span> </span>A shared street may also be suitable in places where there is a desire to induce such conditions; however, care must be taken to understand the larger network effects of shifting or slowing down vehicular traffic.<span> </span>But in some instances, seemingly unrelated changes to traffic patterns or the effects of a coincidental collection of the above conditions sometimes go unnoticed until a street that may have been all about cars gradually shifts into something I refer to as a “<em>de facto</em> shared street”.
FEATURE
Observe, Transform, Model, Interpret
These are just a few of the ways Prof. Peter Bosselman of UC Berkeley analyzes the built environment in his latest book, <em>Urban Transformation: Understanding City Design and Form.</em> Julia Galef brings us this review.
BLOG POST
More on design competitions, and building a city's "culture of design"
<span style="font-size: small"> <p> Can a city's "design culture" be deliberately grown and fostered? If so, can City Hall be part of such a fostering, or must it come from the grass roots, from the cultural or design communities themselves? </p> <p> Readers know I've been musing on these questions for a while. A few years back, after arriving here in Vancouver, I wrote on the difference between our city's reputation as a <a href="/node/23462" target="_blank">"city BY design",</a> and the reputation some other cities have, as "cities OF design". </p>
Pagination
Caltrans
City of Fort Worth
Mpact (founded as Rail~Volution)
City of Camden Redevelopment Agency
City of Astoria
City of Portland
City of Laramie
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Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
