Education & Careers

Working in Planning? Quit Your Job!

Thu, 06/18/2009 - 06:24

It’s Thursday! Sounds like a perfect day to quit your job.

Stuck in the doldrums of office work? Itching to get outside as summer rolls around and the blue skies start looking more and more appealing? There’s never been a better time to pack up and leave, planners. Do it. Quit today.

Remembering Canada's Greatest Architect

Tue, 06/16/2009 - 16:04

This weekend, friends, family, colleagues and admirers got together to celebrate the life, and mourn the death, of a man many consider to be the most talented architect Canada has ever produced. Frank Gehry may have been born in Canada, but Arthur Erickson began, remained and died a great Canadian. He was also one of the World's architectural greats, and a "citizen of the World".

More Americans Have Green Jobs

Wired Science reports that there are now 770,000 green jobs among 62,800 businesses in the U.S., which makes up 3.7 percent of the overall job market.
16 June 2009 - 7:00am
Wired

Struggling LA MOCA Lays Off Its Curator of Architecture and Design

LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) announced on May 19 that it was laying off Brooke Hodge, its curator of architecture and design.
2 June 2009 - 12:00pm
The Architect's Newspaper

Bike Lanes As Training Wheels

Wed, 05/27/2009 - 09:15

A friend introduced me yesterday to rambunctious bicycling advocate Fred Oswald via a recent article 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.

Skills in Planning: Writing Content-Free Planning Documents

Tue, 05/26/2009 - 08:02

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.

Titles

Titles should never reveal the actual content of the report. This is the guideline I find easiest to follow myself.

Meeting The Vanguard

Mon, 05/25/2009 - 21:02

This past week I had the pleasure and honor of participating in the Next American City's Urban Vanguard 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. 

No Jobs in Youth Magnet Cities, But Crowds Keep Coming

Cities like Portland and Austin have been magnets for young professionals. Amid the recession, these cities have few jobs to offer. But the hipsters keep coming.
18 May 2009 - 12:00pm
The Wall Street Journal

Successful Cities and Green Jobs

This week's episode of Smart City explores what makes a city successful and tracks the future of the green job market.
18 May 2009 - 6:00am
Smart City

Graduate School or Fight Club?: Finishing Up the First Year

Sun, 05/17/2009 - 18:00

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.

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.

And, like in the real world, sometimes folks don’t always get along as well as they should.

More on design competitions, and building a city's "culture of design"

Wed, 05/13/2009 - 09:35

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?

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 "city BY design", and the reputation some other cities have, as "cities OF design".

To Make Planning Relevant, Turn to Open-Source Methods

Urban planning is falling into obsolescence, according to this piece, but employing old bottom-up techniques that value input from a variety of sources will make it relevant again.
30 April 2009 - 10:00am
re:place Magazine
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