Exclusives

BLOG POST

Shopping: An ‘Obnoxious Industrial Activity’?

As James Howard Kunstler points out in Home From Nowhere, 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”.

May 30 - Diana DeRubertis

BLOG POST

Top 10 Free Web Applications for Planning

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. 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.

May 27 - Chris Steins

BLOG POST

Bike Lanes As Training Wheels

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.

May 27 - Ian Sacs

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/">The Princess and the Warrior</a>. (Between that and the funicular in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085549/">Flashdance</a>, 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. <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3405/3506113776_77e7083411_d.jpg" width="500" height="375" />

May 26 - Jess Zimbabwe

BLOG POST

Skills in Planning: Writing Content-Free Planning Documents

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.

May 26 - Ann Forsyth

BLOG POST

Meeting The Vanguard

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.

May 25 - Mike Lydon

BLOG POST

Snob-Free Sailing On The Cheap

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

May 25 - Ian Sacs

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.

May 25 - Nevin Cohen

BLOG POST

Don't demolish a Mies van der Rohe building in Chicago

<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> 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.

May 25 - Edward Lifson

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.

May 21 - Nate Berg

BLOG POST

When Spillover Parking Isn't So Bad

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. 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.

May 20 - Michael Lewyn

BLOG POST

Opportunities (and Mindfulness) of the Emerging HUD Blueprint

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".

May 18 - Charles Buki

BLOG POST

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

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.

May 17 - Jeffrey Barg

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.

May 15 - Planetizen

BLOG POST

de facto Shared Streets

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. 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). 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. 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. 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 “de facto shared street”.

May 14 - Ian Sacs

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, Urban Transformation: Understanding City Design and Form. Julia Galef brings us this review.

May 14 - Julia Galef

BLOG POST

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

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 <a href="/node/23462" target="_blank">"city BY design",</a> and the reputation some other cities have, as "cities OF design".

May 13 - Brent Toderian

BLOG POST

Why is it so hard to build a train?

I received a newsletter in the mail recently about the <a href="http://www.purplelinemd.com/" target="_blank">Purple Line</a>, a light rail line in the planning process in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Like hundreds of other public transit projects across the country, the rail line is in the "planning" stages and nobody can really say exactly when it will be constructed or begin operations. The cause is simple: too little funds and a lack of political support both locally and from the federal government. Quite simply, we get more roads because our policies are structured to spend more money on them, and they're more popular with elected officials. Although the specific cause of the lack of transit investment is simple enough, its effect on the way transit systems are planned and perceived by the public is far from simple. The lack of funds has added complexity length to an already complex and lengthy process. As a result, project supporters and detractors alike are alienated from the planning, forced to navigate a morass of acronyms, plans, and steps. The problem lies in the fact that since there is some money available, local supporters of the <a href="http://www.reconnectingamerica.org/public/reports/375" target="_blank">roughly 400 planned projects</a> (with an estimated total cost of $248 billion) pretend they've got a shot at it. Time and again local boosters tell the media they'll just submit for federal funds and break ground after they complete the required paperwork. As we'll see, this couldn't be farther from the truth.

May 11 - Robert Goodspeed

FEATURE

Capturing the Value of Transit

With stimulus funding creating new transit projects across the country, now may be a great time to use innovative methods for funding development around transit, say Nadine Fogarty and Gloria Ohland of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development. Portland and Denver are just two communities that have seen property values rise around rail.

May 11 - Nadine Fogarty

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