People love statistics. They let us understanding the world beyond our own senses. USA Today publishes a daily Snapshot which presents a graph of random statistics. Sports talk and business analysis are dominated by statistics. We measure our progress, or lack thereof, and compare ourselves with others, based on statistics about our size, activities and accomplishments.

Each year a lot of students ask me "how can I get a degree in urban design?" This is a very big question but in this blog I outline some key questions that those interested in urban design in planning need to consider.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend and fellow urbanist, Bob Ransford. Lunches with Bob are never boring, as we get right into things, and often debate. Bob’s a communications specialist and a longtime member of the Twitteratti (@BobRansford), so amongst discussions about strengthening urbanism in the Cascadia Region, and affordability debates in Vancouver, I asked him a question that’s been on my mind for the last month: Is Twitter a positive tool for global urbanism? Put another way, is twitter facilitating smarter discussions on international city-building, or are we all getting dumber, 140 characters at a time?

Over the past few years a variety of documents ranging from contemporary media to more serious research efforts have addressed the cost of auto ownership and use.  These estimates are often used to address two important transportation issues, the household benefits of using transit in lieu of auto ownership and/or the consideration of household location decisions in the context of the total cost of housing and transportation.  Two often referenced sources of research on these issues are the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s (CNT) initiatives in developing a housing and transportatio

William Lucy of the University of Virginia has written extensively on the question of whether outer suburbs are safer than cities or inner suburbs; he argues, based on traffic fatality data, that outer suburbs are certainly less safe than inner suburbs, and maybe even less safe than cities. (1) 

However, Lucy’s analysis is not particularly fine-grained: it analyzes data county-by-county, rather than town-by-town. What’s wrong with this?  Often, suburban cities within a county are quite diverse: some share the characteristics of inner suburbs (e.g. some public transit) while others look more like exurbs.  So I wondered whether there is any significant 'safety gap" between inner and outer suburbs. 

I recently had the pleasure of sitting on a panel convened by the Lincoln Instititute of Land Policy to discuss the Tea Party and its effects on local planning (a topic I've discussed earlier on this blog). At one point, the moderator asked if there were any successful techniques that planners could use to effectively deal with Tea Party activists. This was an intriguing question, but also one that I thought was a bit odd. Controversy and conflict are not new to planning; they are built into the very process of American planning because of its inherent openness and inclusiveness.

Like the rare Corpse flower that blooms every several years, the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects is planning to publish yet a new magazine exploring and extolling local design, how it impacts “our everyday life,” and “who architects are as people.”  Such an effort at such a time deserves notice.

LOGAN AIRPORT, Boston – I’m on my way home from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Journalists Forum , an annual event, co-sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Neiman Foundation, in which journalists from around the country convene to discuss, jointly, the fate of our industry and the fate of American cities.

Set aside whether or not you agree with anything Governor Romney has to say about anything.  Set aside whether or not you think it is axiomatic that the people of the United States need a federal agency generally charged with the mission of housing the poor and attending to urban issues.  

Candidate Romney may be doing us a favor by putting HUD on the table for us as an American community to evaluate.  It does not matter if the world that favors the elimination of HUD is largely comprised of what Senator McCain called Tea Party Hobbits; the question as to the merit of keeping HUD or not deserves our attention.

As the APA national conference draws to a close after four days of connecting, collaborating, and conversing, another c-word has been running through my head -- change. Of course, introducing and disseminating change is the currency of such conferences, where sessions are intended to facilitate professional development and transition by introducing attendees to the progressive practices and policies being spearheaded across the professional world. I mean, why else would we attend such events? Surely not only for the raucous opening night party, right? Right?? 

However, it seems there was more than the usual dose of change in the air during this year's proceedings.

After the Census Bureau released population estimates showing that core counties were (at least in some metro areas) growing faster than exurban counties, the media was full of headlines about this alleged trend.  An extreme example came from the Washington Post: "An end to America's exurbia?" (1)

APA’s Fast, Funny, and Passionate sessions at the national American Planning Association conferences are designed to entertain and educate. I’m serving as the moderator and a speaker at the Sunday morning session. My talk is called “Pin, Post, and Push to Promote Planning.” The purpose is to share lessons about how planners can use social media to promote planning.

As a childhood Whitney Houston fan and former owner of her Greatest Hits cassette tape, her death revived memories of a 13 year old summer camper standing atop a twin bed belting out The Greatest Love of All into a hairbrush microphone. I never really paid much attention to the lyrics until news reports of her death relentlessly played the song--“I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.” The 13-year old in me always liked that Whitney was singing about my generation, but beyond that, I didn’t quite understand the message. And it wasn’t until last month when I listened to the lyrics and I get it now.  It is our responsibility to prepare our children for their roles in building and shaping our world, our cities, our neighborhoods.

There is a certain irony in community stalwarts in testy Greenwich Village wanting to have the stale housing slabs hovering over the bland park composing Washington Square Village declared an architectural landmark that will somehow thwart New York University from overdeveloping further the singular super block.

“Fugataboutit,” would be a relative polite New Yorker’s observation by anyone who has ever been to this dance before, as I have. The plea is really just a feint to get the retro-redevelopment realists involved into a backroom of one of the proposal’s big buck backers to splice and dice the project so it can be swallowed by all without choking to a political death.  

At a recent meeting in Washington, DC I was astonished at the demonstrated lack of grasp of how neighborhood markets work. This, after all, was a meeting called by supposed experts in revitalization to discuss revitalization with other experts in revitalization.

Notably missing during six hours of painful back and forth rehashing of Great Society pabulum v 5.0 was any sense of what "demand" means.  It's not just that there was a lack of understanding of demand, for three quarters of a day it was as if the very word - demand - was off limits.  

Planners strive to anticipate future needs, which sometimes creates self-fulfilling prophecies: by preparing for a situation we help cause it. This is particularly true of automobile dependency. Planning decisions intended to accommodate automobile travel can create a cycle of increased vehicle travel, more automobile-oriented planning, and reduced alternatives. This concept is conveyed brilliantly in the cartoon below, drawn by transportation engineer Ian Lockwood and published in the March 2012 ITE Journal.

I’ve had a lot of questions lately from students about how important transcripts are in the graduate admissions process. Your application to graduate school is one of the few times anyone will actually read your undergraduate transcript so it has some importance. However, how much it matters depends on a variety of factors.

A couple of weeks ago, Todd Litman made a blog entry on logical fallacies in planning.*   After looking at the list of possible fallacies at the end of his post, I thought I would show some (hopefully not too common) examples of these fallacies:

Ad hominem (arguing against the person rather than the argument) – “Smart growth is in the U.N's Agenda 21 so we have to fight it to stop the U.N's plan to socialize the world.”  “Concern about urban containment is just another example of Tea Party extremism.”

Anageon (relying on inevitability)- “Sprawl is inevitable, so there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Last week my family and I took in the 2011 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity (more commonly referred to as the Cannes Commercials), the annual celebration of the best in filmed advertising. The winning ads were, as usual, an entertaining mix of the hilarious, risqué and the moving, and afforded the viewer the chance to be exposed to diverse film styles (and unfamiliar products) from around the world.