Land Use

A broad new plan has been unveiled in Oklahoma City. Included in the plan is a new 70-acre downtown park and a raft of transit improvements.

Meeting the needs of aging residents has been a challenge for many cities. Some suburban communities are pioneering the conversion to an elder-friendly layout.

Last Friday was Park(ing) Day 2009, a growing movement where city parking spaces are transformed into miniature parks as a comment on public space (and the lack thereof). Here's a glimpse into Seattle's version.

New parks are popping up with a quickness in San Francisco, where planners have fast-tracked the conversion of street spaces into pedestrian parks.

Village Green, a utopian, multifamily development in the Baldwin Hills district of Los Angeles, was built in 1941 and inspired by the Radburn Plan. The low, California style apartments ring a large, common open space.

Despite opposition from businesses and neighborhood groups, the city of Des Moines, Iowa is intent on implementing a program to make local streets friendly to non-drivers.

New York City is developing a handful of new parks on industrial lands and otherwise underused spaces. Urban Omnibus talks with Adrian Benepe, the city's commissioner of parks and recreation about the new projects.

The zoning code of Alamogordo, NM hasn't been revisited since April of 1950. Today, the zoning rewrite group is finally updating the code and making the switch to a form-based code in the process.

This report from NPR looks at Houston's growth pattern, and the evolution of a city that at once provides a high quality of life but also creates a big environmental impact.

Imagining cities of the future can bring about some pretty wild predictions. But when they're visions of existing cities, these futuristic predictions can be almost realistic.

We've gotten a lot of responses on our Top 100 Urban Thinkers list, particularly those wanting to separate out the 'bad' from the 'good'. Mary Newsom was inspired by the list to ponder, who was the worst?

Among other issues tackled by the noted New Urbanist during a recent speech, Duany said that the current form of public engagement is broken because it engages only the immediate neighbors.

A judge has overruled challenges from two northern California cities over the siting of the state's proposed high speed rail line. Environmental studies can now move forward.

A review of GREEN METROPOLIS: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability by David Owen, expanding on his groundbreaking essay in the New Yorker in 2004 on why New York is the greenest city around.

Joel Kotkin explains why the Obama Administration's focus on transit is wrong-headed and doesn't do anything for the majority of Americans.

Using a mishmash of highlights from cities around the world, musician and artist David Byrne talks about his personal vision of a perfect, livable city.

Texas officials are calling on the federal government to ditch plans to build a pedestrian fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, arguing the fence will not stop illegal crossing.

Tufts urban planning professor Justin Hollander appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal to answer questions about his new book, Polluted & Dangerous: America's Worst Abandoned Properties and What Can Be Done About Them.

The First Baptist Church of Mandarin applied to build a 249,000 sq. ft. complex in a rural area. They're suing the city in federal court, on the grounds that they're getting "unequal and discriminatory treatment."