Home ›

The Planetizen News Brief

4 September 2008 - 5:00am
Smart City Radio

The Planetizen News Brief is a weekly rundown of some of the most interesting and important news and issues of the past week.

The Planetizen News Brief airs every week on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Smart City", which is broadcast in cities across the U.S. Learn more about Smart City and listen to archived shows.

Full Transcript

High-speed rail is not an American reality. Fast moving trains connecting big cities and transit hubs are commonplace in Europe and Japan, but the idea hasn’t really seemed to catch on in the U.S. That may soon change, In fact, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently approved a bill that will place a budget proposal on this November’s ballot for a long-planned high-speed rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles. With gas prices rising all over the country, California isn’t the only state looking to get into the high-speed game. USA Today reports that Florida Congressman John Mica has proposed a privately-funded high-speed train connecting New York and Washington D.C., one that travels faster than Amtrak’s relatively fast Acela train. Other high-speed projects are also being planned or proposed in Maryland, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Whether these projects move forward, however, could depend largely on what California voters say in November.

And for the same reason more people are considering trains as a viable alternative to the car, many residents across the country are beginning to move back into urban areas. In Atlanta, this move back to the city from the suburbs has caused some rapid changes, as decaying industrial zones are transformed into lively urban areas in just a matter of years. To explain this trend, the Atlanta Journal Constitution took a look at a neighborhood in the city’s industrial Inman Park neighborhood. Over the course of just four years, the area went from an industrial ghost town to a full-on condo-lined, coffee shop-equipped neighborhood. And many other neighborhoods seem to be following on this path to regeneration. Infill development is occurring all over the city, and as a result many say Atlanta’s reputation as a capital of sprawl may begin to fade.

And finally, anthropologists in South America have uncovered traces of a vast network of urban developments in the Amazon rainforest. These city forms date back to the year 1200 AD and researchers are saying that they are organized into hierarchies of cities, smaller villages and rural areas. Study author Anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida in Gainesville says that the city forms show a broad grid structure, indicating a type of controlled regional development. According to an article from National Geographic News, the hub-and-spoke structure of the city cores and radiating roads indicate a broad network of villages that could have housed more than 50,000 people. Heckenberger says the city forms bear a striking resemblance to British planner Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities, and could offer some good advice on redeveloping the Amazon sustainably.

Stories discussed in this week's Planetizen News Brief

More High-Speed Trains

'It's A Little Like Add Water, Instant Neighborhood'

Ancient Cities Found in the Amazon

»
Bookmark and Share
“
The salient historical question is, of course, what made some cities fail while others succeeded?
”