Exclusives
FEATURE
Brainstorm: Can Cities Shrink Gracefully? Should They? How?
As the recession digs in, cities across the country are left with large swaths of abandoned or vacant places. Can these cities shrink gracefully? Do they even need to? Vote on ideas submitted by the Planetizen community, or suggest your own.
BLOG POST
Part Time Lover - Is The Car Just An Affair?
<p> America's so-called “love affair” with the automobile, although cliché, provides a vivid description of how attached we really are to driving. Public policy, and the historically overwhelming effect of auto industry lobbying, is only partly to blame for the endemic traffic jams and smog of the twentieth century. Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant hired by New York City advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, <a href="http://www.transalt.org/files/newsroom/reports/schaller_Feb2006.pdf">recently demonstrated</a> that urbanites with multiple transportation options still choose to commute by car for rational reasons of privacy, convenience, and speed. A chart of his, shown below, demonstrates how perplexing this choice is. Overcoming these reasons is a ser
BLOG POST
Finding Planners with Shared Interests: The Post-Graduation Experience
In recent months many planning students have graduated and are moving on to the next phase of life—jobs, internships, fellowships, and such. For many this will involve a move to a new place. Even those staying in the same metropolitan area will seldom make it back to their planning program, and besides their fellow students will have scattered. Graduate school provides a peer group of those with similar interests and training. How do recent graduates create such a network when they are no longer in residence at a university?
BLOG POST
Making the Car Free Choice
<p> The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that in 2007, over 9.8 million American households had no auto available at home. Although those car free households make up only 8.7% of the U.S., the split by housing ownership is striking: only 3.3% of owner occupied homes do without at least one vehicle, where fully 19.9% of renters have no cars parked in the proverbial driveway. </p> <p> For some, not owning a vehicle is not a matter of choice -- just the reality of limited resources. For others, it's a matter of preference, and many residents of cities with fairly good public transportation choosing to go without cars. Although car ownership is a useful indicator of neighborhoods that provide good options for public transit, the reality is the most important variable isn't whether you own one, but how much you <em>drive</em>. </p> <p> That's the idea behind the annual Car-Free Challenge sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit <a href="http://www.transformca.org/">TransForm</a> (formerly TALC - Transportation and Land Use Coalition). The Challenge's over 160 participants pledged to drive less than 125 miles in June, much less than the Bay Area average of 540, or the U.S. average of over 1,000. Many participants contributed blog posts about their experiences on the <a href="http://www.transformca.org/car-free/challenge-posts">Challenge website</a>. More than just a group of footloose young professionals living in The Mission, challenge participants were remarkably diverse group living mostly in the Bay Area but also Sacramento, Los Angeles, and cities outside of California. </p>
FEATURE
Megaregions and Megaproblems
As America's metropolitan areas meld into "megaregions", officials and policymakers will need to figure out how to deal with their shared and growing infrastructure problems. Consider the ball rolling.
BLOG POST
Memo From Future Self: Hope For The Best But Prepare For the Worst
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-size: small; font-family: Calibri">Planning issues are often considered to be conflicts between the interests of different groups, such as neighborhood residents versus developers, or motorist versus transit users. But planning concerns the future, so it often consists of a conflict between the interests of our current and future selves. </span> </p>
FEATURE
REVIEW: Welcome to the Urban Revolution
In his new book<em> Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World</em>, Jeb Brugmann proposes a new way of thinking about citybuilding. Planetizen Correspondent Michael Dudley has this review.
BLOG POST
The Two Types of Bicyclist
<p> I am a bicycle commuter in Los Angeles, which on the face of it is a pretty tricky proposition. The major boulevards here are designed like freeways, and people use them as such. Pico, Highland, Sepulveda, Olympic- these streets were built for speed and make commuting not a little tricky for your serious bicycle commuter. </p>
BLOG POST
How Much Green for the 'Green'?
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt" class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-size: small; font-family: Calibri">As attention to energy efficiency and climate change continue to pervade the thinking and planning of the future transportation system, we are increasingly challenged to make very real decisions about the prudence of various investments. The current context for decision-making offers perhaps the greatest uncertainty regarding the future witnessed in the lifetimes of people in the planning profession today.
BLOG POST
A Cheapskate’s Guide To Urban (Rooftop/Balcony) Gardening
<p> I can’t deny that one of my strongest personality traits is that of being a hard-core cheapskate. So much so, that I feel obliged to caveat this post by saying that my initial reasons for getting into rooftop gardening were more to save money on buying fresh vegetables and fruit from our rather pricey local markets than any particular affection for gardening. While it turns out that my wife and I probably do save money (surprisingly, I never ran the numbers), the joy of gardening, and the kick I get out of showing our rooftop garden off to friends, has far outweighed the economic benefits. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, urban gardening is much easier than you might imagine. The hardest part is overcoming the psychological hurdle of thinking that it is difficult, confusing, time-consuming, or takes up lots of space. In fact, it is none of these things; you don’t need expensive, special equipment, or any particular skill. You only need a window box, a fire escape, or a small patch of patio if that’s all you have. If this geeky transportation engineer can grow tomatoes, so can you!
BLOG POST
Judaism and Urbanism
<p> After visiting Denver for the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) conference, I began to meditate on the relationship between Judaism and urbanism, and on how few cities accommodate both. In particular, I was impressed by how well-populated downtown Denver was compared to the southern cities where I have spent the past three years (Jacksonville) and this summer (Little Rock) - but I stll couldn’t imagine myself living in downtown Denver all that comfortably. </p>
BLOG POST
Architecture You Can Dance To
On my way to work this morning, I was listening to an interview with the band <a href="http://blitzentrapper.net/vids.html">Blitzen Trapper</a> on my iPod. They’ve got a beautiful song called ‘Furr’; the sound echoes 1970s folk rock- and roots influences like English folk, country and bluegrass. Anyway, Eric Early, the main songwriter, got my attention with his answer to this question:<br /> <br /> <blockquote> <em>INTERVIEWER: Obviously ‘American music’ means different things to different people. What does it mean to you?<br /> </em>
BLOG POST
Working in Planning? Quit Your Job!
<p> It’s Thursday! Sounds like a perfect day to quit your job. </p> <p> 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. </p>
FEATURE
Masterplanning the Architecture of the Near Future
As the population rises, underused and empty spaces are going to fill in. How well the transition works depends on shifts in demographics and infrastructure, as well as architecture. A studio of UCLA architecture students were asked to plot that transition. But before they could be architects, they had to be planners.
BLOG POST
Athletes (Like Stallworth) Are Not The Only Ones Who Get Off Easy
<p> If you watched or read the news yesterday, then you likely came across <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090616/ap_on_re_us/fbn_stallworth_pedestrian_killed">the sentencing of Donte Stallworth</a>. Previously known (maybe) for being an NFL role player, Stallworth will serve a 30 day sentence for hitting and killing a pedestrian named Mario Reyes while driving intoxicated here in Miami Beach. The typical sentence for such an offense in Florida is 4 to 15 years. Stallworth will be released just in time for his NFL training camp. </p> <p> How convenient. </p>
BLOG POST
Remembering Canada's Greatest Architect
<span style="font-size: x-small"> <p> 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". </p>
BLOG POST
Comparing Celebrations in Championship Cities
<p> Here in Los Angeles, the local professional basketball team just won its league's national championship. When I was in Barcelona a few weeks back, the local soccer team won a major international championship. These were two days for the cities to celebrate their home teams' triumphs, but the differences in how they celebrated says a lot about these cities and their civic cultures.<br /> <br />
FEATURE
Reinventing America's Cities: Discovering Opportunities by Challenging Biases
Dr. Aseem Inam takes writers on urbanism and architecture to task for spreading stereotypes about "third world cities", particularly when used to generalize about urban form.
BLOG POST
Top Five Concerns About New Bike Lanes In Our Community
<p> I live in Hoboken, New Jersey. It is a small (~50k residents), very densely populated city (fourth in the country), with high pedestrian volumes and some hairy traffic issues in certain areas. With heavy rail, light rail, subway, bus, ferry, taxi, bicycle, pedestrian, and para-transit all converging at Hoboken Terminal, it is also home to perhaps the richest intermodal transportation facility in the world (in terms of modes). It is often characterized as feeling European, or like Brooklyn, take your pick. Recently, we have been successful in implementing a nascent bicycle plan that includes bike lanes striped along the length of two north/south avenues in the heart of the city. Cross streets are next with “sharrows" since these streets are too narrow for exclusive
City of Costa Mesa
Licking County
Barrett Planning Group LLC
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Mpact Transit + Community
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Tufts University, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy & Planning
City of Universal City TX
ULI Northwest Arkansas
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Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
