Exclusives

FEATURE

Studies often show that bicyclists find "safety in numbers." Norman Garrick and Wes Marshall explain that the street design strategies that attract bike riders are the same ones that improve road safety for all road users.

June 27 - Norman W. Garrick

FEATURE

June 20 - Gregory K. Ingram

FEATURE

Rebecca Bateman grew up in Joplin, Missouri, which was decimated on May 22nd by a tornado. The the personal nature of the disaster has caused her to reflect on some strategies for city planners to consider before a disaster hits.

June 9 - Rebecca Bateman

BLOG POST

<p style="margin-top: 12pt" class="MsoNormal"> <em>Note: This column was originally titled, &quot;A Stupid Attack on Smart Growth,&quot; intended as a pun on &#39;smart&#39; and &#39;stupid.&#39; However, that sounds harsh so I retitled it. - T.L.</em> </p> <p style="margin-top: 12pt" class="MsoNormal"> The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) has a well-financed campaign to discourage communities from considering <span style="font-size: 16px; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif" class="Apple-style-span"><a href="http://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/tisg.htm">smart growth</a></span> as a possible way to conserve energy and reduce pollution emissions. They contend that compact development has little effect on travel activity and so provides minimal benefits. The NAHB states that, “The existing body of research demonstrates no clear link between residential land use and GHG emissions.” But their research actually found the opposite: it indicates that smart growth policies can have significant impacts on travel activity and emissions.

June 9 - Todd Litman

FEATURE

At the 19th Congress for the New Urbanism, Planetizen's Tim Halbur finds a vibrant, active community of urban thinkers more interested in improving livability than in architectural principles.

June 6 - Tim Halbur

BLOG POST

<p> <span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman"><span style="font-size: small">Many of those who have recently graduated in planning are currently asking “how can I get a job?” Of course a number of recent graduates do have work. But government budget cuts may mean that local jobs are hard to get. This is the time to use your imagination. To get you started here are some ideas:</span></span></span><span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small"> </span></span> </p>

June 4 - Ann Forsyth

FEATURE

Landscape architect Laurie Olin says that to design well you have to be interested in how people behave. Johanna Hoffman gets in-depth with Olin about his design process.

June 2 - Johanna Hoffman

BLOG POST

<p> <span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'Courier New'"> </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'Courier New'">As I heard a national reporter put it recently, it’s not often that an entire city is focused on one thing. In Vancouver it happened during the 2010 Winter Olympics. A year and a half later here, it’s happening again.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'Courier New'"> </span> </p>

June 1 - Brent Toderian

FEATURE

Urban designer and architect Ken Greenberg writes "an eloquent, personal, compelling and persuasive argument for more enlightened city-building," says Michael Dudley in this review of Greenberg's new book [...]

May 26 - Michael Dudley

FEATURE

Deteriorating commercial strips are commonplace in today's auto-oriented suburbs. Errin Welty outlines her strategy for turning stagnating strips into vibrant shopping districts.

May 23 - Errin Welty

BLOG POST

<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Big Caslon'"><span style="white-space: pre" class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>A comment I hear frequently from planners is that the focus on food and planning is “trendy”. I must admit that this puzzles me quite a bit. Professional planners in rural areas have concentrated on planning for agriculture – food planning – for decades. Before we had professional planners, human populations planned their communities around food, whether they were planning how best to follow herds for hunting, structuring early agricultural societies, or developing the first cities where food proximity and trade were central considerations.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal">&nbsp;</p>

May 20 - Lisa Feldstein

BLOG POST

<p> Last week, I was busy trying to turn my paper on sprawl in Canada (available at http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/65/) into a speech.   In my paper, I define sprawl in two ways: where we grow (measured by growth or decline of central cities, controlling for municipal annexations) and how we grow (measured by modal shares for cars and transit).  As I was proofing, I asked myself: why these particular measurements?  What presuppositions underlie defining sprawl based on, say, modal share as opposed to the growth of a urban area&#39;s land mass? </p>

May 18 - Michael Lewyn

FEATURE

Prakash M Apte, a planner in India, brings us this in-depth and fascinating look at the history of town planning in Gandhinagar, which was developed with an "egalitarian ethos," says Apte, but now it is at risk of becoming "just another suburb."

May 16 - Prakash M Apte

FEATURE

Architect Charles Moore was an intellect and practitioner that loved Los Angeles, pushing the envelope of the city's nostalgia and utopianism while simultaneously embracing them, says urban designer Vinayak Bharne.

May 12 - Vinayak Bharne

BLOG POST

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May 9 - Johanna Hoffman

FEATURE

Cities like Detroit can find the funds and initiative to make downsizing work by identifying as many stakeholders and potential partners as possible, writes Alison Bates, who thinks that "right-sizing" is the right move for the city.

May 9 - Alison Bates

BLOG POST

By all logic, the comic strip character Dagwood should be fat, sick and impoverished due to his gluttonous eating, sedentary habits, and automobile-dependent lifestyle. Blondie should worry about his high blood pressure and clogged arteries [...]

May 4 - Todd Litman

FEATURE

Planetizen intern Victor Negrete explains how he made the choice to attend planning school, and the thought process he went through deciding which schools to apply for, and ultimately to attend.

May 4 - Victor Negrete

BLOG POST

<p> As just about everyone in the planning profession now knows, this is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-American-Cities-Modern-Library/dp/0679600477/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1304357036&amp;sr=1-1"><em>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</em></a><em> </em>by urbanist icon <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs">Jane Jacobs</a>. While <em>Death and Life</em> was itself iconic, Jane Jacobs was also a great public intellectual who continually built on her ideas in subsequent books and articles.  </p>

May 2 - Samuel Staley

BLOG POST

At the GeoDesign conference in San Diego we heard mention of folks at MIT using helium balloons with cameras attached to take aerial pictures. Thinking this was a fabulous idea I decided to find out more and see if this was a technique [...]

April 27 - Ken Snyder