Exclusives
BLOG POST
Highway Zoning?
<p style="line-height: 150%" class="MsoNormal">The Oscar-winning film <em>The Lives of Others</em> recalls that famous question about governments who spy on their citizens: Who will watch the watchers? (Answer: Alberto Gonzalez.) A similar, if less cloak-and-dagger question applies to planning: Who will zone the zoners? While governments use zoning to keep polluting uses away from homes, what if the biggest polluter in a city is a government use?</p><p style="line-height: 150%" class="MsoNormal">In most cities today, the most common polluting use is exempt from zoning: highways.</p>
BLOG POST
A Tale of Two Public Processes
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">Over the last few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to attend public meetings in Europe and the American South. I find public meetings to be an entertaining challenge. Let’s face it, a public meeting is always a gamble. You’re at the mercy of whoever shows up and whatever they perceive about the project. You have to think on your feet and make quick decisions to guide the process, without looking like I’m-in-control-here-Alexander-Haig.</font><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font> </p>
BLOG POST
"I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help you"
<p>Local officials are rightfully leery of someone who shows up at their doorstep and proclaims, "I'm from the U.S. Government ... and I'm here to help you." That probably goes double for the Environmental Protection Agency. But when a team arrives from the EPA’s Smart Growth office, rather than scrambling to bar the door, local officials greet them with open arms — because they really do provide essential assistance.</p>
BLOG POST
What Gotham Tells Us about Mass Transit
<span style="font-weight: normal"><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman">I recently got <a href="/node/24909" title="Mass Transit Unsustainability">taken to the proverbial wood shed on Planetizen Interchange</a> for arguing that mass transit is unsustainable. So, I decided that it might be useful to look at the mass transit system that seems to be the most successful in nation: New York City. New York has the density and economic activity to sustain transit—perhaps a best-case scenario in the U.S.
BLOG POST
Could Your Rent Pay For More Transit?
<p class="MsoNormal">An acquaintance of mine is trying to decide whether to move to Los Angeles or New York. <span> </span>Having spent most of her life in the Northeast, New York is a familiar city where she has good friends and job connections. However, she can’t help but feel the draw of the West Coast, and on a recent visit to Los Angeles, she was rather keen on settling down in Southern California, especially when she was comparing the rents in L.A. to those in New York. While rents in New York are increasingly stratospheric, L.A.’s are just exorbitantly high.</p>
FEATURE
L.A.'s One Way Proposal Goes The Wrong Way
While there's no doubt Los Angeles has a traffic problem, it would be a mistake to put congestion relief over neighborhood revitalization.
BLOG POST
The Future of Cities Community Launches at the Institute for the Future
<p> <span style="font-size: 12pt">Some readers may be familiar with the </span><span style="font-size: 12pt"><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/telecom-cities">TELECOM-CITIES listserv</a></span><span style="font-size: 12pt"> that I've run for the last ten years, sharing discussions about how information and communications technology is transforming cities and the process of urbanization. Once upon a time back in 1998, 1999, TELECOM-CITIES was an active community of researchers trying to figure out what fiber optics and cell phones and dot-com startups meant for the future of cities. Over the years, the list has maintained that focus, but growth of readership has been stagnant for years.
BLOG POST
The Myth of The Diverse City
<p class="MsoNormal"> Solve this riddle: New York has an unequaled reputation for diversity in the US, but at the same time ranks as “hyper-segregated” in measures of Black-white racial segregation. How do we unravel this contradiction, and what does it say about what diversity really is?</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The Columbia Encyclopedia provides the prevailing view: “New York City is also famous for its ethnic diversity, manifesting itself in scores of communities representing virtually every nation on earth, each preserving its identity.”</p>
BLOG POST
Compelling Needs, Great Technology and Unparalleled Economic Capacity Produce Stunning Transportation Progress ...Not!
<p><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial">Having sat through a Transportation Task Force committee meeting recently where a representative of local government requested funds to enable the completion of a particular road project, I had to chuckle – folks had been asking for the final funds for that road for several years and, several times, various community leaders had touted the resolution of the funding problem with “full speed ahead” declarations.<span> </span>While not quite as embarrassing as the President Bush’s now dated declaration of “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, it was gaining the same notoriety locally.<span> </span>The actual construction was less than half completed and years away from being finished.<span> </span>Several levels of government ha
BLOG POST
Sound Planning
<p>For the last couple of years I have been tracking decision support tools that bring audio into the planning process. At our <a href="http://www.communitymatters.org" title="CommunityMatters">PLACE<strong>MATTERS</strong>06</a> conference, Harris Miller Miller & Hanson Inc. (<a href="http://www.hmmh.com" title="hmmh">HMMH</a>) demonstrated their suite of acoustical environmental tools for planning, including a simple online <a href="http://www.hmmh.com/soundscape_02sbuilder.html" title="soundbuilder">soundbuilder</a> enabling visitors to create different mixes with several sound overlays. <br />
BLOG POST
New Orleans Today -- In Pictures And Numbers
<p>It is now about 22 months since hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. I was recently in New Orleans for the first time and had plenty to see. The city is still very much in a state of devastation. But there has also been a lot of progress.<br /><br />In this post, I'd like to share some pictures I took when I was there and some facts and figures I've come across that help illustrate the current situation in the city.</p>
FEATURE
A Browner Shade of Green: The New Water Rules and the Next Chapter of Sprawl
Stormwater mitigation rules are supposed to help protect the environment, but the current regulations also end up encouraging sprawl over urban redevelopment.
BLOG POST
So You Want to Change the World, Part 1: Networking for Students (and Others)
<p class="MsoNormal">Some people choose to work in planning because they see it as a relatively interesting and stable job. Others have dreams of being the equivalent of an all-powerful SimCity-style mayor. However, many choose planning as a career because they want to make a difference in the world. They want to do good and to help those who are the least advantaged. They are attracted by the potential, if limited, for planning to foster environmental justice and social equity.</p>
BLOG POST
World Urbanists Take Manhattan: Lessons Learned and Left
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="3"><font face="Trebuchet MS"><span>A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of sharing several stages over two days in </span><span>New York</span><span>, with some of the most influential urbanists anywhere. The Forum for Urban Design brought together Amanda Burden (Commissioner and Director of Planning for New York), Cheong-Chua Koon Hean (CEO of Urban Development for Singapore), </span><span>Robert Freedman</span><span> (Director of Urban Design for Toronto), Peter Rees (Chief Planning Officer for London), </span><span>Kairos Shen</span><span> (Director of Planning for the Boston Redevelopment Authority), and myself, to discuss multiple city-building topics in front of (and with) Forum members, the business community and the general public. </span></font></font></p>
BLOG POST
Building History Anew In Old Town Warsaw
<p>WARSAW, Poland --I'm on my fourth city in a two-month excursion, and so far I've found all the quaintness, density, pedestrian life, and vernacular architecture that I was looking for as an antitode to my beloved, loathed Los Angeles. The cores of Riga and Vilnius come right out of proverbial fairy tales, and even Helsinki, though historically torn between Sweden and Russia, has plenty of the best trappings of Boston and San Francisco (as well as some of the worst of Atlanta or Dallas; more on that later). </p><p>Then there's Warsaw. </p>
BLOG POST
Mass Transit Unsustainability
<p>The solution to so-called "automobile dependence" within the contemporary planning community is almost alway more mass transit: more trains and buses. But is this realistic, particualarly given current strategies and approaches to providing mass transit? Most investments in mass transit are patently unsustainable, requiring huge investments in capital and dramatic reductions in mobility (measured by travel time) to achieve ridership goals. </p><p>Proof of mass transit's unsustainability is obvious to anyone willing to look at it objectively: </p>
BLOG POST
Engineers on the City
<p><img src="/files/u10403/accessj.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="155" align="right" />Do yourself a favor: Go check out the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum, either online or in hard copy. Spectrum is the trade magazine for the international engineers' society—it's really quite good—and this issue features an extensive package on megacities.</p><p>This is the engineer's take on many of the issues we all grapple with on Interchange. So it's not about making public meetings go more smoothly or trying to understand how to use GIS for placemaking. It's about building stuff and making sure it'll keep working.</p>
BLOG POST
Democratic Planning in the Face of Immigration
<p style="text-indent: 0.5in" class="MsoNormal">Although the latest immigration bill being debated upon in congress has attracted relatively little attention from planners, the planning implications of reforming or not reforming current immigration policy are huge.<span> </span>Immigration impacts labor markets, and thereby commuting patterns, transportation planning and economic development.<span> </span>Immigration swells the population of many cities and towns forcing planners to rethink their plans for housing, schools and other public services.<span> </span>Often overlooked, however, is f immigration’s impact on the planning process itself.</p>
BLOG POST
With transit you can grow better, but not more.
The protesters at Chicago’s Grant Park in 1968 might have been talking about Denver’s multi-billion dollar FasTracks rail expansion while they chanted “the whole world is watching.” With 50+ new transit stations the Denver region has an opportunity no modern American city has been able to realize – to build a regional rail network and link it with land use planning to accommodate growth without diminishing livability. <br /><br />Part of the conversation in Denver is will FasTracks help the region’s competitiveness and capture more growth than it would otherwise? Or is the best planners can do is to use FasTracks as a tool to grow better by reshaping the growth that is already coming? <br />
FEATURE
Planning For The Afterlife
Most cities and planners seem unprepared to deal with the land use issues surrounding the nation's burgeoning cemeteries.
New York City School Construction Authority
Village of Glen Ellyn
Central Transportation Planning Staff/Boston Region MPO
Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS)
City of Grandview
Harvard GSD Executive Education
Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada
Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commissions
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
