Exclusives
BLOG POST
The Quiet Evils Of America's 'Favorite' Buildings
<p>The American Institute of Architects recently threw its authority behind a list of America's <a href="http://www.aia150.org/afa150_default.html" target="_blank">"favorite architecture,"</a> ranking three centuries of indigenous design one to 150 specimins. The resulting menu, culled by survey, of buildings, bridges, monuments, and other solid things amounts to a joyous celebration and a remarkable commentary on America's embrace of beauty. It also reinforces the desperation that arises when aesthetics and nationalism mix.<br />
BLOG POST
Why should planners care about the Farm Bill?
<p class="MsoNormal">Every five to seven years, Congress votes to reauthorize one of the largest and most significant legislative measures affecting land use policies in the U.S - the Farm Bill.<span> </span>This year, Congress will debate the omnibus legislation that defines not only America’s agricultural policy, but determines funding priorities for rural development, food and nutrition assistance, energy and environmental issues.<span> </span></p>
BLOG POST
Sleepless in Shanghai, #2
<p>Two moments in this trip bring home the pace of change here. Sunday morning, 8am, I wake up in the Zhongshan Park section of west-central Shanghai. Head out into the backlanes of the superblock behind the hotel and construction on a high-rise gated apartment building is already at full tilt. Two other construction projects intitimate in my life... a dorm across from our apartment in Manhattan, and a restaurant next to the Institute in Palo Alto, are definitely not on the same aggressive shifts.</p><p>Next moment, Wednesday evening 11:18pm at our hotel in Pudong, I glance out the window before bed and see a line of cement mixers 10-12 deep waiting to unload at the construction site across the street.</p>
BLOG POST
Sleepless in Shanghai
<p>I'm in Shanghai this week conducting workshops for two of my Fortune 500 clients looking at the future of mobility in the Shanghai region and Chinese cities more broadly. If you've never been to China, get on a plane now and come here. You will never think about cities or urbanization the same way again.</p><p>Shanghai has created a city larger than Manhattan in less than 20 years, and is set to create another in the next 15. The earth literally sags under the weight of the new buildings, as they push the former rural swampland into the earth.</p>
BLOG POST
Where Do I Live and Where Do I Park?
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">As one of my favorite colleagues says, all anyone ever cares about at any public meeting is “where do I live and where do I park?” Public process, in short, asks people to accept changes to their homes and lives. And people generally do not like change. </font></p>
FEATURE
Barriers To Planning: Lessons From Katrina
Evacuating people after Hurricane Katrina revealed chronic shortcomings of local and regional evacuation planning. The barriers that hindered efforts in New Orleans apply not only to evacuation planning, but to planning in general.
BLOG POST
Physical Effects Of The Declining Housing Market
This week, the <em>Economist</em>’s cover story, "The trouble with the housing market," details the downward-spiraling "subprime" mortgage market and its potential effects on the U.S. economy.<span> </span>The collapsing market certainly poses problems to Wall Street traders and taxpayers in general, but what about the physical toll it's taking on our cities?<span> </span>Abandoned, foreclosed homes now increasingly dot the nation's inner ring suburbs, helping spread neighborhood decline out from inner cities, while developers build more homes farther into the urban periphery.
BLOG POST
What's In A Name?
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman">How important are the names we use?<span> </span>As Shakespeare said, </font></font><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman">"</font></font><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman">What's in a <span>name</span>? That which we call a <span>rose</span> by <span>any</span> <span>other</span> name <span>would</span> <span>smell </span>as <span>sweet</span>."<span> </span>I’ve been struck by this thought recently as I’ve been considering the myriad of organizations and stakeholders trying to have their particular term for stormwater management techniques be more widely adopted in the nomenclature.<span> </span></font></font></p>
BLOG POST
'Historic', Not 'Hysterical': Preservation Goes Mainstream
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'">Historic preservation still suffers from an image problem, even in the face of all available evidence.<span> </span>Some critics still have the misimpression that preservationists are fussy (even fusty) antiquarians.<span> </span>When I hear complaints about the requirements of historic review commissions, I’m amazed that the griping is often accompanied by a crack about the local “hysterical society.” <span> </span>Even the Wikipedia entry on “historic preservation” contains the passage, “‘historic preservation’ is sometimes referred to as ‘hysterical preservation’.”<span> </span>(And, of course, Wikipedia is ever-infallible).</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'"> </spa
BLOG POST
Candor on Canadian Planning Departments and Planning Schools
<font face="Trebuchet MS"><p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3">Since this is my first blog, let me introduce myself. My name is Brent Toderian. In 2006 I was appointed the City of Vancouver, British Columbia’s Director of Planning. Before that I was the Manager of Centre City Planning and Design for the City of Calgary, Alberta. I am a founding member of the <em>Council for Canadian Urbanism (CanU)</em> which is discussed below. I look forward to your comments on this and future posts.</font></p>
BLOG POST
An Outbreak Of Beauty and Happiness?
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">In spite of my sense that we are heading pell mell into the gloom of global warming, catastrophic conflict and hopeless mediocrity, I’ve noticed a hopeful trend. Beauty and happiness have been rehabilitated from irrelevant to necessary.<span> </span>It may not be an avalanche, but proponents are showing up in unusual places: a book by an environmental conservationist, another by an historian philosopher, and a <em>Mother Jones</em> article about the economy.<span> </span>Can this portend a trend? </font></p>
BLOG POST
The Unified New Orleans Recovery Plan Nears Completion
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">As I said in my last posting, the main, if not the only, topic of discussion in planning circles in New Orleans these days is recovery planning from Hurricane Katrina.<span> </span>A year and a half after the storm, we are getting close to having a recovery plan.<span> </span>In late January the Citywide Strategic Recovery and Rebuilding Plan, otherwise known as the “Unified New Orleans Plan” (UNOP), was presented to the New Orleans City Planning Commission (CPC), of which I am the Chair. The CPC has held several public hearings on the plan and we have at least one more scheduled.</font></p>
BLOG POST
Can Everything Be Green?
<p class="MsoNormal">As the current fascination with all things green grows with leaps and bounds, the question arises – are there any limits to what can be green? </p>
BLOG POST
Planimation
What better way to envision the future of a city than with a cartoon? <div> <br /> <br /> </div> <div> None, I say! </div> <div> <br />
BLOG POST
Blade Runner Watch: A New Sign on the Bay Bridge
<p><img src="/files/u10403/IMG_0039.jpg" alt="" width="266" height="262" align="left" />I drive the Bay Bridge just about every work day. I'm not proud of this fact. I never expected to be one of those dreaded suburban commuters, living off urban sprawl, the sole occupant of a compact car inching through rush hour traffic twice a day.</p><p>So sue me. Or better yet, give me enough money to afford a house in San Francisco. Until then, Berkeley it is.</p><p>But on my morning drive last week I saw a new feature amid the landscape of cargo containers that borders the southern side of the Bay Bridge toll plaza—that's on the East Bay side. It was a new billboard, depicted above. I have no idea how it works. But damn, is it bright. It's an active surface—it changes, presumably according to programming, cycling through a bunch of different ads. So what? Well, for one thing, it's the biggest, brightest one of these kind of signs I've ever seen, high resolution and bright enough to be seen in stark California sunlight. And second, it's just another step in the Blade Runnerfication of our cities.</p><p>Not that there's anything wrong with that. More after the jump.</p>
FEATURE
Removing Urban Freeways
As part of our effort to slow global warming, we should be correcting one of the great errors in the history of American city planning: the post-war binge of urban freeway building.
BLOG POST
If Paul Davidoff has Email Should I Write?
<p class="MsoNormal"><strong>Information Strategies for Answering Fundamental Planning Questions</strong></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In universities in the northern hemisphere, April and May are months for completing work and moving closer to graduation. Assignments are due. Exams are looming. Students are too tired to write well and professors are too tired to notice. In the crunch for time, enterprising students look to the power of new information and communication technologies to reach out beyond their harried contexts to experts who can help them answer important questions. If Paul Davidoff (now dead) had email, they reason, he would have been happy to respond.</p>
BLOG POST
Tunnel Vision: Has Tysons Missed the Train?
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica" class="Apple-style-span">First, let me begin by introducing myself. I am Parris Glendening, and I serve as the president of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute in Washington, D.C., which is part of Smart Growth America. From 1995-2003, I was Governor of Maryland, and for more than 20 years before that I served at various levels of local and county government. I am excited about being part of the network of contributors here at Planetizen and participating in the discussion.<br />---<br /><br />In 1956 Pres. Dwight Eisenhower shepherded the Interstate Highway into existence, fulfilling a decades-long aspiration to link the nation with highways that could move both people and materiel as efficiently as those he had seen in Germany. Later, he would warn us against the military-industrial complex, but with a bit more foresight he might have warned against the asphalt-industrial complex, as well.
BLOG POST
Starchitecture is not the enemy...
<p>I'm glad this blog to date has provided fertile ground both to challenge planning as a profession as well as to compliment planning when it happens to do something worthy. In this spirit, I'd like to irritate many of my colleagues out there and definitively say that starchitects are not the problem. </p><p>I wish I could play the role of <a href="http://newstandardnews.net/content/fourthcolumn/?itemid=4244">Stephen Colbert</a> and ridiculously declare the end to this debate, but alas, I do not have the television airtime (or wit) to make this point as effectively as I would like. This forum will have to do.</p>
BLOG POST
Spanish-style Waterfront Home On a Private Island: $28
<p><img src="/files/u4/sl-spanish-sm.jpg" alt="Spanish-style home at Darrow Estates (small)" title="Spanish-style home at Darrow Estates (small)" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="200" height="128" align="left" />I'm making a <strong>prediction</strong>: While the real estate market in RL (real life) is cooling off, the<strong> real estate market in Second Life</strong> (SL) is heating up.<br /><br />I was recently contacted via IM (instant message) by Elliot Eldrich. I interviewed Elliot several months ago for a feature-length article about urban planning in Second Life. (The article appeared in the January, 2007 issue of the American Planning Association's <em>Planning</em> magazine, but is now also <a href="http://www.urbaninsight.com/virtual/2ndlife0307.html">available online</a>.)</p>
Smith Gee Studio
City of Charlotte
City of Camden Redevelopment Agency
City of Astoria
Transportation Research & Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University
US High Speed Rail Association
City of Camden Redevelopment Agency
Municipality of Princeton (NJ)
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