Exclusives
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.
BLOG POST
Is Detroit Half-Empty, Or Half-Full?
<p><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman">Two years ago I saw John Norquist, former Mayor of Milwaukee and current President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, give a presentation on the state of America’s cities. During the slide show, Norquist used two sets of images to effectively convey a point about urban disinvestment in America. The first set of images was of Berlin and Detroit circa 1945. Unsurprisingly, the Berlin image displayed a war-torn and rubble-strewn city, while the Detroit image revealed why it was once called the Paris of the Midwest -- it was simply elegant. <span> </span>However, the second set of images displayed the same two cities 60 years later. It was as if Detroit had been through an epic war and not Berlin.
BLOG POST
Beyond CO2
<p> It’s great that global warming is finally getting its day in the media spotlight. But with all the buzz about c<em>arbon footprints </em>and <em>carbon offsets</em>, I wonder whether the average American now believes that carbon dioxide is the only pollutant that we need to worry about? <br />
BLOG POST
Urban Issues Absent On Campaign Trail, Although Edwards Has Plans
<p><em>City Limits</em> magazine recently completed a <a href="http://www.citylimits.org/content/articles/viewarticle.cfm?article_id=3343&content_type=1&media_type=3">review</a> of the 18 presidential candidates' stances on urban issues, and the major news is that there is no news. Most domestic issues, let alone those related to cities, don't even appear on the candidates' -- or the media's -- radar screens. Their article quotes a p<span class="content2">olitical scientist who "says 2008 is shaping up as 'yet another gigantic referendum on Bush and Iraq.'" The bright spots? Although <a href="/node/23153">Bill Richardson</a> has advocated for greater energy conservation and public transportation, John Edwards has articulated an intriguing <a href="http://www.johnedwards.com/about/issues/poverty/">plan</a> to end poverty in the U.S. by 2036 and <a href="http://johnedwards.com/about/issues/housing/">overhaul</a> the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal">
BLOG POST
Once Again, Planners Descend On New Orleans
<p class="MsoNormal">It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating – the reconstruction of New Orleans is both a planner’s dream – and a planner’s nightmare. Even before the flood waters subsided, planners and architects from around the globe descended on the Crescent City to give their take on the road to recovery. Close to two years later, a host of plans lay in the wake of the constant ebb and flow of professionals in and out of the city. Local residents are exasperated with the proposed plans and the progress of the recovery. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has seemingly lost interest.</p>
BLOG POST
Street Beat
<p>4 tools that support community building at the street level.</p><p>Just heard from my co-worker, Chris Haller, who is at Where 2.0 that Google has announced yet another cool tool for visualization. Street View provides panoramic views embedded as an additional view to g-maps. Initially this tool is only available in 5 cities: Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco. </p><p>Was able to locate the following YouTube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91wuBqlny50">demo</a>. Corny video, but cool technology.</p>
BLOG POST
Summer Academics: Finding Faculty Blogs
<p class="MsoNormal">With the coming of summer, students finish courses, faculty head off to do research, and practitioners think about vacations. However, for those interested in keeping up to date with academic issues in planning, a number of bloggists provide useful insights into the politics and hot issues in planning education. For students they are a window into the work of educators and for practicing planners they are an easy way to keep up to date with what’s happening in the schools.</p>
BLOG POST
Madrid’s Alternate Suburban Universe
<p>Houston or Holland? The rapidly growing suburbs of Madrid uncomfortably (and instructively) amalgamate some of both. I was lucky to receive a recent tour from David Cohn, a long-time colleague and 20-year resident of Madrid; Sylvia Perea, a post-doctoral student and, until recently, an editor at the journal Arquitectura Viva, and Emilio Ontiveros, a young architect of the local Research Group on Social Housing. </p><p><img src="/files/u10275/DSC_0122_0.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="212" /> </p>
BLOG POST
Ontario’s leaders look for “Places to Grow”
<p>Think big.<br /><br />That’s what the people of Ontario and the Toronto region set out to do more than 5 years ago when they began a visionary planning process for the area known as the Greater Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario, Canada. (The Greater Golden Horseshoe is the area around Lake Ontario that stretches from roughly Peterborough to the east, west through metropolitan Toronto, and around the west tip of the lake to the southern side and Niagara Falls — hence the horseshoe shape.) </p>
BLOG POST
Underwriting Fun
<p>“We underwrite fun,” says Naomi McCleary, Manager of arts for the Waitakere City Council, one of the municipalities that make up the Auckland (New Zealand) metropolitan region. She is referring to the practice of involving artists in the thinking and creation of public places, buildings, streets, bridges; they take an equal seat at the table from conception to completion. According to Ms. McCleary, the results are remarkable. Fun is a partner of beauty and happiness, it is a means toward the creation of objects and places that are beautifully usable. Around the world it is possible to find municipalities that are underwriting this kind of fun, but for every found opportunity, we have several more that are lost. </p>
BLOG POST
Does planning = zoning?
<p><span style="font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana">I would like to think that the overwhelming response to the question posed in the title would be a resounding, "No!" I never gave the issue much thought before last week because frankly, I didn't really need to. Working in a city like Philadelphia where the overwhelming percentage of proposed projects requires a zoning variance, we've trained ourselves to work within an imperfect system and make the best of what's at hand. (It should be noted that Philadelphia is about to embark upon a process to re-vamp the zoning code, but that is for another post in the future). More importantly, the issues faced by some neighborhoods go a lot deeper than zoning. So why this post?</span></p>
KFH Group Inc.
Greater Baltimore Committee
Eagle County Government
The Architects Foundation
University of Cincinnati Online
The Pocatello Development Authority
The Urban Renewal Agency of the City of Pocatello
FREE Course: Walkable City 1: Why Walkability?
After describing his path towards focusing on walkability as the essence of good planning, Jeff Speck marches through his five principal reasons for making more walkable places.
Reinventing Malls: Planning Alchemy—Turning Gray Fields Into Gold
The course focuses on the opportunities and imperatives that shape reinvention of mall sites.
