Exclusives

BLOG POST

What We Talk About When We Talk About 11th-Hour Preservation

My friend Wes was talking about a burger joint. Wes is from Texas, so sometimes that gives him the right. <div> <div> <div> The Beef Burger Barrel, a barrel-shaped hunk of roadside architecture in Amarillo, <a href="http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2007/todays-news-2007/60-year-old-texas-eatery.html">closed last month</a> after 60-odd years of hamburger heaven. </div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> "It wasn't beloved until everyone heard it was closing," Wes told me. The Barrel started out selling A&W root beer on Route 66 in the 1930s and was rolled later to a less-traveled part of town. Now locals are trying to find a way to reopen Amarillo's quirkiest building. </div> <div> </div> <div>

March 13 - Margaret Foster

BLOG POST

The New Muni Line in San Fran

<img src="/files/u10403/T3logo.gif" alt="" width="369" height="72" align="top" />The family and I took a recreational ride on the newest light rail line in San Francisco today, the Muni train known as the T. It runs along the city's east-west spine, Market St., and then cuts south along the water of the bay, then inland and way, way south down Third Street—from the city's hottest under-construction neighborhood through the worst ghetto.As such, it's an interesting new ride in San Francisco. Some photos and observations after the jump.

March 10 - Anonymous

BLOG POST

Introducing Todd Litman

Greetings from Victoria, British Columbia!

March 10 - Todd Litman

BLOG POST

Geographic Web Resources Hold Great Potential for Place Making

At the <a href="http://www.planetizen.com/www.communitymatters.org" target="_blank" title="CommunityMatters07">PlaceMatters06</a> fall conference, participants were treated to the first sneak preview of <a href="http://outside.in" target="_blank" title="Outside.in">outside.in</a>, a spatially enabled hub for blogs and forums that adds location-based information to online discussions. Steven Berlin Johnson, author of several books including Emergence, and The Ghost Map, and the leading inspiration behind outside.in’s conception, demonstrated the beta site during his keynote session. It created a buzz with conference participants quick to recognize its potential as a tool for encouraging community dialogue and place making.

March 9 - Ken Snyder

BLOG POST

The G-Word

Are politicians becoming obsolete in the age of the Internet? Are they simply the 'middle-men' that will be replaced by votes cast directly by citizens? This was the issue before a veritable <a href="http://www.usc.edu/schools/sppd/bedrosian/events/dacollpanelists.html">rock-star cast</a> of poliltical insiders from California and around the country. So what is the G-Word? <img src="/files/u4/header2sm.jpg" alt="panelists" title="panelists" hspace="4" vspace="4" width="490" height="55" align="left" />

March 9 - Chris Steins

BLOG POST

A Neotraditional Building Boom on Campus

Across the U.S., dozens of colleges and universities are planning or building major campus expansions. However, unlike the 1990s which saw gleaming bioscience research facilities appear on campuses, the new construction is calculated to help attract and retain faculty and students with amenities for living and shopping. Almost without exception, these projects are in a strictly neotraditional design mold.

March 9 - Robert Goodspeed

BLOG POST

Planners Can Access Planning Research Much More Easily Than in the Past

How useful is planning scholarship to planners in practice? Thirty years ago, the author of a British study of information use by planners found, "The journal is not a source of major importance to the planner in practice, though this statement must be taken to reflect inadequate privision and inadequate timeing for reading" (White, 1974). Perspectives differ, but at least some of the problem has been the difficulty of finding relevant scholarship at the moment it is needed. I believe that these difficulties have greatly reduced in the past few years, and that we are on the verge of an unprecedently increase in the use of scholarship in practice fueled by online bibliographic searching and retrieval. From both the scholar's and the practitioner's perspectives, this change will have substantial effects.

March 9 - Bruce Stiftel

BLOG POST

The Future Of Smart Growth In A World Gone Green

This week, I came to the Planetizen office to find that I had received a package in the mail containing a matching set of men's and women's athletic socks. After opening the box, I learned that these were not ordinary socks – which are manufactured from petroleum derived synthetic fibers – but from a new type of fiber made from corn (which, along with soybeans and bamboo, seems set to become one of the most versatile substances of the 21st century). I'm not really sure why I someone thought I should receive a few pairs of corn-fiber socks (perhaps they knew I'd blog about it), but it did seem to me to be another symbol of how the world is slowly but steadily entering a bold, new, eco-friendly future.

March 8 - Christian Madera

FEATURE

Deriving Urban Density and Intensity in Greater Washington, D.C.

It's not so easy to measure urban density -- either by sight or calculation -- but thoughtful analysis of development intensity can illustrate useful insights into our cities and regions.

March 8 - Terry Holzheimer, PhD

BLOG POST

Telling the Planning Story

During my term of office as president of the American Planning Association, I made my theme “telling the planning story.” My point then – and today – is that we need to do a better job of explaining to our many publics what it is that planners do and why it makes a difference.

March 7 - Eric Damian Kelly

BLOG POST

Baudrillard is dead; I feel okay

<img src="/files/u10403/shockney9.jpg" alt="" hspace="10" vspace="6" width="268" height="162" align="left" />The French postmodern philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudrillard">Jean Baudrillard</a> <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/03/06/europe/EU-GEN-France-Obit-Baudrillard.php">died yesterday</a> (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0679720200/ref=sib_dp_pt/105-3662130-2734002#reader-link">"or yesterday maybe"</a>). He wrote a lot about simulation and simulacra; if you went to college in the late 1980s like me, you quoted him in your thesis. Lots of stuff about how things in the world were actually perfect simulations of real things, and what that meant for our experiences of them.Postmodernists. Weird guys.But I remembered—misremembered, actually—a salient bit from his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/America-Jean-Baudrillard/dp/8433925059/ref=pd_bbs_sr_4/105-3662130-2734002?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173293088&sr=8-4">America</a>. Tracked it down in a recent issue of the <a href="http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_1/levy.htm">International Journal of Jean Baudrillard Studies</a>. It's coming after the break.

March 7 - Anonymous

BLOG POST

Web sites to read, and an interesting paper

Our blog taskmaster, Christian, told me that my day for posting was going to be the 6th of every month, and that if I failed...well, let's just say he pointed me to <a href="http://www.bmezine.com/" target="_blank" title="body mods">this site</a> and told me to be afraid.So here I am, with an easy three hours before end-of-day.Let's get started with a couple of blogs you should be reading (other than ours, of course). The action starts after the jump.

March 6 - Anonymous

BLOG POST

Getting real about planning and mobility

After reading through dozens of long range transportation plans, I have to wonder if the planning profession is serious about improving mobility. By mobility, I mean improving the ability, speed, and efficiency of getting from point A to point B.

March 6 - Samuel Staley

BLOG POST

Bill Richardson -- The Planner's Candidate?

As planners and most allied professionals know, the federal government lacks cohesive urban and environmental policies, and especially during the tenure of the current Bush administration, there has been a relative lack of investment in cities, public transportation systems, and alternative sources of energy. With the ongoing war in Iraq and perennial issues like social security, healthcare, and immigration dominating the political landscape, important domestic issues like affordable housing, public transit, and compact urban growth seem little more than a microscopic blip on the radar screens of potential 2008 presidential candidates, if they discuss these issues at all.

March 6 - David Gest

BLOG POST

Revisiting Robert Moses

The message from last weekend's two-day symposium at Columbia University, the Queens Museum and the Museum of the City of New York on Robert Moses: many aspects of the master builder's place in history haven't been told, despite Robert Caro's 1,162-page Pulizter Prize-winning biography; and that New York may need to rethink the paradigm for big plans and community engagement as the unique metropolis makes new investments in transit, roadways and large redevelopment projects from Ground Zero to Hudson Yards.

March 5 - Anthony Flint

BLOG POST

Who Pays for the Subprime Lender Meltdown?

Scrambling to grab that elusive “American Dream” of homeownership, millions plunged into the subprime mortgage market to build wealth through appreciation (if not speculation). Pundits cheered as the ownership rate crept up, lauding the pluck of aspirational minority and immigrant families.There’s a reason it is called subprime, though. Lenders offered a smorgasborg of loan “products,” but the bottom line was that they are all very costly for the borrower – often entailing adjustable-rate surprises in the 30 percent or higher range.

March 5 - James S. Russell

BLOG POST

A Way Out of New York City Rent Regulation Impasse

The merit of rent regulation is a recurring debate in New York City. On one side are tenant advocates arguing that rent regulation is desperately needed to help poorer households, maintain socioeconomic diversity in New York City, and prevent the City from becoming the preserve of the super rich. Real estate interests on the other hand argue that rent regulation deprives property owners of the right to market their apartments as they see fit, causes landlords to under-invest in their properties, and that in many instances the beneficiaries of rent regulation are affluent. What makes the debate so bedeviling and contentious is that both sides are correct.

March 5 - Lance Freeman

BLOG POST

If You Build It, They Will Come...

The planned expansion of Interstate-5 in San Diego County would finally complete the Southern California metropolis. Los Angeles and Orange Counties became wall-to-wall sprawl development decades ago, erasing all traces of their rural heritage and the scenic outdoors. Northern San Diego County, with its quaint beach towns, is tenuously holding on to the last vestiges of agricultural land and breathable open space. But these areas too are rapidly developing. It is no surprise then that I-5, the only north-south route along the coast, is increasingly traffic clogged. The county’s solution? Invest $1.4 billion to expand the freeway from 8 lanes to 12 or 14 lanes along a 26-mile stretch of the north county coast.

March 3 - Diana DeRubertis

BLOG POST

The End of Planning (as we know it)

For as often as the Gulf Coast and 9/11 debacles and their aftermaths have been analyzed, one discussion has been conspicuously missing: how starkly those events, natural and man-made, revealed the inability of planning today--however professionally designed, organized and regulated—to contend with the vagaries of circumstances and conditions out of its control.

March 3 - Roger Sherman

BLOG POST

Such a Sisyphean task this Thing we call Planning

What is this thing we do called planning? Are we really planning or just reacting? And visioning? What’s that all about? These the questions that came to mind as I was reading yesterday’s - <a href="http://www.planetizen.com/node/23076">Ineffective Local Planning Efforts Push County To Seek Greater Control</a>. And, also, how many articles like this are published on a daily basis?? If you were to add them all up from across the country, I’m sure the number wouldn’t be insignificant.

March 2 - David Renkert