The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

A re-awakening of interest in walkable urban environments in suburban locations? This trend mostly revolves around the pre-war downtowns of small Southern California cities that grew into suburban bedroom communities in the 1950s and 1960s.

January 31 - The Los Angeles Times

The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey finds Vancouver housing to be 'severely unaffordable', and 15th worst worldwide.

January 31 - The Vancouver Sun

John Schindel lives in Stafford County, Virginia, a far-out exurb of Washington, D.C. Because of previous legal problems, he has no driving privileges. How does he get to and from his varied places of employment?

January 31 - The Washington Post

With the U.S. automobile industry falling into what appears to be permanent decline, Paul Harris muses on what it means for America's "love affair with the car" when its cars are built somewhere else.

January 31 - Observer (UK)

Despite early promises to support a swift recovery after Hurricane Katrina, slow Federal cleanup of debris and inadequate provision of suitable housing for evacuees are slowing rebuilding efforts.

January 30 - The Washington Post

Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe how the movement of high-skilled and professional jobs to rapidly growing inland California is changing the region where the "California Dream" is still possible.

January 30 - The Los Angeles Times

NASA's leading climate scientist claims that the Bush administration has tried to censor him from speaking out about global warming.

January 30 - The New York Times

BB&T, the country's ninth-largest bank, announces that it will not make commercial loans to developers who plan private projects on land seized via eminent domain.

January 30 - Winston-Salem Journal

Suburban growth has kept our cities livable while they expand, and attempts to limit suburban growth ignore important historical trends, writes Joel Kotkin.

January 30 - The San Francisco Chronicle

The Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) disagrees with Demographia's recent study on housing affordability.

January 30 - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

This brief describes a new information tool developed by the Urban Markets Initiative to quantify, for the first time, the impact of transportation costs on the affordability of housing choices.

January 30 - The Brookings Institution

How Chinese New Year in Vancouver symbolizes the emergence of a new, unique civic culture.

January 30 - Maisonneuve

Office space in the Portland metro area grew by a net 1.45 million square feet in 2005, but only 150,000 was added to Portland's commercial core in Multnomah county. The rest, almost 90 percent, was distributed across three suburban counties.

January 30 - The Oregonian

Preservationists are protesting the City of New Orleans' intentions to bulldoze historic homes.

January 30 - Associated Press

In his latest book, the creator of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock, presents his views on global warming.

January 29 - The Times

Tom Thompson argues that eminent domain has been abused throughout U.S. history.

January 29 - The Seattle Times

Nevada's latest tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign to lure California businesses features a missing California Grizzly Bear and 'California happy cows'.

January 29 - The Mercury News

Latino new urbanism is quickly gaining popularity in California and Texas, the nation's two most populous states and the ones with the largest numbers of Hispanics.

January 29 - USA Today

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors agreed to a new transportation policy calling for increased use of alternative forms of transportation.

January 29 - The Los Angeles Times

BLOG POST

No, seriously. As I keep getting into arguments with urban planners about community involvement (they're in favor of it) and bitching about marquee architetecture (and marquee architects) someone else voiced my inner conflict before I got to a keyboard. Here's Robert McDonald on the <a href="http://www.urbancartography.com/">Urban Cartography</a> blog:<br /> <br /> <blockquote>MIT's new Stata Center lurches impressively over Vassar Street, a mélange of surfaces and cylinders intersecting at odd angles. Designed by Frank Gehry, it's seen as the pinnacle of hip, postmodern architecture in Boston (which ain't saying much), and supposedly is surprisingly functional inside despite its odd form. I therefore feel decidedly square saying it but I must: I think it's rather ugly. More than anything, its ornamentation seems ostentatious to me, arbitrary, like a sculpture pretending to be a building. Part of me still believes in that mantra of modernist architecture, form follows function. Politically and spiritually, this at least seems like an honest goal, far more than mere irony and whimsy.<br /> <br /> Yet as I've been reviewing the works of Mumford and Kunstler, I've been realizing how much of modern architecture and modern town planning has been a disaster. Often the scale of the projects has been all wrong, and the projects have not really been focused on human needs at all. There's typically no respect for public space, no creation of places for human interactions. And they are often just plain ugly, all gray concrete and blacktop, which on our New England winters gets pockmarked with salt stains.<br /> <br /> And so I've been struggling between these two parts of myself. I want architecture and urban planning to reflect some of the honesty of modernism, and yet I want beauty and even a bit of whimsy and ornamentation. It strikes me that both post-modernism and modernism have same fault, at least as they are often practiced: An utter lack of interest in what the users of the space want, and what will seem beautiful in the context of its surroundings. Form does not follow the true, human function of the building but instead a perverted function set by someone other than the users. For modern architecture, it became cheapness of construction; for post-modern architecture, it has become hip irony; for urban planners, it became moving cars efficiently. The solution, in my humble opinion (as an ecologist who is admittedly not trained in architecture), is not to abandon "form follows function” but to make sure society gets the function it wants.</blockquote>

January 28 - Anonymous