The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

Those are the building blocks of landscape architect Piet Oudolf, leader of the "new perennial movement" that strives to use only perennial plants. A new book showcases his work.

May 22 - ASLA's The Dirt blog

In this series from <em>Glass House Conversations</em>, journalist Greg Lindsay asks what the successful cities of the future will look like, and whether or not they should be built from scratch.

May 22 - Glass House Conversations

Urban design is increasingly linked with poor health conditions. <em>Grist</em>'s Sarah Goodyear explains how cities are literally killing people.

May 21 - Grist

Keeping America innovative means maintaining its power to lure in immigrants, according to this article. But as it argues, that lure is fading.

May 21 - The Wall Street Jounal

Some residents of St. George, Missouri, population 1,300, are circulating a petition for the November ballot that would disband their town and put them under the jurisdiction of St. Louis County.

May 21 - The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Preparations for the World Cup and Olympics are displacing hundreds of families in Rio de Janeiro. One neighborhood next to a major stadium has been turned into a ghost town.

May 21 - Guardian

New Yorkers get most of their physical activity from walking to the subway or running errands, not jogging or going to the gym, says a new report from the New York Dept. of Health.

May 21 - Streetsblog

BLOG POST

<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Big Caslon'"><span style="white-space: pre" class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>A comment I hear frequently from planners is that the focus on food and planning is “trendy”. I must admit that this puzzles me quite a bit. Professional planners in rural areas have concentrated on planning for agriculture – food planning – for decades. Before we had professional planners, human populations planned their communities around food, whether they were planning how best to follow herds for hunting, structuring early agricultural societies, or developing the first cities where food proximity and trade were central considerations.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal">&nbsp;</p>

May 20 - Lisa Feldstein

Kunstler and Duncan Crary debate the merits and drawbacks (mostly drawbacks) of two McDonald's restaurants being proposed for Saratoga Springs and Troy, New York (their respective hometowns).

May 20 - KunstlerCast

A federal jail, The Metropolitan Correctional Center, is snuggled right into Chicago's Loop. Reporter Roman Mars looks at how the architecture manages to help the building disappear.

May 20 - 99% Invisible

John King gives readers the tools to critique plans for the new wing of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art <em>before</em> the designs are released next Weds.

May 20 - The San Francisco Chronicle

Find yourself wondering what those federal dollars dedicated to high-speed rail are actually funding? The Illinois Dept. of Transportation sent cameras out to capture a high-speed rail upgrade in progress near the Twin Cities.

May 20 - WJBC

Jarrett Walker looks at a recent "Top Cities for Transit" list that ranks Honolulu #1, and says the criteria that the Brookings Institution used are "especially perverse".

May 20 - Human Transit

A new report takes a unique look at quality-of-life issues in the Golden State, measuring social well-being using health, education and income factors. The study concludes that the state is divided into 5 areas with different ecologies.

May 20 - Ventura County Star

As the city of Detroit struggles with population loss and dwindling industrial jobs, farms and community gardens offer the city a positive nudge.

May 20 - The New York Times

Geomapping data is helping police in cities address problem areas, improve unsafe intersections and improve overall efficiency.

May 20 - Governing

At the center of ongoing protests and uproar in the Middle East, iconic and historical public spaces hold political clout.

May 20 - Time Magazine

Developers in Mumbai will be allowed to build street furniture and sell advertising space on it as part of their projects, in accordance with a new law in the city.

May 20 - NDTV

Maggie Koerth-Baker digs into the history of monorails, and finds examples in the United States as early as 1876.

May 19 - Boing Boing

Just as Witold Rybczynski declares New York's High Line un-copyable, St. Louis announces plans for a linear park on top of an old railroad trestle

May 19 - St. Louis Post Dispatch