The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

<p>Even with all the interest in green building, most large scale homebuilders are weary of incorporating green building practices, citing consumers' lack of willingness to pay more.</p>

March 9 - AP via MSN Money

BLOG POST

<p>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&#39;s and women&#39;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&#39;m not really sure why I someone thought I should receive a few pairs of corn-fiber socks (perhaps they knew I&#39;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.</p>

March 8 - Christian Madera

<p>Commentator Neal Peirce argues that the nation's second-tier cities can indeed grow and prosper in partnership with leading metro areas, if we only give them a chance.</p>

March 8 - The Houston Chronicle

<p>Daily Wireless offers a review of the most connected cities in the World. Only two (or five, depending on how you count) are in the US. Several cities might surprise you.</p>

March 8 - Daily Wireless

<p>Entrepreneurial students-turned-developers are turning houses into dorms around San Diego State University to meet the growing demand for affordable housing, but neighbors want the city to crackdown on the practice.</p>

March 8 - The San Diego Union-Tribune

<p>Special districts would allow cities and counties in Central Texas to impose development rules and collect sales and property taxes to pay for roads, streets and utility improvements without requiring immediate provision of city services.</p>

March 8 - Austin American Statesman

<p>Cheap hydroelectric power helped Quincy, Washington -- population 5,300 -- hit the high-tech economy jackpot. But with land prices skyrocketing and local services taxed, might the boom be too much of a good thing?</p>

March 8 - The Wall Street Journal

<p>Video billboards are coming to a town near you. But critics worry that these 'TVs in the sky' are a major safety hazard for motorists.</p>

March 8 - USA Today

<p>Richard Luov, author of Last Child in the Woods, writes of unique partnerships forming to support the growing movement to reconnect children to the natural world.</p>

March 8 - Orion Magazine

<p>State legislators have introduced a bill to connect the Green Line light rail with LAX.</p>

March 8 - The Daily Breeze

<p>Architectural critic John King finds 'starchitects' to be great designers, but troubling to cities.</p>

March 8 - The San Francisco Chronicle

FEATURE

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

<p>Homes built on large lots in farming areas are causing concern amongst land conservationists who say the patchwork of housing severely compromises the produictivity of the land.</p>

March 8 - Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

<p>Growing school districts in Minnesota look at ways of subdiving new large high schools to give students that "small school" feeling.</p>

March 8 - Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune

<p>Can soliciting too much public input on civic decisions result in nothing getting done? Seattle's efforts to figure out what to do with the Alaskan Way Viaduct provides a "textbook" example.</p>

March 7 - The Los Angeles Times

<p>A wave of women has moved into urban Bolivia, and brought with them the ambition to make their home amid the slum conditions and crumbling infrastructure.</p>

March 7 - The Washington Post

<p>With the end of a federal subsidy intended to soften the blow to rural forest economies, an entire public library system in Oregon is being shut down.</p>

March 7 - The San Francisco Chronicle

BLOG POST

<p style="margin: 0pt 0pt 6pt" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">During my term of office as president of the American Planning Association, I made my theme “telling the planning story.”<span> </span>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.</font></p>

March 7 - Eric Damian Kelly

<p>Time-sensitive commuters would benefit from proposed toll express lanes for D.C. area freeways, which would be built on congested carpool lanes by private companies. Carpools would still use the lanes free of charge.</p>

March 7 - The Washington Post

BLOG POST

<p><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">&quot;or yesterday maybe&quot;</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.</p><p>Postmodernists. Weird guys.</p><p>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&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1173293088&amp;sr=8-4"><em>America</em></a>. Tracked it down in a recent issue of the <a href="http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_1/levy.htm"><em>International Journal of Jean Baudrillard Studies</em></a>. It&#39;s coming after the break.</p>

March 7 - Anonymous