The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

For those who missed it, Friday brought the end to the influential infrastructure focused blog -- The Infrastructurist

January 11 - The Infrastructurist

Used by Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush to define a key difference between "free" and "fear" states, historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom looks to the global public uprisings of 2011 to prove the validity of the Town Square Test.

January 11 - Miller-McCune

Much of the existing literature on Gentrification looks at what happens to residents as places change. Two authors are focusing their attention on commercial uses to better understand the interrelationship between retail and changing neighborhoods.

January 11 - The Atlantic Cities

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Bob Pool profiles a project by Urban Planner James Rojas, who's constructed an 80-square-foot scale model of Long Beach that residents and business owners can tinker with to illustrate their own vision of the city.

January 11 - Los Angeles Times

Dozens of renewable energy projects completed in California's national parks and forests have yet to be utilized due to a years-long squabble with Southern California Edison, wasting tens of thousands of dollars in potential savings.

January 11 - Los Angeles Times

Since the Japanese government spent $300 billion rebuilding Okushiri after a 1993 tsunami, things have taken a grim, ironic turn: with high-paying construction jobs leaving, so are young people who no longer wish to be part of a fishing economy.

January 11 - The New York Times

From movie sets to pot farms to low-income housing, foreclosed homes have been converted in unepected and resourceful ways. Catherine Rampell reports.

January 11 - The New York Times

"Look out, Silicon Valley"-- A decades-long effort to bring technology-based firms to New York City is beginning to see a payoff, according to this piece from The Economist.

January 11 - The Economist

Across the city, in areas as diverse as tourist friendly Venice Beach and the largely immigrant community of Westlake, local officials are leading the charge to crack down on illicit street vending.

January 10 - New York Times

Writing in the New York Times, Kenneth Chang explores the challenges of Historic Preservation in an unlikely location, the surface of the moon.

January 10 - The New York Times

Known as 'The Shard', the new skyscraper being built in London will have 72 floors, and stand 1,017 feet. Both opponents and critics agree: The building will "change London -- for centuries."

January 10 - Spiegel Online

Despite the dark cloud that the policies of new Mayor Rob Ford have brought to several of Toronto's promising transportation and redevelopment initiatives, Christopher Hume gives us 10 reasons to feel optimistic about the future of the city.

January 10 - Toronto Star

Energy efficiency has become as compelling as "the new granite countertop" for home sales and rentals.

January 10 - Urban Land

If California doesn't start work on high speed rail by September, 2011, it will lose $3 billion in funding. If California does start work without securing future funding, it could end up with a $6 billion track to nowhere.

January 10 - The Washington Post

Following highly publicized urban highway removal success stories like Boston's Big Dig and San Francisco's Embarcadero, Anthony Flint asks whether similar successes will be easy to duplicate.

January 10 - The Atlantic Cities

BLOG POST

<p> <span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Courier">Across the world, city-builders who understand the complex relationship between land-use, car infrastructure and road congestion, struggle to communicate it in a simple way that resonates with the public. It&#39;s now well-demonstrated in transportation demand management (TDM) research and practice that you can&#39;t build your way out of traffic congestion by building roads, and in fact the opposite is true - the more free-ways and car lanes you build, the more people drive and the more congestion and other negative results there are.

January 10 - Brent Toderian

Jerry Brown has proposed a huge governmental streamlining to make the state more efficient. But in the process he is proposing separating transportation and housing -- now housed in one agency -- and putting them in separate agencies.

January 10 - California Planning & Development Report

Architect Peter Calthorpe lays out a forceful argument for the lower costs and higher benefits of constructing high speed rail versus expanded highways to serve the state's growing population and economic development.

January 10 - San Francisco Chronicle

Writing on the topic of Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic Christopher Hawthorne's year-long series exploring the city through its literature, Nate Berg talks to the author about his critical touchstones and common themes.

January 10 - The Atlantic Cities

The Philadelphia Inquirer's architecture critic sets out to find the outer edge of the Philadelphia suburbs, and finds a "zombie subdivision."

January 9 - The Philadelphia Inquirer