The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

The Bakken formation, which lies under North Dakota and Montana, could contain almost 11 billion barrels of oil. Towns like Williston, ND are exploding in population and have the lowest unemployment in the country.

September 26 - NPR

Once again, a government shutdown looms after Sept. 30 over funding for disaster relief. House Republicans insist that the additional spending must be off-set with spending cuts, and their target is a subsidy for electric cars and batteries.

September 26 - National Public Radio

Officials and planners from across Georgia came out to answer any questions the public may have about a new regional transportation plan. Evidently the plan has "100 percent support," joked one official, because no one showed up.

September 25 - The Daily Citizen (Dalton)

Aurash Khawarzad looks at three projects that turned crude into gold, as old gas stations are quickly updated into a movie theater, a cafe and a restaurant.

September 25 - Pattern Cities

...or, how to say "Yes, in my backyard!" to new development proposals. A new guide developed by the Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver is intended to provide guidance for communities that actually want hard-to-place projects.

September 25 - The Globe and Mail

Jennifer Runyon asks if environmentalists are doing the right thing by pushing regulations that make the cost of building renewable energy projects prohibitive.

September 25 - Renewable Energy World

Performance parking, dynamic pricing; whatever you call it, SF Park's strategy uses the latest technology and pricing strategies to make the most efficient use of parking, with the goal of improving air quality and traffic flow. But is it working?

September 25 - San Francisco Chronicle

Two planners with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reveal how they use GIS to coordinate their efforts, using the recent tsunami and earthquake in Japan as an example.

September 24 - Directions Magazine

Since Wednesday, Chinese farmers have been protesting the sale of over 800 acres of farmland to developers. The scene, writes Andrew Jacobs, is not entirely uncommon lately as concerns over environmental justice build.

September 24 - New York Times

Free charging stations for electric and hybrid-electric vehicles in Colorado likely won't last due to the high cost of construction of the facilities.

September 24 - The Denver Post

Reporting on a topic of discussion at the Greening Greater Washington Conference, Neal Peirce expounds on how public transit choices has bolstered regionalism around the nation's capital.

September 24 - Citiwire

Texas is getting dryer and dryer--and the costs to implement water delivery projects only go up as localities and regions scramble to secure the bulk of the funds necessary to build them. Ramit Plushnick-Masti reports.

September 24 - NPR

Waterfront Toronto is a public advocacy group formed in 2001 to plan the city's extensive waterfront revitalization. In early Sept., Mayor Rob Ford announced he was taking over and turning the land into a giant mall park. Urbanists to the rescue!

September 23 - The Atlantic Cities

It's only $100 million - the President wants $8 billion - but it acts as a 'placeholder'. In any case, 4 Senators: Feinstein (CA), Durbin (IL), Lautenberg (NJ) and Landrieu (LA), all Dems', restored the funding after the sub-committee zeroed it.

September 23 - Steetsblog Capitol Hill

Architect Galina Tachieva, author of the Sprawl RepIr Manual, talks about the errors of scale that have been committed for decades, and how to return to a human scale in architecture and planning.

September 23 - Galina Tachieva's blog

That's what Janette Sadik-Khan said New York is striving to do on their streets, speaking last week at a two-day conference at Harvard.

September 23 - ASLA's The Dirt blog

The Mayors of West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, and the Vice Mayor of Beverly Hills discuss local redevelopment and planning in the face of state intervention. The conversation centers on politics, projects, transportation, and parking.

September 23 - The Planning Report

Urbanized is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.

September 23 - urbanizedfilm.com

Tallahassee, Florida planners came to a realization - while their transit system was set up to efficiently get commuters downtown, only 14% of them actually worked downtown. So they actually changed where the buses go.

September 23 - Grist

One out of every two Latino's live in the nation's top 25 most ozone-polluted cities according to a new report. KQED's California Report interviews one of the co-authors, the Director of Latino Outreach for NRDC, in this radio report.

September 23 - The California Report