The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

All buildings in Los Angeles taller than 75 feet are required to have a flat surface on the roof where helicopters can land, according to a fire department-mandated code. Now leaders are thinking about updating that code -- and the city's skyline.

October 26 - Curbed LA

Marc Stoiber offers suggestions for bolstering a city's green image by looking at several cities across the globe that have found success at marketing their own sustainable urbanism programs and initiatives.

October 26 - GreenBiz

Hillary Brown argues that the infrastructure priorities of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act further the carbon-intensive status quo and miss an unprecedented opportunity to build innovative, green systems.

October 26 - Design Observer

Walder’s arrival from London, where he transformed a flagging bus and subway system, brought high hopes for New York’s transit system, says Michael Grynbaum. But is he meeting the expectations of riders and officials?

October 26 - The New York Times

Street furniture and plantings transform a small strip of roadway within a bustling San Francisco neighborhood, much to the delight of the planners and designers who fought for the change for over five years.

October 26 - The San Francisco Chronicle

Some critics say the proposed voluntary measures don’t have teeth, while others worry they lay the groundwork for overdevelopment.

October 26 - The Architect's Newspaper

BLOG POST

<p> While critiquing one of my blog posts, Prof. Randall Crane asked: &quot;Is <em>any</em> parking regulation a net social burden or only 1.75 spaces per Jacksonville, Florida apartment?&quot; This question in turn is an example of a broader question: how do we resolve an issue when we don’t know, and perhaps have no way of knowing, the ideal empirical answer? </p> <p> Parking regulation presents a classic example: looking at environmental harm alone, it seems to me clear that minimum parking requirements create some environmental harm by on balance encouraging driving, but also reduce environmental harm from &quot;cruising&quot; (motorists wasting time and fuel searching for parking spaces).* </p>

October 26 - Michael Lewyn

Awards for high speed rail projects will be announced Oct. 26. CA will receive $902 million for 18 projects from SF to San Diego, the largest in the Central Valley. Florida will get $800 million for the Orlando to Tampa line

October 26 - Los Angeles Times - L.A. NOW

A new Canadian study indicates that young people in the U.S. and Canada are trending away from owning their own homes and towards renting apartments.

October 26 - Treehugger

With the debut of the latest map of the Moscow Metro, TheCityFix's Jonna McKone takes a look at mass transit maps from across the globe and chats with mapmaker Cameron Booth.

October 26 - TheCityFix

A new Brookings Institute report points to urban centers as key for growing a "new" American economy.

October 26 - International Business Times

In Samara, a Russian city on the Volga, a rich architecture of wooden buildings is quickly disappearing, thanks to corrupt government and thoughtless devleopers.

October 25 - The Guardian U.K.

Christopher Hawthorne reflects on the simultaneous rise of bicycle culture and anti-transit NIMBYs. Can Angelenos come together to move forward when it comes to transportation and the built environment?

October 25 - The Los Angeles Times

Architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen says that streets can't create public interaction in the way that unstructured spaces like urban parks can.

October 25 - ASLA's The Dirt blog

Public domain activist Carl Malamud explains in this brief talk why he believes building, fire and safety codes should be taken out of the hands of the private companies that distribute them and made publicly accessible.

October 25 - Boing Boing

FEATURE

Planetizen talks with Peter J. Park, Manager of Community Planning and Development for the City of Denver, Colorado, about the return of physical planning, the city's form-based code, and more.

October 25 - Tim Halbur

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how population growth increases greenhouse gas emissions. More importantly, two demographic factors shape the increase, urbanization and aging -with opposite effects.

October 25 - BBC News - Science & Environment

BLOG POST

<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small">Republicans appear set to make significant political inroads in Congress this November, perhaps taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives and knocking on the door of majority control of the U.S. Senate. Their success will be in no small part due to the so-called Tea Parties, a grassroots political movement reacting to the perceived excess of the federal government. Planners should take note. While the Tea Party Movement is largely a national and statewide, its effects may well be felt on the local and regional level as well.</span> </p>

October 25 - Samuel Staley

At the recent RailVolution conference in Portland, OR, Chris Smith of Portland Transport showed off a cheap and simple display device that uses open source data to display transit times in public spaces. His price? $200.

October 25 - Steetsblog

BLOG POST

It's Halloween time again, the day when dressing up in silly costumes is required of every conscionable person. Some opt for the scary ghost or the sexy nurse, but others, more thoughtful others, make more of this opportunity.

October 25 - Nate Berg