The Daily Source of Urban Planning News
Cuckoo Clock Comes To City Square
<p>A Dallas suburb considers whether to change its sign regulations to allow a massive cuckoo clock in a public space. European cities often have them, but American cities rarely do.</p>
NIMBYs On Vacation
<p>Next American City nails NIMBYs for their vacation choices.</p>
Friday Funny: Developers Bad at Naming Streets
<p>Developers often see naming streets as their way of making a mark, naming streets after daughters, alma maters, or the family dog. But they often find themselves tangled up in regulations and the limits of their own creativity.</p>
Friday Funny: 'Guide Ferret' Banned From Bus
<p>OC Transpo (Ottawa's transit authority) says that Frances Woodard can no longer bring her pet ferret on transit.</p>
Moscow Tops List of World's Most Expensive Cities
<p>Moscow tops an annual ranking of the world's most expensive cities. The survey examines housing, transportation, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment for corporations and government agencies determining living costs for expats.</p>
Motor City Reconsiders Transit
<p>After over fifty years without public transportation, new support for transit from Detroit leaders.</p>
A Portrait of New Urbanism
<p>Terrain.org profiles Bradburn Village, a successful New Urbanist project in Westminster, Colorado. As one resident puts it, 'Bradburn is designed around community.'</p>
Time for a National Water Policy in the U.S.
<p>Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega laments the incredibly disjointed and ad hoc approach to freshwater management in the United States.</p>
Personal Rapid Transit: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
<p>Malcolm Buchanan writes that advances in control technology and the upcoming launch of the Heathrow Airport PRT mean that Personal Rapid Transit is ready for the spotlight.</p>
Coconut Grove Looks to Revamp, Modernize Waterfront
<p>Miami's Coconut Grove waterfront neighborhood may receive a makeover if city commissioners approve a new master plan. However, one questions remains: who is going to fund it?</p>
NPR's Talk of the Nation Highlights Amtrak Long Distance Travel
<p>Former travel editor Catherine Watson is interviewed on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" about her Amtrak trip on three long-distance trains from Minnesota to New Mexico that illustrate the difference between travel and transportation.</p>
SF's New Federal Building is Green and Safe, But Is It Good?
<p>Witold Rybczynski visits Thom Mayne's new Federal Building in downtown San Francisco. He finds a number of energy conservation innovations at play, but concludes that precious little else is playful or human about the architecture.</p>
America's Dying Middle Class
<p>Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi writes that the media are missing the real story: that millions of Americans are financially drowning under home heating costs, gas prices and debt, and the middle class is disappearing.</p>
Does CA Drought Mean No Growth? Bill Fulton Says No
<p>Although water is a natural resource and often discussed as such, the real issue for California is how water gets used. Bill Fulton argues that California has plenty of water. What it needs is political will to make the best use of the water.</p>
Highway Funding: The Last Bastion of Socialism in America
<p>Since 1956, federal, state and local governments have invested nine times more capital funding in highway subsidies than in transit.</p>
Appalachia Creates a 'Suitability Map' to Entice Responsible Development
<p>A key idea of western North Carolina's Mountain Landscapes Initiative is to create a map of land already in conservation, layered with land that <em>should</em> be preserved, so that developers, builders, and residents together can plan responsibly.</p>
Manhole Theft Plagues Philadelphia
<p>The rising value of iron and steel has prompted thieves to steal an alarming amount of manhole covers from Philadelphia's streets.</p>
San Francisco Locked Out of Own Data By Disgruntled Employee
<p>A systems admin in San Francisco apparently decided to bring San Francisco grinding to a halt, and refuses to divulge the passwords he set up across the city's entire network.</p>
BLOG POST
McKinsey's Pitch for a More Compact Urban China
<p>The McKinsey Global Institute has just published a major report outlining four potential scenarios for urbanization in China.</p><p>The main thrust of the report is that China needs to focus less on growing its cities and more on making them efficient and productive. Given the massive levels of capital investment Chinese cities have seen over the last 20 years, it makes sense that the country's urban planners need to find ways to squeeze more capacity out of these systems. After all, as McKinsey projects, another 350 million people will need to be accommodated, some 250 million of them as rootless rural migrants.</p>
Underpreserved Beijing Feels Sting of Gentrification
<p>As Beijing undergoes rapid redevelopment, many historic buildings have been lost in the scramble. Now the few that remain are inspiring a flood of gentrification.</p>
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