The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

<p>This column from <em>The Portland Tribune</em> chews out the city's "light-rail mafia" and claims that the only people benefiting from Portland's elaborate transit plans are the power players making the decisions and their developer friends.</p>

September 12 - The Portland Tribune

<p>Wendell Cox argues that smart growth development plans are bad policy for African Americans because they elevate home prices out of reach.</p>

September 12 - Heartland Perspectives

<p>The rise in childhood obesity and diabetes has been linked to declining numbers of children who walk or bike to school. In addition, new traffic accident data shows that being driven to school is also a serious health threat.</p>

September 12 - The New York Times

<p>The Los Angeles City Council will consider a moratorium on fast-food restaurants in South L.A., a part of the city with high rates of obesity and below-average access to grocery stores.</p>

September 12 - The Los Angeles Times

<p>In downtown Boise, recently announced plans to construct a homeless shelter have many local business owners upset and making arrangements to move out of the area. The city, however, is defending its decision to approve the shelter.</p>

September 12 - The Idaho Statesman

<p>The city of Rome recently launched a dynamic mapping project that utilizes cell phones and GPS devices to display the city's flow of traffic and pedestrians on a publicly accessible website.</p>

September 11 - Discovery

<p>More and more people are ranking New York and London at the top of the list of cool cities. But will London move ahead of front-runner New York to become the coolest city of the 21st Century?</p>

September 11 - The Guardian

<p>What may be the world's largest sustainable development project is currently being planned in Libya. The project aims to boost the country's ecotourism along its Mediterranean coast and to protect its many archaeological sites.</p>

September 11 - Environmental News Network

<p>Officials in Russia are hoping to help kick-start a population boom in the rapidly depopulating country by declaring September 12 the "Day of Conception" and awarding prizes to those who give birth exactly nine months later.</p>

September 11 - Associated Press via Contra Costa Times

<p>As downtown Los Angeles undergoes a massive redevelopment, the major concern is not whether it will be another New York, nor if its public spaces will improve, but rather how much worse traffic will get, writes Sam Hall Kaplan.</p>

September 11 - L.A. Downtown News

<p>Walls and checkpoints intended to bolster security in Baghdad have made cross-town journeys almost impossible and turned the city into a collection of ghettos that are reinforcing sectarian divisions.</p>

September 11 - The Independent (UK)

<p>The U.S. coastline, home to 53% of the nation's population, is at catastrophic risk from just a 1-meter rise in sea level concludes a major new study.</p>

September 11 - Washington Post Writers

<p>Plans to buy up land in the Great Plains and repopulate them with pre-settlement species such as buffalo have many cattle ranchers on edge. But proponents say these species are meant to be there -- in both an economical and and ecological sense.</p>

September 11 - Long Haul Productions

<p>The ever-growing size of American homes means that, regardless of how "green" the construction techniques, they will be rapacious users of energy for decades to come.</p>

September 11 - Michael Dudley

<p>Despite minor speedbumps in the permitting process, an explicitly green home is now being built in Kendall, a suburb to the south of Miami. The owners expect it to be the greenest home in the region.</p>

September 11 - The Miami Herald

<p>Former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist visits Buffalo to protest state DOT's plan to expand freeway infrastructure on city's Outer Harbor, calls for demolition of elevated freeway and replacement with at-grade urban boulevard.</p>

September 11 - The Buffalo News

<p>Residents of the South Bronx are opposed to new parking garages for Yankee Stadium, which will be subsidized with tax-exempt bonds issued by New York City.</p>

September 10 - Streetsblog

<p>The rapid rural-to-urban population shift is felt heavily in many African cities, but especially so in the continent's smaller cities, such as the Botswanan capitol of Gaborone.</p>

September 10 - The Christian Science Monitor

<p>The growth of Vancouver has far surpassed what planners projected half a century ago. And though some problems have followed, the region's growth hasn't wrought the city's downfall, as many expected.</p>

September 10 - The Vancouver Sun

<p>The city of Coral Gables, Florida, has tight regulations that keep its neighborhoods and homes beautiful. But a regulation that forbade residents from parking pickup truck on streets and in driveways at night has been ruled unconstitutional.</p>

September 10 - The New York Times