The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman looks at two great American cities, one losing population for decades and now filed for bankruptcy, the other growing rapidly but through sprawl, not smart growth. Yet Atlanta suffers lower social mobility.

August 4 - The New York Times - The Opinion Pages

Middlemen, private jets, communication blackouts: providing design services to the world's most reclusive regime isn't easy. Mark Byrnes describes how one architecture and planning firm was selected to redesign North Korea's airports.

August 3 - The Atlantic Cities

Inequality is alive, well, and growing in the U.S. As President Obama indicated in a speech last week, it's a problem the country must address. First, says Eduardo Porter, will need to articulate the problem to build the consensus needed to solve it.

August 3 - The New York Times

More people live in downtown Cleveland now than at any time in the past 60 years. Yet this revival didn't happen easily, and it wasn't the result of a giant 'silver bullet' project. Sophie Quinton explains how one family contributed to the revival.

August 3 - National Journal

After incurring $4.8 billion in repair costs from superstorm Sandy, NY's MTA had a hard time buying insurance. It's utilizing an innovative tool - called a catastrophe bond - to help prepare financially for a damaging storm surge in the near future.

August 3 - The Wall Street Journal

Recently it was announced that D.C. had reached a tentative agreement to help fund a new soccer stadium to be built in an area of the city that has long resisted redevelopment. Stadiums are generally a bad deal for cities, but is this an exception?

August 3 - Washington City Paper

Community Cable 9 has outdone themselves with this trailer for the weekly broadcast of Whitehorse, Canada's City Council meetings. Don't you wish your council meetings were this epic?

August 2 - The Washington Post

Does an inordinate amount of your knowledge come from films? Then you might take pleasure in Zachary Edelson's romp through the past hundred and twenty years of architectural history as told through motion pictures.

August 2 - Architizer

Four former EPA heads in Republican administrations, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, have penned an op-ed in The Times calling on members of all parties to support President Obama's recent climate initiatives and do more to curtail warming.

August 2 - The New York Times

The 'biggest regional planning effort in a generation' is providing residents of twelve Northeast Ohio counties with an opportunity to discuss how the area can leverage its existing infrastructure rather than continuing to sprawl.

August 2 - The Plain Dealer

Same drill, round two. After almost a month of apparently fruitless negotiations, the unions gave a 72-hour notice of going on strike. Unless an agreement is reached, 200,000 Bay Area rail riders will need to find alternatives for the Monday commute

August 2 - San Jose Mercury News

For its fourth annual list of the best college towns in America, Livability looked beyond the experiences of students to the relationship between colleges and the surrounding community, and to opportunities for the former to transition to the latter.

August 2 - Livability

This summer, a new school will begin rising in the Bay Area city of Emeryville that redefines the relationship between a K-12 school and its surrounding community.

August 2 - Fast Company Co.Exist

Discussion on increasing user fee revenue has centered on increasing and/or indexing the gas tax and applying VMT fees. Now some are pushing a return of the original user fee - road tolls applied by states or regions on interstate highways.

August 2 - Governing

Over the past 14 years, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron have experienced an unprecedented drop in water levels, and many fear they won't be coming back. In a multi-part series the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel explores the causes and implications.

August 2 - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A decade ago, a power failure in northern Ohio caused a cascading series of outages that knocked out power to 50 million people in the United States and Canada. New tools aim to reduce the chances that such events could happen in the future.

August 2 - The New York Times

In the face of vocal opposition, Vancouver's city council approved a proposed bike route and greenway. For one former councillor, if a third of the speakers in hostile public meetings support a project, that's enough to indicate a silent majority.

August 1 - The Globe and Mail

Barry Bergdoll, the Museum of Modern Art's Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, has announced he is leaving the museum to take up a post at Columbia University. Over six years he curated a number of popular, and critically praised, exhibitions.

August 1 - Architectural Record

Since it was begun in the late 1950's, Paris's La Defense business district 'has always worked better in architectural theory than in anthropological practice,' says Georgi Kantchev. A new plan seeks to humanize the spaces between its tall towers.

August 1 - The New York Times

Strapped for cash, cities across the US have decided to save money by turning off street lights. An investigative series documents the effect of all those darkened lights on crime and economic development in San Diego - home to a $30 million backlog.

August 1 - Fast Company Co.Exist