The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

<p>India must eradicate its ubiquitous shantytowns if it is to become an economic success story. Just such an effort is underway in the Dharavi neighborhood outside Mumbai by Mukesh Mehta, an Indian architect and developer.</p>

October 14 - The San Francisco Chronicle

<p>A California developer is pushing proposals for high-speed magnetic levitation trains. He's hoping private enterprise will help make the costly venture more attractive to state and regional governments.</p>

October 14 - Metro Times Detroit

<p>A small college in Maine has made a pledge to reduce and offset all of its greenhouse gas emissions, including those generated by students' trips to and from school.</p>

October 14 - The Washington Post

<p>Report by Seattle-based Sightline Institute documents a growing backlash against "property rights" initiatives in Oregon communities deeply affected by Oregon's Measure 37 and implications for western states.</p>

October 13 - Sightline Institute

<p>Conservation leaders explore three types of incentive programs to achieve land conservation in an economically efficient, measurably effective, and reasonably equitable manner: tax incentives, market-based incentives, and fiscal (or budgetary) incentives.</p>

October 13 - Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Land Lines Newsletter

<p>Urban universities including the Univ. of Southern California are working to transform their tough neighborhoods.</p>

October 13 - The Los Angeles Times

<p>As the nation's population reaches 300 million, tackling explosive growth becomes a critical national priority.</p>

October 13 - The Boston Globe

<p>Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve for two decades, is the latest Republican economist to join a small academic movement to increase gas taxes to address market imperfections so as to reduce energy consumption.</p>

October 13 - The New York Times

<p>Did the city of Atlanta make a mistake by letting a deal with a mega-developer fall apart or did it have no choice?</p>

October 13 - Creative Loafing

<p>New York City's planners are welcoming the news that many of the city's security bollards, planters and Jersey barriers are going to be removed.</p>

October 13 - The New York Times

<p>Citing the example of Cuban organic farming, this piece from <em>The Sydney Morning Herald</em> looks at the paradigm that pits cities against all that is natural.</p>

October 13 - The Sydney Morning Herald

<p>A year after an earthquake killed 73,000, rural leaders say they need a greater voice in rebuilding.</p>

October 13 - The Christian Science Monitor

<p>Canyon-Johnson Urban Funds, headed by former NBA Star Magic Johnson, is investing millions of dollars into the biggest condominium development to date in the Miami working class neighborhood of Little Havana.</p>

October 12 - The Miami Herald

<p>A new study suggests that the traditional wisdom that suburbs are more affordable places to live than cities may be wrong. Although housing costs may be lower in suburbs, the difference is often outweighed by drastically increased transportation.</p>

October 12 - The Washington Post

"To conservative Christians, environmentalism was a dirty word -- it stank of paganism, of interference with the free market, of the sixties. Meanwhile, many environmentalists were more secular than the American norm, and often infected with the notion spread by the historian Lynn White in his famous 1967 essay, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," that Christianity lay at the root of ecological devastation. Everyone, in short, was scared of everyone else. But there were a few lights starting to shine in that gloom."

October 12 - Grist Magazine

<p>Prop. 90 looks like a simple anti-Kelo bill...until you get to the part about regulatory takings. Officials in Los Angeles are waiting with baited breath to see if the proposition passes.</p>

October 12 - The Los Angeles Times

<p>After undergoing years of gentrification, New York City's Greenwich Village has become almost unrecognizable to its long time residents.</p>

October 12 - The Boston Globe

<p>The head of Atlanta's most prominent development firm expects transplanted suburbanites to balloon the city's intown population to over 800,000 by 2020. These numbers far exceed Atlanta's regional planning agency forecasts of 650,000 residents.</p>

October 12 - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

<p>Like other rural communities, a southern Colorado town struggles to provide services to homeless people without adequate assistance from the federal government.</p>

October 12 - The New York Times

<p>In a sweeping series of budget cuts, Canada's Conservative government has eliminated the only federal support available for municipalities wanting to preserve heritage buildings.</p>

October 12 - The Globe and Mail