The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

Detroit's most iconic building, the Renaissance Center, will soon get a major upgrade.

January 23 - Detroit Free Press

The "war on cars" and its pushback has a achieved a singular pitch in Belgium, where the national rail service has canvassed the country with a satirical ad campaign excoriating the country's horrible congestion.

January 23 - The Wall Street Journal

The usual litany of Rust Belt woes hit North Braddock, Pennsylvania particularly hard. The Pittsburgh suburb has shed two-thirds of its population and is burdened with 350 abandoned properties.

January 23 - Belt Magazine

Public food markets can be key centers of urban commerce and social life. Late last year, a brainstorming event in London considered how they might evolve to accommodate modern lifestyles and technologies.

January 22 - Nesta

A large winter storm is bearing down on the East Coast, prompting advanced preparations by local officials.

January 22 - The Washington Post

As a part of a competition sponsored by SpaceX, university students and independent engineering teams are building scale-model Hyperloop pods.

January 22 - FutureStructure

These days, Big Data is the topic at hand, but Arup's Vincent Lee says data analysis can only go so far. He uses his work on the New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program to illustrate why a "human element" is crucial to finding solutions.

January 22 - Doggerel

The unlikely alliance of a ballpark billionaire, tax watchdog, and environmentalists in San Diego circulate a planning ballot initiative that makes an all-too-familiar sacrifice: urban neighborhoods.

January 22 - UrbDeZine

Reporting from the world's most polluted capital, Julie McCarthy speaks with Ari Shapiro on NPR's "All Things Considered." McCarthy talks glowingly about how successful the two-week trial went in reducing pollution and congestion even more so.

January 22 - NPR

BLOG POST

Musicians from all varieties of musical genres spent the past year pondering, celebrating, and complicating our perception of places.

January 22 - James Brasuell

A raft of recent research finds that small, local businesses are critical to overcoming many of our biggest challenges. This article rounds up the new studies and what they say about why local business should be a focus of planning in 2016.

January 22 - Institute for Local Self-Reliance

Cars and cyclists have issues at intersections. A new type of intersection design from the Netherlands offers improved protection to cyclists. The solution is based on the four islands near each corner of the intersection.

January 22 - Huffpost Good News

Cartoonists have been satirizing the issue of gentrification for almost a century. Witness the evolution of gentrification political cartoons in an article by The Guardian.

January 22 - The Guardian Cities

Logically we might assume that as cities grow larger, commutes get harder. It can certainly feel that way. But research points to structural factors that actually make commuting in big cities more efficient.

January 21 - CityLab

It's not only young adults who are delaying in getting drivers licenses, but a drop in licenses among all age groups according to a new analysis of license data from 1983-2014 by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

January 21 - The Fiscal Times

Over the past decade, Texas has led on wind but lagged on solar power. That may soon change. Texas solar companies are now offering "all-solar" plans to take advantage of an improved market.

January 21 - Dallas News

Despite continued dispute over their effectiveness, carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs in the United States and Canada have raised billions of dollars. And China has now followed suit.

January 21 - New York Times

Architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne describes an L.A. in flux, at once beholden to its postwar image and pushing in a new direction. The city, he says, faces existential questions on a scale unmatched elsewhere in the nation.

January 21 - The Architect's Newspaper

Among other things, the Las Vegas Strip is famous for seemingly infinite numbers of free parking spots. MGM, however, will soon change the game.

January 21 - Los Angeles Times

Sometimes, city walks can mean more than just getting from place to place. Author and book critic David Ulin discusses his favorite accounts of that rich experience.

January 21 - Barnes and Noble Review