The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

The former three-term New York City mayor, already president of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group has been appointed to a special United Nations envoy position on cities and climate change by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

February 8 - Reuters

Last Wednesday, an estimated 700,000—more than the city's population of 635,000—welcomed the Seahawks home, without major incident. Writing in The Atlantic Cities, Chuck Wolfe describes five lessons for placemaking through words and photographs.

February 8 - The Atlantic Cities

People watching on the train: we all do it. But some of us do it better. Like October Jones, who uses his commute downtime to animate his fellow passengers.

February 7 - BuzzFeed

BLOG POST

Anti-jaywalking laws are based upon questionable assumptions.

February 7 - Michael Lewyn

An enterprising blogger has produced a slew of urban maps with an overlay of publicly available data on exercise routes. In addition to being fetching, the patterns revealed show how runners make use of the public realm.

February 7 - FlowingData

Up and down the West Coast, Texas, and in some places on the East Coast, starfish are dying off and washing up on shore in distressing quantities. The so-called "sea star wasting syndrome" has also been called a “mass mortality event.”

February 7 - PBS NewsHour

Metropolis Magazine examines the 21st century efforts at creating wild places in cities, exemplified by the Buffalo Bayou Promenade in Houston and the Passaic River in Newark.

February 7 - Metropolis Mag

The permanent art collection of the Atlanta BeltLine just added a relic from the city’s past—a thirteen-ton sculpture crafted out of old train tracks—but it's not the only example of repurposed detritus from the city's history of demolition.

February 7 - Atlanta Magazine

Atlantic Cities details the new urbanist vision of a master planned community called Eastmark in Mesa, Arizona. The development’s mix of uses, form-based code, and walkability create “an uncommon sales pitch for car-dependent Arizona.”

February 7 - Atlantic Cities

Harriet Tregoning recently announced the end of her seven-year tenure as planning director of Washington D.C. Called by some the “futurist-in-chief,” Tregoning will head to HUD, where she’ll head the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities.

February 7 - Capital Business - The Washington Post

Many of us grew up with the telephone as a central appliance in our homes, around which much energy and attention revolved. The days of the land-line telephone, however, are numbered.

February 7 - National Journal

While road usage fee advocates may be celebrating this key endorsement of what many transportation experts view as the inevitable funding option, Streetsblog's Tanya Snyder is calling it a setback because of what else Rep. Bill Shuster did on Feb 4.

February 7 - Streetsblog USA

“Across millennia [mute swans] symbolized transformation and devotion, light and beauty,” says a recent article in Wired. Not so much in New York City, where the city’s population of mute swans will be reduced to zero to protect other native species.

February 7 - Wired

Plans to build “movie theaters, restaurants and a 34-story hotel” overlap with the archaeological site of a 2,000-year-old Tequesta village.

February 6 - Bradenton Herald

The West Coast’s first offshore wind project will use floating turbine technology not found in North America. The 5-turbine project near Coos Bay in Oregon is the first offshore wind energy for the West Coast.

February 6 - AP for the Oregonian

A new report examines Toronto’s options for the crumbling Gardiner Expressway and speaks favourably to the city-building and economic benefits of demolishing the elevated eyesore, a view not shared by Mayor Rob Ford.

February 6 - The Torontoist

In the first case of its kind, federal regulators fined three oil companies for allegedly either failing to test, or improperly testing crude from the Bakken Shale in N.D., resulting in rail companies not knowing which type of oil tanker cars to use.

February 6 - The Wall Street Journal

The flood management story of Boulder, Colorado, includes a successful encounter with a 1,000-year rain event, and its lessons are less about concrete and dams than one might think.

February 6 - Next American City

Walkable developments are in demand, but what really makes a community "walkable"? It all boils down to three simple principles—physical access, proximity, and places—says John Lavey.

February 6 - Community Builders

BLOG POST

Human beings are both born and programmed to need open spaces. As our existence becomes increasingly urban, cities and towns must provide the open spaces our natures require.

February 6 - Steven Snell