The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

London has always been a pedestrian-friendly city. But over the last decade the number of daily trips taken on foot in the city jumped by 12 percent, while walking declined nationwide. What explains the capital's pedestrian popularity?

August 5 - The Economist

Michigan is a national leader in rail-to-trail conversions, but a mining company in the Upper Peninsula will necessitate the first "reactivation" of a trail in the state. The federal Rails to Trails law sanctions such conversions.

August 5 - Detroit Free Press

While MTA’s East Side Access project, which will bring Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) trains directly to Grand Central Terminal by 2019, has received much attention, less well-know is a complementary plan to bring Metro-North trains to Penn Station.

August 5 - City & State

Senior citizen apartment complexes, a gas station, and 17 emergency communication towers are among the latest targets of staunch neighborhood opposition in the St. Louis area. What is the line between reasonable objections and "BANANAS" opposition?

August 4 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

In the 1980s and 90s, a pair of accomplished architecture firms were asked to design restaurants for the world's most famous, and formulaic, fast food chain. See what happened when the avant garde rethought the golden arches.

August 4 - Smithsonian

Though Connecticut is well served by commuter rail, a new report indicates that only half of the communities with Metro-North station have land use regulations in place to maximize development around them.

August 4 - The Hartford Courant

Using 8,000 photos taken from atop the Tokyo Tower, photographer Jeffrey Martin has assembled a 150-gigapixel panorama of the city. The best part - its interactive - meaning you can pan and zoom to an incredible level of detail.

August 4 - io9

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