Technology

Urban planning commentator Robert Goodspeed declares June "Public Participation in Urban Planning Month" and offers a four part series examining how technology and public participation might be more closely linked.

June 9, 2008 - The Goodspeed Update

Fast Company highlights Chicago and London, their picks for U.S. and Global Cities of the Year, respectively. Whatever you think of the way such lists come together, these are interesting profiles of two vibrant municipalities.

June 5, 2008 - Fast Company

Will laser-projected pedestrians make crossing the street safer in South Korea?

May 30, 2008 - Streetsblog

Often times I’m struck by the advances we’ve made in mapping, modeling and depicting our cities.  What was once the purview of mapmakers, surveyors or architects is now a democratized, engaging process that brings unexpected results.  And the more advanced the technology, the more transparent our cities seem to become. 

January 11, 2008 - Scott Page

One of the more powerful concepts to come out of the information and services economy is the Long Tail.

November 26, 2007 - Samuel Staley

How sustainable is the internal combustion engine? The answer depends, in part, on your historical perspective. This point becomes startlingly evident in a recent article by UCLA doctoral student Eric Morris in the most recent issue of Access magazine. The magazine publishes accessible versions of academic research and is published by the University of California Transportation Center at Berkeley.

October 24, 2007 - Samuel Staley

Technology creates new challenges and opportunities, and this came home to me a couple of weeks ago when I was previewing a rough cut of Gridlock: Hell on Wheels, a video on traffic congestion released by Reason Foundation today. In the video, Comedian Drew Carey makes the following off-the-cuff comment on a morning drive-time radio show: “I would love to own a freeway in LA.”

October 16, 2007 - Samuel Staley

4 tools that support community building at the street level.Just heard from my co-worker, Chris Haller, who is at Where 2.0 that Google has announced yet another cool tool for visualization. Street View provides panoramic views embedded as an additional view to g-maps. Initially this tool is only available in 5 cities: Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco. Was able to locate the following YouTube demo. Corny video, but cool technology.

May 30, 2007 - Ken Snyder

I'm making a prediction: While the real estate market in RL (real life) is cooling off, the real estate market in Second Life (SL) is heating up.I was recently contacted via IM (instant message) by Elliot Eldrich. I interviewed Elliot several months ago for a feature-length article about urban planning in Second Life. (The article appeared in the January, 2007 issue of the American Planning Association's Planning magazine, but is now also available online.)

March 16, 2007 - Chris Steins

At the PlaceMatters06 fall conference, participants were treated to the first sneak preview of outside.in, a spatially enabled hub for blogs and forums that adds location-based information to online discussions. Steven Berlin Johnson, author of several books including Emergence, and The Ghost Map, and the leading inspiration behind outside.in’s conception, demonstrated the beta site during his keynote session. It created a buzz with conference participants quick to recognize its potential as a tool for encouraging community dialogue and place making.

March 9, 2007 - Ken Snyder

Are politicians becoming obsolete in the age of the Internet? Are they simply the 'middle-men' that will be replaced by votes cast directly by citizens? This was the issue before a veritable rock-star cast of poliltical insiders from California and around the country. So what is the G-Word?    

March 9, 2007 - Chris Steins