Chris Stines is Planetizen's former Editor and the founder of Urban Insight, a leading digital agency. Chris has 25 years of experience in technology consulting and urban planning and has served as a consultant to public sector state, county, and local agencies, Fortune 500 private firms, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations.
June is Public Participation in Urban Planning Month
<p>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.</p>
The Failure of Long-Range Metropolitan Transportation Planning
<p>In a policy analysis for the Cato Institute, Randal O'Toole reviews plans for more than 75 of the nation's largest metropolitan areas reveals that virtually all of them fail to follow standard planning methods, and half of them are not effective.</p>
Live From Vegas: Millennial Planners, Activist Planners, & The CE Soap Opera
<p> <img src="/files/u4/20080428-apa-0667.jpg" alt="Las Vegas Strip" title="Las Vegas Strip" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="320" height="240" align="right" /> I'm at the Paris Hotel on the Vegas strip for the 100th annual American Planning Association (APA) <a href="http://www.planning.org/nationalconference/">conference</a>, which started Saturday, and runs through Thursday, May 1. The conference offers 300 sessions and 60 mobile workshops to the approximately 5,000 participants. </p> <p> And it's going to be a crowded week, if the 30-minute line for coffee this morning in the Paris boulangerie is any indication. </p> <p> <strong>Infrastructure matters; Planners should be politically active.</strong> </p>
Bandwidth-Oriented Development
<img src="/files/u4/20080425-cable-map.png" alt="Submarine Cable Map, courtesty of Telegeography (http://www.telegeograph.com)" title="Submarine Cable Map, courtesty of Telegeography (http://www.telegeograph.com)" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="243" height="179" align="right" />So how do you permit and build a 4,000-mile undersea communication cable system? And why do we care?<br />
Web 2.0 in Planning
<p>Hot technologies like blogs, mashups, YouTube, Flickr, and social networking are among the most notable of new Internet technologies that are collectively known as Web 2.0. These technologies offer great possibilities for planners.</p>