Opinions and commentary about the built and natural environment.
Created by chavan on Jul 30, 2008
Last updated: 02/23/10 at 12:39 AM
As managing editor of Planetizen, I'd like to make a quick note on today's op-ed, Resisting Dickensian Gloom by Tony Recsei. Mr Recsei asked for a chance to respond to a recent criticism of his work by Planetizen regular Michael Dudley. It is our policy at Planetizen to allow points of view that are critical of the status quo in urban planning, so I agreed to run the piece. I did ask Mr. Recsei to tone down some of the more personal attacks on smart growthers so that his points could be presented more clearly to our audience, and I believe he has done that.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/42941
As planners, one of our roles is to help stretch the scope of what is considered possible. For example, between 1950 and 2000 most development was highly automobile-dependent, based on the assumption that almost all travel would be by personal automobile and other modes were relatively unimportant. This pattern is so well established that many people have difficulty imagining anything different. It is useful to help people understand the full range of options available, from automobile dependency to carfree communities.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/42838
I’m going to riff off a recent Interchange Blog post by Michael Lewyn on the relationship between mobility and accessibility. Given the positive comments from the planning community to Michael’s post, a little engagement may be necessary for both clarity as well as fully understanding the implications of reading too much into the accessibility versus mobility debate.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/42367
Very snowy holiday greetings from Finland, everyone! While here visiting my in-laws and friends, I wanted to take a quick moment and share an intereting observation about the way Finns handle the incessant layers of snow that blanket their chilly winter country. It seems that aside from limited access highways and some primary arterials, the Finnish standard for snow tretment is to plow to a reasonable depth, but not worry too much about an inch or two of snow base layer covering streets. Some streets get sand treatment as well, but salt is used very, very sparingly.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/42302
Conventional wisdom dictates that middle-class families would find urban schools more tempting if we only “fixed the schools”- a concept that implies that urban public schools are simply unable to educate anyone, because they are either horribly underfunded (in the liberal version of this claim) or horribly mismanaged (in the conservative version).
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/42063
The display of yellow ribbons in remembrance of friends and family serving far away goes back hundreds of years. Dr. Gavin Finley has an interesting website on the history. The American Folklore Center at The Library of Congress has more intriguing history and also cites the 1949 John Wayne and Joanne Dru film, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/42062
A recent event organized by Good Magazine, Sheridan/Hawkes Collaborative and The Public Studio brought together about 30 civic-minded designers, planners and architects to come up with some ways to improve the urban environment of Los Angeles. It was a big question to tackle in one afternoon, with a huge array of possible solutions. The crowd was split up into five separate groups and surprisingly, each came up with a similar answer: taco trucks. OK, not taco trucks specifically, but the essence of taco trucks and what they bring to the city.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/42024
For a myriad of personal and professional reasons I moved to New York City this fall. Part of the reason I uprooted myself from the pastel, sun soaked streets of Miami Beach to the chaos of New York is because Gotham has made such incredible strides in becoming one of America's most bicycle-friendly cities. read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/42008
I am prompted to report on this issue I came across in a news item last week. A Baptist minister in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, buried his 18-year-old son, who died three days after a car crash on July 12, in the backyard of the pastor’s church. While state law doesn’t prohibit this, some county and local ordinances do, and this county, Fayette County, only allows burials on large parcels zoned for agricultural use. The church has only five acres and is in a residential zone.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/41964
New Jersey's prized gateway communities along Long Beach Island - South Jersey's extra-special vacation spot better known to the planning community for its prescient example as human habitation threatened by natural erosion in Ian McHarg's planning tome “Design with Nature” - are facing an entirely man-made threat in the form of ill-conceived plans to effectively double the roadway “capacity” of the one and only bridge connecting this 18 mile barrier island to the mainland. If NJDOT is left to its own devices, and local community officials rush them along, a proposed new bridge will have the complete opposiread more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/41865
My classmate was up in front of everyone, flapping and
flailing, pleading his case and getting shot down at every turn. It was a bit
like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
It was also kind of like looking in the mirror.
I’m just more than halfway through a planning school studio
project working on the beautiful (no, really) Lower Schuylkill River in
Philadelphia. They’ve teamed up about 15 planner/urban designers with about 45
landscape architects, who, as I mentioned last time, are reasonably bonkers.
That was about a month and a half ago; since then, I’ve begun to think maybe
I’m the one needing a room with padded walls.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/41595
If you’ve ever worked in distressed communities, you’ve
faced the dilemma that there simply is no private market for what you want to
see built. You can chip away at the
problem of vacant land with thoughtful affordable housing developments or, if
you’re lucky, a new recreation center but by and large, large amounts of
vacancy remain and impact the psyche of those that live nearby. So working closely with residents, and really
listening, has sparked a whole new sub-discipline in our world of urban
planning and design - temporary use.
The shrinking cities movement shined a light on the
potential of ad-hoc reuse and programming some time ago but so too has groups
like the Pennsylvania Horticultural Societyread more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/41567
For those who either have been wondering about, or not regularly following, the private life and times of your correspondent, I believe some sort of explanation is in order for what appears to have been my abrupt and complete disappearance off the face of the Earth. No, I did not get hit by an electric bus. No, there were no sinkholes in my proverbial bike lane. No, I didn't fatally discover an improperly phased pedestrian “Don't Walk” message on a recent signal timing field test. In fact, I have not disappeared from the face of any planet; rather, I have been devoured by the political wranglings and machinations of a very complex and tumultuous mayoral campaign in my fantastic hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey. More importantly, one week after being read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/41522
After four years of political wrangling, hundreds of public and internal meetings, several revisions, and one determined planning department, consultant team, and Mayor, the City of Miami made urban planning history tonight by adopting the largest known application of a form-based code. In doing so, Miami has catapulted itself to the forefront of those large American cities serious about implementing smart growth.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/41370
City data catalogs are fast moving from the exception to the norm for large U.S. cities.
Washington, DC's Data Catalog, spearheaded by former CTO Vivek Kundra, was an early leader. The site combines hundreds of static government-created datasets from across DC government with administrative feeds like the city's 311 system. Their site emphasizes providing data in multiple formats, including where possible formats that don't require proprietary software. Kundra's selection as the nation's first Chief Information Officer, and launch of the federal government's Data.gov has elevated the principle among the federal government's vast datasets. DC's two "apps" contests sought to encourage creative uses of the data made available, and some of which are available at the DC App Store.
Beyond DC, many big cities have recently launched or are planning open data catalogs of their own.read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/41324
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/41086
Did you know that yesterday was International Walk to School Day? While many communities may have let this important public awareness opportunity pass by, New York City public school students were out in full force. Perhaps one would expect nothing less in a city where 80% of students already walk to school (transit trips require walking, too!).
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/41045
The fall is high season for school visits from prospective
students. I am a great believer in doing this remotely—while some greenhouse
gases are generated by a Google search it is far less than a plane ride to a
distant campus. I suggest visiting schools only after you have been admitted
(and not even then if you don’t have a really crucial question that can only be
answered on site). However, if you can’t bring yourself to even apply to a
school in a place you’ve never visited, and promise to buy carbon set asides, a
tour may be worth it. The following tips can help you make the most of the
school.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/41016
Forgive me Olmsted, for I have sinned. I have strayed. I
have coveted. I have had doubts.
I have thought about kicking urban design to the curb like a
mangy puppy.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/40796
In her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, journalist and essayist Rebecca Solnit describes a phenomenon that is rarely mentioned in the context of disaster preparedness: the spirit of caring -- even joy -- that can emerge in the face of calamity.read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/40713
In my first week here in Beijing, I have spoken to a number of scholars here about climate change. A few observations;
1. China's scholars are thinking about climate change mitigation but I haven't met many talking about adaptation.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/40553
I have lived in Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco but I have never seen anything like Beijing. Over the next two weeks, I'm giving a series of talks at Tsinghua, Peking University and the Lincoln Institute, and the CASS. While I was little surprised to see Mao's face on all of the money and to not be able to access my blog, I have been very impressed with everything I see and I see glimpses of a future "green city".
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/40514
Forbes just came up with another of its “Most X City” surveys. This week, it listed the most stressful cities (http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/20/stress-unemployment-homes-lifestyle-rea... ). Nearly all of Forbes’ criteria, however, are silly in one respect or another.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/40441
Yogi Berra said that. I also recall someone saying at some conference on smart growth or new urbanism: the more cars sharing the road, the more people get frustrated (hence all the car ads of people driving with no other cars in sight), while the more people on a well designed sidewalk, the more we tend to like it.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/40397
When we moved the Post Carbon Cities office to downtown Portland I was thrilled to get a bird's-eye view of the downtown streetcar, the first new streetcar line built in the US since World War II. This morning I got a new history-making treat out my window: four wind turbines mounted yesterday on a new high-rise, among the first such urban wind projects in the country.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/40171
It has been two months since I completed my first year of the Master of City Planning at MIT. Returning home to Baltimore, I felt exhausted from the rigors of the program, accomplished because of the mere fact that I completed a year of said program, and enlightened by the many class discussions, projects and experiences that I enjoyed – and not enjoyed – during the school year. I also returned to Baltimore excited about the project that I would work on as a Mayoral Fellow in the Department of Transportation. I am working on the Baltimore read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/39938
The unstoppable force paradox is an exercise in logic that seems to come up in the law all too often. There is a Chinese variant. The Chinese word for “paradox” is literally translated as “spear-shield” coming from a story in a Third Century B.C. philosophy book, Han Fiez, about a man selling a sword he claimed could pierce any shield. He also was trying to sell a shield, which he said could resist any sword. He was asked the obvious question and could give no answer.
The Washington Supreme Court broke the paradox between a 12-month moratorium during which the City of Woodinville considered sustainable development regulations for its R-1 residential area, and the efforts by the Northshore United Church of Christ (Northshore Church) to host a movable encampment for homeless people on its R-1 property. City of Woodinville v. Northshore United Church of Christ (July 16, 2009).
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/39812
AZUL: 12PM-3PM@The Brig - Abbot Kinney and Palm in
Venice;
6PM-9PM@La Brea/Pico Billboard Eco Art - 4829
West Pico just east of La Brea
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/39717
Everybody knows that most, if not all, of downtown businesses' customers arrive by car. So it's intuitive to try to come up with a way to encourage drivers - who normally wouldn't venture downtown - to hop into their rides and cruise on down to Main Street to shop for wares. If we could do this, just think of all the new business we'd be stimulating! In continuing with this logic, it's also a given that it's impossible for would-be customers to actually get to downtown without the essential attaché to driving, gasoline. So, isn't it therefore intuitive to suggest that if cities were to give away a little bit of gas to each customer – you know, to kind-of thank them for their generosity - then customers would find an overwhelming incentivread more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/39618
America's so-called “love affair” with the automobile, although cliché, provides a vivid description of how attached we really are to driving. Public policy, and the historically overwhelming effect of auto industry lobbying, is only partly to blame for the endemic traffic jams and smog of the twentieth century. Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant hired by New York City advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, recently demonstrated that urbanites with multiple transportation options still choose to commute by car for rational reasons of privacy, convenience, and speed. A chart of his, shown below, demonstrates how perplexing this choice is. Overcoming these reasons is a serread more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/39477
Planning issues are often considered to be conflicts between the interests of different groups, such as neighborhood residents versus developers, or motorist versus transit users. But planning concerns the future, so it often consists of a conflict between the interests of our current and future selves.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/39418
After visiting Denver for the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) conference, I began to meditate on the relationship between Judaism and urbanism, and on how few cities accommodate both. In particular, I was impressed by how well-populated downtown Denver was compared to the southern cities where I have spent the past three years (Jacksonville) and this summer (Little Rock) - but I stll couldn’t imagine myself living in downtown Denver all that comfortably.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/39364
On my way to work this morning, I was listening to an interview with the band Blitzen Trapper on my iPod. They’ve got a beautiful song called ‘Furr’; the sound echoes 1970s folk rock- and roots influences like English folk, country and bluegrass. Anyway, Eric Early, the main songwriter, got my attention with his answer to this question:
INTERVIEWER: Obviously ‘American music’ means different things to different people. What does it mean to you?read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/39322
Here in Los Angeles, the local professional basketball team just won its league's national championship. When I was in Barcelona a few weeks back, the local soccer team won a major international championship. These were two days for the cities to celebrate their home teams' triumphs, but the differences in how they celebrated says a lot about these cities and their civic cultures.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/39259
One important planning approach for sustainable living is how to locate and integrate the natural and man-made attributes of the land to configure a low-carbon site for large scale development.read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/39162
Thanks to the National Vacant Properties Campaign for another important conference on vacant properties - this time in Louisville. I was duly impressed with the first conference on the subject a year and a half ago but what struck me this time was the growing diversity of voices concerned with the issue.
At the last conference, I (and I assume many others) had the feeling that it was a therapy session of sorts for like-minded spirits. "Older industrial" cities were sharing information and ideas because, while all cities are unique, we share a lot of the same challenges.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/39154
It was the collapse of the housing bubble that triggered the current economic crisis. As is the case in the aftermath of many calamities finger pointing abounds. There are an ample number of would be culprits. Take your pick; The Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates too low, mortgage brokers for pushing inappropriate loans, ratings agencies for blessing dubious securities, the list goes on. A common criticism aimed at all of these culprits is that they lacked the foresight to see the inevitable housing bust. It was the housing bubble that camouflaged all of the bad decisions.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/39001
As James Howard Kunstler points out in Home From Nowhere, one of the tragedies of single-use zoning is that it branded shopping as an “obnoxious industrial activity that must be kept separate from houses”. Ironically, the places where most Americans shop today come pretty close to “obnoxious” and “industrial”. read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/39018
I had the opportuntity, at the 2009 national planning conference in Minneapolis, to present (together with my colleague Christian Peralta Madera) ten free web applications that can be used to support planning.
Approximately 350 participants attended the session. Since the presentation, I've received over 100 emails congratulating us on the practical nature of the presentation, and requesting links to the websites we presented. Since our presentation was a hands-on demonstration, this blog entry outlines the ten technologies, and provides links to examples of the technology in practice and resources so you can experiment with the technologies. read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/38952
I’d been obsessed with it ever since I saw The Princess and
the Warrior. (Between that and the funicular in Flashdance,
there is just something about bad-ass chicks that commute via unique transit.)
So, when I found myself with an unexpected free morning in Essen, Germany, after especially
cooperative weather for photographing the day before, I hopped on the S-Bahn towards Wuppertal to
see the famed train.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/38955
See the building and the walls in the lower left? They're designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. They're part of the ensemble he designed at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Mies and his office designed this corner around the same time they were designing the masterpiece on campus - Crown Hall.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/38929
One justification for municipal minimum
parking requirements is the danger of “spillover parking”: the fear that if Big
Brother does not force businesses to build huge parking lots, that business’s
customers will “spill over” into neighboring businesses or residential
neighborhoods, thus reducing the parking available to the latter group. For example, if Wal-Mart doesn’t build a
thousand parking spaces, maybe Wal-Mart’s customers will park at Mom’n’Pop Groceries
down the street, thus reducing the parking available to Mom’n’Pop customers.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/38872
I received a newsletter in the mail recently about the Purple Line, a light rail line in the planning process in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Like hundreds of other public transit projects across the country, the rail line is in the "planning" stages and nobody can really say exactly when it will be constructed or begin operations.
The cause is simple: to little funds and a lack of political support both locally and from the federal government. Quite simply, we get more roads because our policies are structured to spend more money on them, and they're more popular with elected officials. Although the specific cause of the lack of transit investment is simple enough, its effect on the way transit systems are planned and perceived by the public is far from simple. The lack of funds has added complexity length to an already complex and lengthy process. As a result, project supporters and detractors alike are alienated from the planning, forced to navigate a morass of acronyms, plans, and steps.
The problem lies in the fact that since there is some money available, local supporters of the roughly 400 planned projects (with an estimated total cost of $248 billion) pretend they've got a shot at it. Time and again local boosters tell the media they'll just submit for federal funds and break ground after they complete the required paperwork. As we'll see, this couldn't be farther from the truth.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/38721
A common argument in favor of building sprawl-generating roads and highways is that if we just pave over enough of the United States, we can actually reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by reducing congestion. For example, a Reason Foundation press release cited a report by two University of California/Riverside engineering professors, “Real-World CO2 Impact of Traffic Congestion” (available online at http://www.cert.ucr.edu/research/pubs/TRB-08-2860-revised.pdf ). But if you read the report carefully, its policy impact is a bit more ambiguous.read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/38676
I missed the APA national conference for the first time in 15 years -- but I quickly heard reports that one of the hot topics focused on banning electronic message boards. I dissent.
What would Times Square be without the colorful, multi-message, oft-changing signs? Would Las Vegas have become the tourist definition that it has without the colorful signs? I am not a huge fan of Las Vegas, but I certainly think it has the right to define itself as it wishes.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/38621
One of the many glorious perks of being an engineer is that we are so bad at thinking up clever names for programs and tools that there's been an unabashed, universal concession by the general public to accept our use of horribly convoluted acronyms. My favorite transportation acronym sub-genre is the collection of traffic signal configurations that for no clear reason (other than because engineers are, deep down, fun people) have flown off on a winged tangent. The original intersection signal control which included pedestrian push buttons was “PEdestrian LIght CONtrolled”, close enough to be named “Pelican”. A “Pedestrian User-Friendly INtelligent crossing” alternative to the Pelican is named “Puffin”. Since a combined pedestrian/bicycle signal means two (read more
http://www.planetizen.com/node/38521
"If we can develop and design streets so that they are wonderful, fulfilling places to be — community-building places, attractive for all people — then we will have successfully designed about one-third of the city." Allan Jacobs
A few weeks ago, I was asked to speak at an event celebrating what will hopefully come to be recognized as one of Vancouver's great civic feats - the redesign and reconstruction of downtown Vancouver's Granville Street.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/38441
At a company presentation about environmental impact the other week a colleague included a historic photograph of Scollay Square in Boston. You are pardoned if, even after visiting or living in that city, this doesn’t sound familiar because all prominent characteristics of the area were summarily obliterated in the mid-twentieth century to make way for a potpourri of brutalist-style administrative buildings and renamed Government Center. Urban redevelopment arguments aside, the photograph reveals a particularly interesting detail about the function and use of streets virtually erased from our minds over the last century.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/38401
It’s always tempting returning from a vacation to a foreign country to come to conclusions about how that society works. This isn’t entirely a bad thing- after all, exposure to different ways of life are mind-expanding and suggest new possibilities. My first trip to Rome redefined the way I think of public space, and set me on a path leading to a career in urban planning.
Along the Philosopher's Walk in Kyoto.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/38332
Not sure if you want to be a planner? Recently my colleagues
and I have received a spate of emails from prospective students around the world
wanting to know whether planning is a field they should pursue. Their extensive
lists of questions show that this is a pressing issue for them. This entry
answers some of the more common questions and aims to help prospective students
come to programs with a shorter and more focused set of topics to explore.
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http://www.planetizen.com/node/38163
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