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DipityIf 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 wit...
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 hav...
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 urb...
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 combi...
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...
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...
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. read more
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 conte...
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 ...
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, Pe...
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... ). Near...
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 pe...
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....
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 current U.S. healthcare reform proposal is often described as costing a trillion dollars. That will make it difficult to pass. However, the same program could legitimately be described as cost...
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-s...
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 read more
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 downtow...
The Olympics can be awesome for cities. Or they can be devastating. Rarely they're both, and most often they are an economic drain caused by over-investment in facilities with limited long-term us...
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 eff...
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that in 2007, over 9.8 million American households had no auto available at home. Although those car free households make up only 8.7% of the U.S., the split by ho...
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 con...
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 particula...
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 inf...
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 c...
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.rea...
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 ...
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 woul...
I’ve read some airport-related planning literature about the interiors of airports and about their public transit connections. (For a good example of the latter, see http://www.planetizen.com/node...
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 ...
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 sup...
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....
This past week I had the pleasure and honor of participating in the Next American City's Urban Vanguard conference. Held in Washington DC, the event brought 35 young urban leaders together from a ...
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). Mi...
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’...
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...
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 b...
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...
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 pub...
"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-...
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 t...
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 l...
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 shoul...
I would like to expand an ongoing debate between Reason Foundation policy expert Samuel Staley and me concerning land use policy impacts on affordability and economic stability to include two addi...
Watching Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar winning film of 2008 that is being released on DVD today, can be a bracing experience for those accustomed to the conveniences of Western living. The destit...
As you may have heard in yesterday's Planetizen Podcast, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine doesn't like cul-de-sacs. Most news reports on the story have claimed that the state is "forbidding," "banni...
Since the passage of The Telecommunications Act of 1996, media activists have been warning that a combination of consolidated corporate ownership of media outlets and a correspondingly intense prof...
Worldwide media coverage earlier this week of Tata Motors unveiling their Nano car-for-the-masses brings the argument over individual car ownership to the forefront yet again. Thanks to one hundr...
The state of Virginia’s decision to limit the use of cul-de-sacs in residential subdivisions(1) will no doubt create a torrent of commentary, both pro and con. In the residential context, cul-de-...
In a recent blog I emphasized the value of using smart growth policies to increase household affordability and support regional economic development. In his blog, “Planning Foreclosures,” Samuel S...
High Speed Rail (HSR) is the favorite moniker to describe the new era of trains envisioned and partially down-paid by the recent stimulus. The idea, linking major regional corridors via fast trai...
Since Vancouver Council unanimously supported the preparation of bylaws to introduce laneway housing across the City in single family zones, the housing idea has been getting consistent media atte...
A week ago I spent some time with Enrique Peñalosa, urban strategist and provocateur. North Americans don’t often look south for innovation, but Peñalosa made remarkable changes in the public envir...
Often, participants in public debates use words to mean things very different from their common-sense meanings, in order to manipulate the public’s emotions. Two examples in the field of urban...
New Orleans is still struggling, especially its hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward. The economic recession has been bad news for development all over the world, and it's really not helping things down in N...
Anyone who has picked up a greeting card, coffee mug, or calendar in the past 100 years or so can recognize the sentiments of any number of great American environmentalists: Whitman and his yawp, T...
We have just published a new report, "Smart Transportation Economic Stimulation: Infrastructure Investments That Support Strategic Planning Objectives Provide True Economic Development" which disc...
I am enjoying the last day of my Independent Activities Period (IAP) – the period after winter break in which all students at MIT can take one of many non-credit or for-credit course offerings at M...
Two years ago the Planetizen editors asked me to contribute a monthly blog posting. The first one appeared in February 2007 and I have managed to submit posts monthly for two years. In accepting t...
The green marketplace is the marketplace of the future. From Wal-Mart to Toyota to the neighborhood dry cleaner, it seems like every business is going out of its way to tell us how green they are....
The military has recently opened a new type of recruitment office known as "The Army Experience Center" in a Philadelphia shopping mall. It's like an arcade, where video games and other interactiv...
Usually planners get involved in the allocation and details of creating both public and private spaces for groups of people engaged in a wide range of variety of activities. Recently, I lear...
It is a chestnut of urban planning that a neighborhood must have a certain number of dwelling units per acre (usually around 8 or 10) in order to have adequate bus service. But the quarter-acre lo...
Just getting started here, so I hope you’ll give me time to set my voice and you will tune in to provide a thoughtful dialogue. Like many of you, I am urban planner with a distinguished background...
I decided to apply to graduate schools in urban planning before I had even finished up with my undergrad work. Urban planning spans many topics, and when I minored in it in college I realized I ha...
Normal 0 Like all of us I have been watching the carnage in Gaza with concern and growing despair. And like many people, I have struggled with how best to understand this conflict, fraught as ...
A common refrain among environmentally-minded planners is: policy X will reduce global warming. So why would anyone be dumb enough to oppose policy X? But often, global warming will be the we...
In 2008 I took a wonderful trip to Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Malmo, Sweden. Although the occasion involved invitations to speak on Vancouver's waterfront achievements and challenges, it...
Transportation and its relationship to the economy have been headline media topics for most of 2008 as we have seen unprecedented swings in fuel prices and travelers responding with declines in ve...
In the dawn of the New Year, I cannot help but to reflect on my pivotal moments in 2008 as I look forward to 2009. I wrapped up – no, survived – my first semester in the Master of City Planning pr...
Because of President-elect Obama’s plans to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure, some recent discussion of smart growth has focused on proposals for huge projects, such as rebuilding Ameri...
As we move into a 2009 full of staggering urban challenges - economic, environmental, social, and leadership challenges - do our planning departments have the passion, creativity and leadership to...
Terrorized by the literature is the title of a chapter of Howard Becker’s excellent book, Writing for Social Scientists (1986, Chicago). Whether through terror or misunderstanding, the literature ...
Terrorized by the literature is the title of a chapter of Howard Becker’s excellent book, Writing for Social Scientists (1986, Chicago). Whether through terror or misunderstanding, the literature ...
Terrorized by the literature is the title of a chapter of Howard Becker’s excellent book, Writing for Social Scientists (1986, Chicago). Whether through terror or misunderstanding, the literature ...
In late 2007, it was with increasing frustration that I penned and op-ed entitled "Make Miami a Bicycle-Friendly City." Appearing in the December 13th edition of the Miami Herald, the article implo...
You have heard it, or seen it, before. A developer comes in for a presubmittal meeting, and he is excited. He has the best project your city has ever seen, and, when all is said and done, he insis...
When Chris Steins approached me with his to write a kids book about urban planning, I was a little skeptical. We had gotten a hold of a book from 1952 called Neighbor flap foot. The City Planning F...
Due to the collapse of local tax revenues caused by the national economic downturn, many transit systems may face shortages of money over the next year or two. Assuming this is the case, transit p...
"Why did nobody notice it? If these things were so large, how come everyone missed them?" - Queen Elizabeth, on the global credit crunch. Things are so large in the Vaughan Corporate Centre, ...
While Americans and Canadians alike watched the U.S. presidential race with growing enthusiasm and passion over the past two years, it may have slipped the notice of our American friends that we a...
Economic stimulation is an important issue these days. Let’s be smart when choosing economic stimulation strategies. read more
With the return to prominence of physical planning and increasing use of GIS, planning students are becoming interested in developing portfolios of their work. This blog entry provides tips for th...
Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, I thought I would ask myself: what I am thankful for that is related to urbanism? On a personal level, the answers are easy: 1. I live in a neighborhood t...
Locality: "We have distressed neighborhoods" Conventional Thinking: "We have housing dollars" Locality: "But we have distressed neighborhoods" Conventional Thinking: "But we have housing dol...
Occasionally, someone familiar with my scholarship asks me: why do you care about walkability and sprawl and cities? Why is this cause more important to you than twenty other worthy causes you mig...
A paradigm shift is changing the way we think about transportation safety. In the past, traffic safety experts evaluated risk using distance-based units (traffic crashes and casualties per 100 ...
Hey, have you heard we’re all screwed? Last week Penn hosted the “Reimagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil” conference. If you were there, or if you read the liveblog of the event, ...
This weekend, I had the pleasure of taking a ride up the Pacific Coast Highway in a hot-off-the-assembly-line Tesla sportscar. While I normally fall in with the camp that thinks the focus on a...
Some things are so very bad that they are good, for the sake of amusement and as examples to avoid. Of course, everybody makes mistakes, but some massive disasters involve so many errors by so man...
The United States has been reborn. The election of Barack Obama has put – or reintroduced – the United States to the world stage as a beacon of hope for all people. We have proven that we believ...
With due respect to Frederick Jackson Turner, the American frontier closes on Tuesday. This time, for good.read more
Recently I’ve been writing about skills that planners need—the findings from surveys of employers and the key role or writing in the planning skill set. Skills like writing, graphics, data analysis...
Since arriving in Vancouver, I've realized that we are part of a "peer group" of international water cities. Through waterfront design conferences where the same cities seem to get invited time an...
One of the perks of my job is getting to know new cities and neighborhoods. We research, create a lot of graphics and talk with a lot of people. In the course of those discussions, while people o...
The following post will likely result in the revocation of my Philadelphia residency. It’s heretical to say, especially on a day when the city is on fire (not literally; okay, mostly not literal...
It's Halloween and that means it's costume time. But, what's that you say? Too busy updating your comprehensive plan to find a costume? Well, don't fret! I've got some last-minute costume for the b...
This morning I was reading through my daily dose of planning related blogs and dropped in on The Overhead Wire, Jeff Wood's excellent transit soapbox. One of Jeff's most recent posts links to an...
This morning I was reading through my daily dose of planning related blogs and dropped in on The Overhead Wire, Jeff Wood's excellent transit soapbox. One of Jeff's most recent posts links to an...
Here in New York City, there is an incredibly popular burger stand in Madison Square Park called The Shake Shack. It's one of the touchpoints for Silicon Alley, and a great meet-up spot. The proble...
Out in the bar, the world as we know it was coming to an end. In the backroom, meanwhile, smart people were trying to figure out the future of suburbia. The bar was in the lobby of a desert res...
A few days ago, someone asked a question on one of my listservs about the likely impact of America’s economic crises upon urbanism. The best answer is: it depends.read more
A recent report that I coauthored, "Managing Transport Challenges When Oil Prices Rise" provides practical policy guidance on how to manage the transport challenges associated with rising oil price...
The answer is: “Because people today would rather not work and instead just sit at home collecting welfare checks.” And the question? If you guessed, “What should you not say in a room full of ...
One of the most interesting things that I have learned in school thus far is the history of the urban renewal program. As a budding urban planner, I have often used the term “urban renewal” interc...
Jane Jacobs once said, “Songs and cities are the best things about us. Songs and cities are so indispensable.” For a long time I thought Mother Jacobs was speaking, as only she could, about two s...
One of Vancouver's most recent significant planning exercises is noteworthy not simply because of the merits of its process or its resulting planning and design vision, but perhaps more so because...
That's what some guy said to me late last night as I waited for my tacos at a typically busy taco truck. He was talking about our Los Angeles neighborhood, Echo Park, which was recently named by t...
Most people have a highly distorted view of the risks they face, which skews their decisions and ultimately reduces their happiness. We live in one of the safest times and places in history, yet, ...
A PLANNER’S PRAYER Next week, Jews around the world (including myself) will spend the day in synagogue for Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. On that day, we will pray for forgiveness for o...
Last Thursday night marked the end of an intense two-week team project in my Gateway: Planning (a kind of Introduction to Planning) course. In this project, my and I assumed the role of consultan...
I've always wanted, but never quite had the cred, to go to Burning Man. Instead, I went to this year's rendition of National Park(ing) Day in the hopes that it would provide a reasonable, if diminu...
With the subprime mortgage and housing bubble crises now metastasizing into the full-blown implosion of the U.S. economy, global markets have been gasping to keep up with the turmoil. Later this w...
Last Friday, I was in two different suburban environments in Atlanta. Both are sprawl by any normal definition of the term - car-oriented environments where residential streets are separated fro...
More than anything, I remember laughing at them. While I, as a bright-eyed undergrad, woke up at 11 to enjoy my very liberal arts in everything from gerontology to the physics of music, the busine...
I occasionally get accused locally of being too much of a "booster" for Vancouver's success and reputation in city-building and urban design. Although I usually tend to mix in a healthy dose of "co...
Starbucks stores have seen a lot of protests. Due to its international brand recognition, the chain became an easy mark for activists looking to draw media attention to concerns from genetic engin...
I often hear debates over the costs of different modes of transportation, particularly between driving and public transit travel. Rising fuel prices have made public transit more attractive for so...
The battle for the White House has reached my inbox, as even listservs about urbanism crackle with endorsements and denunciations of Obama, McCain, Palin, etc. But all of this frenzied activity ...
As the summer winds down, here are a list of the five funniest urban planning videos I've found on YouTube over the years, covering news for Planetizen. Aloha from Kauai At the margin of crea...
This week will be my first full week of at MIT; however, I have actually been here for three. I arrived into Cambridge at the end of August to attend the weeklong department orientation, which wa...
Deindustrialization has wreaked havoc across many American cities and towns. One only need visit the landscape of the rust belt, places like Buffalo, Detroit or Flint, Michigan to get a sense how...
Blogs are emerging as important information sources in the contemporary discourse on cities and city planning. read more
I used to have interns. Probably hundreds of them, if you add them up over the years. I lorded over them all—benevolently, of course—while they, with doe eyes and studied eagerness, did whatever t...
I clearly remember the day that I received a call from MIT faculty notifying me of my acceptance into the Master of City Planning (MCP) program. I could not believe that a department within the il...
Despite the rising costs of belonging to the jet set, I took my share of flights for a few business trips and boondoggles this summer. Though most of my plane tickets were paid for, my transportat...
Just spent 4 action-packed days (have you ever tried to keep up with Dan Burden?) touring the Pacific Northwest with Dan, Paul Zykofsky, a very patient charter bus driver, and 40 +/- townmaking fan...
At the beginning of semester students are signing up for and planning their degrees. Lately, a question I have been asked quite frequently is which will make new planners most employable? Students...
Smart growth supporters tend to prefer grid systems to cul-de-sacs, for excellent reasons. A proliferation of cul-de-sacs artificially lengthens walking distances: if streets don’t connect to each...
Smart growth supporters tend to prefer grid systems to cul-de-sacs, for excellent reasons. A proliferation of cul-de-sacs artificially lengthens walking distances: if streets don’t connect to each...
This summer I cycled through beautiful countryside, saw impressive ruins, visited old churches, travelled through small towns and met friendly people. I also saw communities, deprived of their pu...
With the Olympics nicely coinciding with my vacation, I think I’ve watched more coverage of the games than the average human should. Prior to the start of the games, I followed with interest the ...
An introduction to free tools for creating interactive information graphics. As professionals shaping the built and natural environment, we have to process and communicate complicated concep...
In a much discussed speech, ‘A Generational Challenge to Repower America,’ Al Gore challenged America to hit the off-switch on foreign oil and re-power itself with home-grown carbon-free energy– n...
In a much discussed speech, ‘A Generational Challenge to Repower America,’ Al Gore challenged America to hit the off-switch on foreign oil and re-power itself with home-grown carbon-free energy– n...
Costco may be coming to Manhattan, bringing 2300 parking spaces with it.read more
I recently read Oscar Newman’s 1970s book on crime prevention, “Defensible Space.” In this book, Newman addressed the question of why some public housing projects are insanely dangerous, and othe...
When it comes to urban policy issues such as public transit and smart growth, self-identified "Conservatives" and Libertarians have turned "straw man" argumentation into an art form. Many of their...
As gas prices keep rising, the public demand for buses and trains keeps growing. Yet in some cities, government is actually cutting back transit service, because rising gas prices make transit veh...
Visual communication is becoming more sophisticated in planning, however many online image sources are restricted and require payment for use. Others, such as flikr.com and Google Images are extre...
The McKinsey Global Institute has just published a major report outlining four potential scenarios for urbanization in China.The main thrust of the report is that China needs to focus less on growi...
This morning, one of my listservs was aflutter with discussion of a new article by Joel Kotkin, attacking an alleged "war against the suburbs." According to Kotkin, this "war" consisted of Jerry B...
In early 2008, the Mayors' Institute on City Design received a generous gift from the Edward W. Rose III Family Fund, directed through the National Endowment for the Arts, to support technical ass...
It's a unique time to be joining the staff of Planetizen as managing editor. The world seems to be awakening for the first time to all of the issues we deal with everyday, whether we work in urban ...
For two years I walked to work. Before that, gas cost a penny and a few hummed bars of "Livin' La Vida Loca" and climate change meant turning up the A/C. In the mid-2000s my commute got longer and...
City cycling can be hectic. Let's be realistic: most American cities are not meant for cyclists. It would be great if they were, but for now, our city forms are primarily designed for the movement ...
Last year Project on Public Spaces and I published the Great Neighborhood Book, which offers hundreds of from around the world about making community improvements on issues ranging from crime preve...
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