Exclusives

BLOG POST

Two bad words

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 planning come to mind.

February 9 - Michael Lewyn

FEATURE

Can Retail Be Reinvented?

February 9 - Tim Halbur

BLOG POST

Ninth Ward, The Movie: How To Really Rebuild New Orleans

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 New Orleans. The federal government's broke, states are cutting costs, and local government is practically bankrupt. But even in tough times, there is one place where business always seems to be good and money's always flowing: the movie industry. Maybe New Orleans should look to Hollywood as a means to recovery. It has the money, it has the incentive, and it's proven that it actually has the power to make it happen.

February 8 - Nate Berg

BLOG POST

Voices In The (Urban) Wilderness

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, Thoreau and his deliberateness, Frost and his serene decisiveness. We know the exhortations of Carson, Leopold, Emerson, and Abbey. John Muir, John McPhee, and Barry Lopez are known to have taken a few strolls through the chestnuts.

February 4 - Josh Stephens

BLOG POST

Smarter Transportation Economic Stimulation

We have just published a new report, "<a href="http://www.vtpi.org/econ_stim.pdf">Smart Transportation Economic Stimulation: Infrastructure Investments That Support Strategic Planning Objectives Provide True Economic Development</a>" which discusses factors to consider when evaluating transportation economic stimulation strategies.

February 3 - Todd Litman

BLOG POST

All Hail Paterson (and other overlooked mid-size cities)

Paterson? Yeah <a href="http://www.patersonhistory.com/">Paterson</a>, the City 13 miles to the west of NYC. Birthplace of American industry, the “Silk City” founded by Alexander Hamilton and designed by Washington DC’s master planner Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Besides textiles, Paterson was home to the first repeating revolver, first submarine and the Rogers Locomotive Works that, at one time, manufactured 80% of the Country’s locomotives. Paterson is also home to the second largest waterfall in the northern hemisphere (Niagra Falls taking top honors of course) and a collection of foreign born residents so lar

February 2 - Scott Page

FEATURE

Towards 'Dynamic' Zoning

Don Elliott, author of A Better Way to Zone, argues that dynamic zoning regulations can help cities grow appropriately and avoid bottlenecks to good development.

February 2 - Don Elliott

BLOG POST

Plugging into Planning: Baltimore and New Orleans

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 MIT, set up a winter externship, or just do nothing. This amounts to six weeks of bliss!

February 1 - Tamika Camille Gauvin

BLOG POST

New Jersey: It’s Like Ohio, But Even More So

The second semester in planning school at Penn is defined by a major project in which students are broken into groups, given a problem region, and tasked with, in the space of three months, coming up with a plan comparable to what professionals do in 12 to 18 months. Over those three months, the students get intimate with their designated locale, exploring every nook, cranny and underused land parcel. Helloooooooooo, Cherry Hill, New Jersey. There’s an old John Gorka song called “I’m From New Jersey.” It goes, “I’m from New Jersey/ It’s like Ohio/ But even more so/ Imagine that.” I’d bet good green cash he was driving down Route 70 when he wrote that.

February 1 - Jeffrey Barg

BLOG POST

Two cheers for midblock crossings

A few weeks ago, I read a newspaper article commenting on a pedestrian who was killed in a car crash; the article suggested “educating pedestrians to cross at intersections.” But sometimes, some pedestrians are actually safer crossing mid-block. Here’s why: when I cross at the intersection nearest my suburban apartment, I have to look for traffic coming from a variety of directions: not just oncoming drivers in both directions who might run red lights, but also drivers turning from the corners of the intersection.

January 31 - Michael Lewyn

BLOG POST

Recap on Two Years of Advice

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 <a href="/blog/10386" target="_blank">posts </a>monthly for two years. In accepting the assignment, I decided that I needed to have an angle. I write, teach, and practice about the substance of planning so I decided to do something else—provide advice for students on how to enter and succeed in planning programs. Martin Krieger at USC already provided a terrific <a href="http://blogs.usc.edu/sppd/krieger/" target="_blank">advice column</a> for doctoral students so I decided to focus on students in professional planning programs.

January 31 - Ann Forsyth

BLOG POST

Competitions help young designers get B.I.G

Perhaps the biggest difference between the design processes in Europe and North America, at the building scale and increasingly at the neighbourhood scale, is in the use of design competitions. I've been fascinated by this difference for some time, and make a point while in every competition-friendly city I'm in, to dig a little deeper.

January 30 - Brent Toderian

FEATURE

Streetsblog: Advocacy Journalism and the Reconquering of the American City

The Internet is a trove of great ideas about improving cities. Filling blogs and personal websites, the vast majority of ideas out there are little more than that: ideas. New York City's Streetsblog -- now a growing nationwide force -- is transforming the conversation into action.

January 29 - Mike Lydon

BLOG POST

Inside the Mind of the Green Market

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. That could either be a great thing because these businesses are actually using environmentally-friendly practices, or it could be a bad thing because they're just claiming to be green. Regardless of whether it's one or the other, what's certain is that they say they're green because that's what we want to hear.

January 28 - Nate Berg

BLOG POST

The Urban Recruitment Center

The military has recently opened <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/us/05army.html?_r=4" target="_blank" title="Urban Tool in Recruiting by the Army - An Arcade - NYTimes.com">a new type of recruitment office</a> known as <a href="http://www.thearmyexperience.com/" target="_blank" title="Army Experience Center Website">"The Army Experience Center"</a> in a Philadelphia shopping mall. It's like an arcade, where video games and other interactive technologies provide visitors a glimpse of what it might be like to be in the military. It's a new approach, one that capitalizes on the modern teenager's affection for video games to attract them to the military life. You could call it persuasive, cajoling, or even a thinly-veiled attempt to con kids with flashy games, but, as it provides exactly what its target audience wants, the bottom line is that it's very effective. Why couldn't a city do the same thing?

January 24 - Nate Berg

BLOG POST

In Planning Terms - Size Matters

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.

January 24 - Rick Abelson

FEATURE

Stimulus to Nowhere?

John Norquist, President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, believes that President Obama should reconsider committing stimulus funds to decades-old freeway expansion projects and take transportation policy in a new direction.

January 22 - John Norquist

BLOG POST

The joys of medium density

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 lot seems to get no respect: too dense for estate-home luxury, not dense enough to constitute "smart growth". But a 9 year-old girl recently taught me that, at least for children of a certain age, these medium-density neighborhoods have their advantages.

January 22 - Michael Lewyn

FEATURE

From Utility to Amenity: Greening the Alleys of Los Angeles

January 22 - Nate Berg

BLOG POST

Obama, Web 2.0 and Planning

What can we as planners learn from president-elect Barak Obama's use of technology? President-elect Obama has been an early adopter of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE">Web 2.0</a> technologies both in his campaign and the transition to the White House. It is likely that the Obama administration will continue to use Web 2.0 technologies to both engage the public in determining policies and to make government operations more transparent. As planners, there are a lot of great tools and techniques that we can use in the planning processes. Here are some of the tools that the Obama team have used that could be used in planning.

January 19 - Chris Steins