Exclusives

FEATURE

How Mechanization Can Help Cities Rethink Parking

March 17 - Shannon Sanders McDonald, AIA

BLOG POST

Economists vs. Planners? Complements, Not Substitutes

Often, planners and economists seem to be at odds. Actually, a better description would be talking past each other—literally two ships passing in the night. Planners often think economists are too narrowly focused on dollars, cents, and rational decisionmaking. Economists can’t understand why planners don’t recognize the real world of markets and why incentives matter—a lot.

March 15 - Samuel Staley

BLOG POST

Therapeutic Cities

I'm reposting this from my <a href="http://cities.iftf.net">Future of Cities</a> blog. You're all invited to join our conversation over there: it's sort of for urban studies what Planetizen is for urban planning and design. Some of you may know that my wife and I welcomed a little girl to the world last month (Stella!). Despite the fact that my mother was a nurse for 40 years - or perhaps because of it - I've never spent a lot of time around hospitals. In fact, like many of you I share an aversion to the centralization of sick people.

March 13 - Anthony Townsend

BLOG POST

When Planning Matters

Why plan? That’s an important question for a planning skeptic like myself. I’m not at all convinced that conventional public urban planning has much value, despite (or because of?) spending eight years on a city planning commission. Yet, I don’t consider myself an “antiplanner”. I’m happy to leave that role to my friend and virtual colleague <a href="http://www.cato.org/people/otoole.html">Randal O’Toole</a> at the Cato Institute. (He even runs a blog called “<a href="http://www.ti.org/antiplanner/">The Antiplanner</a>”.) Urban planning has a role even though, IMO, on balance, its application has had a negative impact on communities and cities. Notably, even the free market (and Nobel Prize winning) economist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek">F.A. Hayek</a> recognized a role for planning in his classic book on political economy <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Liberty-F-Hayek/dp/0226320847">The Constitution of Liberty</a>. The question is: what is planning’s role and, perhaps more importantly, how has this role changed or shifted in modern times?

March 12 - Samuel Staley

BLOG POST

Dublin Disappearing?

<img src="/files/u405/DSCN4789small.jpg" alt="" width="309" height="237" align="left" />                     Anne Street, Dublin City Center: A mixture of uses prevail in this pedestrian friendly, human-scaled street.

March 9 - Mike Lydon

FEATURE

AICP's Continuing Education Program Needs To Be Fixed

The new continuing education program set up by the American Planning Association's American Institute of Certified Planners is an unfair system that will prevent AICP-certified planners from getting affordable, high-quality education.

March 6 - Nate Berg

BLOG POST

Common Problems with Proposals for the Exit Project or Thesis in Planning

In <a href="/29520" target="_blank">January</a> I explored what kind of exit paper or project students of planning should prepare, why they should write such papers, and when. This month I turn to the proposal, examining key issues any proposal writer needs to consider. As I outline below, the parts of the proposal are fairly standard. However, three areas typically trip up students working on exit projects: identifying the audience(s), framing the question, and reviewing the literature.

February 29 - Ann Forsyth

BLOG POST

Blight in Full Color

Every city has blight – the unsightly, derelict, abandoned, disheveled, and under-utilized spaces of our urban areas. It drains the life out of neighborhoods, drives down the values of surrounding properties, and just looks really bad. So what do cities do about it? Some seize it through eminent domain for redevelopment and others offer incentives to developers to replace it with something better. Many of them, though, don’t do anything at all. But removing blight from a city is not impossible, and it doesn’t have to be an elaborate multi-party scheme or a drawn-out political process. It can be as simple as a coat of paint.

February 27 - Nate Berg

FEATURE

Bicycles on the Verge of Extinction in Bangalore

February 25 - Sudhir

BLOG POST

An Algorithmic Antidote To Sprawl

How could a new chamber of commerce algorithm drive decisions about employer locations, improve mobility of workers, while reducing pollution accruing from longer daily work trips? The answer is simple, says the chief economist of the Greater Dallas Chamber, Lyssa Jenkens, “You change the data system to deliver information people never got before.”

February 20 - Anonymous

FEATURE

Suburbia: The Natural Evolution of Development?

Is suburban growth really a product of the natural progression of human development, and if not, could a a different growth pattern better meet our desires and reduce our impact the climate?

February 19 - Ashwani Vasisth

BLOG POST

Smart Growth at the Grassroots, Part 2

Rethinking College Park <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rethinkcollegepark/389600607/" title="Route 1 by RethinkCollegePark, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/144/389600607_46aace7f11_m.jpg" alt="Route 1" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="240" height="180" align="right" /></a>Is College Park, Maryland a great college town? Although the town is home to a top-ranked national research university that is one of the largest employers in the state of Maryland, the town pales in comparison with the nation's best-liked college towns, whether Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ithaca, New York, or Charlottesville, Virginia. In this post I describe <a href="http://rethinkcollegepark.net/blog/">one attempt</a> to use the internet to improve an aspiring college town.

February 14 - Robert Goodspeed

BLOG POST

21 'Strange' Maps

<img src="/files/u2/20080211_1.jpg" alt=" " title=" " width="234" height="112" align="right" />The Strange Maps blog is an eclectic collection of maps, diagrams, and cartoons. Some graphics featured on this blog are informative, some are creative, and others are completely bizarre.The website is maintained by an anonymous blogger. The posted graphic is often accompanied by informative notes. Here is a list of 21 maps that I found interesting:

February 11 - Abhijeet Chavan

FEATURE

The City as Factory

February 11 - Josh Stephens

BLOG POST

A Practical Need for Utopianism

Who doesn’t love the Apocalypse? Society collapses, people run around in chaos, and we try to imitate the survival strategies culled from too many Hollywood end-of-the world blockbusters. Apocalyptic predictions have always been part of American culture, and why not?

February 6 - Greg Smithsimon

BLOG POST

Singing the City Sterile: Urbanism and New Wave

I've always hated songs about cities, particularly mawkish anthems like "New York, New York," "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," and the ghastly "I Love L.A." Lyricists seem to dream them up when there's nothing else to sing about. Indeed, cities are the setting for life, not the object of it. Singing about them is like performing a play about a theater.

February 2 - Josh Stephens

FEATURE

Debating Detroit’s Redevelopment

January 31 - Joseph Cialdella

BLOG POST

Getting Started on an Exit Project or Thesis in Planning

My December <a href="/node/29121" target="_blank">blog</a> dealt with key problems faced by those heading for an end-of-school-year graduation—completing a proposal, choosing methods, starting to write, and dealing with formatting. This month I step back and ask some bigger questions: what kind of exit paper or project you should prepare, why, and when?

January 30 - Ann Forsyth

BLOG POST

Tax and Burn Environmentalism

We’re recognizing the scale of the global warming crisis just as there’s a parallel crisis of imagination about how to address environmental problems. Because of years of conservatives’ claims that government doesn’t work, and that the only option is to privatize and deregulate, we’re left believing that we can’t take decisive action in the public interest. We think we can do no more than charge a fee while allowing the smokestacks to keep belching. Call it tax-and-burn environmentalism: Rather than eliminating dangerous practices, tax-and-burn introduces taxes and leaves practices unreformed. Ironically, tax-and-burn often makes things easier for polluters.

January 30 - Greg Smithsimon

BLOG POST

The Art and Science of Planning

As technology becomes more an integral part of planning and public outreach around planning, the need for a “creative touch” becomes increasingly important. While technology can increase the quality and quantity of public input, it can also diminish the quality of human interaction and creativeness. As we look for technologies that engage citizens, we also need to find ways to utilize art materials, maps and other visuals, and encourage storytelling.

January 27 - Ken Snyder