Exclusives
FEATURE
Removing Urban Freeways
As part of our effort to slow global warming, we should be correcting one of the great errors in the history of American city planning: the post-war binge of urban freeway building.
BLOG POST
If Paul Davidoff has Email Should I Write?
<p class="MsoNormal"><strong>Information Strategies for Answering Fundamental Planning Questions</strong></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In universities in the northern hemisphere, April and May are months for completing work and moving closer to graduation. Assignments are due. Exams are looming. Students are too tired to write well and professors are too tired to notice. In the crunch for time, enterprising students look to the power of new information and communication technologies to reach out beyond their harried contexts to experts who can help them answer important questions. If Paul Davidoff (now dead) had email, they reason, he would have been happy to respond.</p>
BLOG POST
Tunnel Vision: Has Tysons Missed the Train?
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica" class="Apple-style-span">First, let me begin by introducing myself. I am Parris Glendening, and I serve as the president of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute in Washington, D.C., which is part of Smart Growth America. From 1995-2003, I was Governor of Maryland, and for more than 20 years before that I served at various levels of local and county government. I am excited about being part of the network of contributors here at Planetizen and participating in the discussion.<br />---<br /><br />In 1956 Pres. Dwight Eisenhower shepherded the Interstate Highway into existence, fulfilling a decades-long aspiration to link the nation with highways that could move both people and materiel as efficiently as those he had seen in Germany. Later, he would warn us against the military-industrial complex, but with a bit more foresight he might have warned against the asphalt-industrial complex, as well.
BLOG POST
Starchitecture is not the enemy...
<p>I'm glad this blog to date has provided fertile ground both to challenge planning as a profession as well as to compliment planning when it happens to do something worthy. In this spirit, I'd like to irritate many of my colleagues out there and definitively say that starchitects are not the problem. </p><p>I wish I could play the role of <a href="http://newstandardnews.net/content/fourthcolumn/?itemid=4244">Stephen Colbert</a> and ridiculously declare the end to this debate, but alas, I do not have the television airtime (or wit) to make this point as effectively as I would like. This forum will have to do.</p>
BLOG POST
Spanish-style Waterfront Home On a Private Island: $28
<p><img src="/files/u4/sl-spanish-sm.jpg" alt="Spanish-style home at Darrow Estates (small)" title="Spanish-style home at Darrow Estates (small)" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="200" height="128" align="left" />I'm making a <strong>prediction</strong>: While the real estate market in RL (real life) is cooling off, the<strong> real estate market in Second Life</strong> (SL) is heating up.<br /><br />I was recently contacted via IM (instant message) by Elliot Eldrich. I interviewed Elliot several months ago for a feature-length article about urban planning in Second Life. (The article appeared in the January, 2007 issue of the American Planning Association's <em>Planning</em> magazine, but is now also <a href="http://www.urbaninsight.com/virtual/2ndlife0307.html">available online</a>.)</p>
BLOG POST
Planning And The Scourge Of The Collective Action Problem
<p class="MsoNormal">In its most forward attempt to ensnare the fabled “discretionary rider,” my local transit agency recently set out handsome billboards touting the pleasures of the bus and the miseries of driving alone. They employed pithy admonishments and graphics such as a hand cuffed to a gas pump and a merry executive knitting and purling his way to the office. <br />
BLOG POST
A Big City Mayor Makes a Splash!
Big city mayors (and even some smaller city leaders) are making a big splash! LA’s Antonio Villaraigosa is dealing with crime; Chicago’s Richard Daley is turning that dusty city green; Philadelphia’s John Street has agreed to an important re-thinking of seven miles of highly developable waterfront; Miami’s Manny Diaz is working closely with Donna Shalala, President, University of Miami, to harness anchor-institution strength to downtown development. And Michael Bloomberg became a winner when he took on New York City’s school system. But of equal note is his soon-to-be announced PlaNYC, a strategic vision for 2030.<br />
BLOG POST
The Moses Shows
<p><img src="/files/u10403/images.jpg" alt="" hspace="10" width="150" height="113" align="left" />Anyone seen any of the <a href="http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/current/466.html">three</a> <a href="http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/current/466.html">museum</a> <a href="http://www.learn.columbia.edu/moses/">shows</a> in New York on Robert Moses, the colossus of urban planning? I myself have not, seeing as how I live 3,000 miles away from them. To recap: highly controversial figure, built many public works from the 1920s through the 1960s, in the end wanted to destroy neighborhoods to build freeways, ultimately brought low by grassroots organizing and the sainted Jane Jacobs via her book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/0375508732/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3662130-2734002?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173894137&sr=8-1"><em>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</em></a>.</p><p>The exhibits have gotten a lot of ink in the New York press and the planning press. An excerpt from Ada Louise Huxtable's review in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> today, and other rantings, after the jump.</p>
BLOG POST
What We Talk About When We Talk About 11th-Hour Preservation
My friend Wes was talking about a burger joint. Wes is from Texas, so sometimes that gives him the right. <div> <br /> <div> <br /> <div> The Beef Burger Barrel, a barrel-shaped hunk of roadside architecture in Amarillo, <a href="http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2007/todays-news-2007/60-year-old-texas-eatery.html">closed last month</a> after 60-odd years of hamburger heaven. </div> <div> <br /> </div> <div> <br /> </div> <div> "It wasn't beloved until everyone heard it was closing," Wes told me. The Barrel started out selling A&W root beer on Route 66 in the 1930s and was rolled later to a less-traveled part of town. Now locals are trying to find a way to reopen Amarillo's quirkiest building. </div> <div> <br /> </div> <div>
BLOG POST
The New Muni Line in San Fran
<p><img src="/files/u10403/T3logo.gif" alt="" width="369" height="72" align="top" /></p><p>The family and I took a recreational ride on the newest light rail line in San Francisco today, the Muni train known as the T. It runs along the city's east-west spine, Market St., and then cuts south along the water of the bay, then inland and way, way south down Third Street—from the city's hottest under-construction neighborhood through the worst ghetto.</p><p>As such, it's an interesting new ride in San Francisco. Some photos and observations after the jump.</p>
BLOG POST
Geographic Web Resources Hold Great Potential for Place Making
At the <a href="http://www.planetizen.com/www.communitymatters.org" target="_blank" title="CommunityMatters07">PlaceMatters06</a> fall conference, participants were treated to the first sneak preview of <a href="http://outside.in" target="_blank" title="Outside.in">outside.in</a>, a spatially enabled hub for blogs and forums that adds location-based information to online discussions. Steven Berlin Johnson, author of several books including Emergence, and The Ghost Map, and the leading inspiration behind outside.in’s conception, demonstrated the beta site during his keynote session. It created a buzz with conference participants quick to recognize its potential as a tool for encouraging community dialogue and place making. <br />
BLOG POST
The G-Word
<p>Are politicians becoming obsolete in the age of the Internet? Are they simply the 'middle-men' that will be replaced by votes cast directly by citizens? This was the issue before a veritable <a href="http://www.usc.edu/schools/sppd/bedrosian/events/dacollpanelists.html">rock-star cast</a> of poliltical insiders from California and around the country. <strong>So what is the G-Word?</strong> </p><p><img src="/files/u4/header2sm.jpg" alt="panelists" title="panelists" hspace="4" vspace="4" width="490" height="55" align="left" /> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
BLOG POST
A Neotraditional Building Boom on Campus
<p>Across the U.S., dozens of colleges and universities are planning or building major campus expansions. However, unlike the 1990s which saw gleaming bioscience research facilities appear on campuses, the new construction is calculated to help attract and retain faculty and students with amenities for living and shopping. Almost without exception, these projects are in a strictly neotraditional design mold. </p>
BLOG POST
Planners Can Access Planning Research Much More Easily Than in the Past
<p>How useful is planning scholarship to planners in practice? Thirty years ago, the author of a British study of information use by planners found, "The journal is not a source of major importance to the planner in practice, though this statement must be taken to reflect inadequate privision and inadequate timeing for reading" (White, 1974). Perspectives differ, but at least some of the problem has been the difficulty of finding relevant scholarship at the moment it is needed. I believe that these difficulties have greatly reduced in the past few years, and that we are on the verge of an unprecedently increase in the use of scholarship in practice fueled by online bibliographic searching and retrieval. From both the scholar's and the practitioner's perspectives, this change will have substantial effects.<br /> </p>
BLOG POST
The Future Of Smart Growth In A World Gone Green
<p>This week, I came to the Planetizen office to find that I had received a package in the mail containing a matching set of men's and women's athletic socks. After opening the box, I learned that these were not ordinary socks – which are manufactured from petroleum derived synthetic fibers – but from a new type of fiber made from corn (which, along with soybeans and bamboo, seems set to become one of the most versatile substances of the 21st century). I'm not really sure why I someone thought I should receive a few pairs of corn-fiber socks (perhaps they knew I'd blog about it), but it did seem to me to be another symbol of how the world is slowly but steadily entering a bold, new, eco-friendly future.</p>
FEATURE
Deriving Urban Density and Intensity in Greater Washington, D.C.
It's not so easy to measure urban density -- either by sight or calculation -- but thoughtful analysis of development intensity can illustrate useful insights into our cities and regions.
BLOG POST
Telling the Planning Story
<p style="margin: 0pt 0pt 6pt" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">During my term of office as president of the American Planning Association, I made my theme “telling the planning story.”<span> </span>My point then – and today – is that we need to do a better job of explaining to our many publics what it is that planners do and why it makes a difference.</font></p>
BLOG POST
Baudrillard is dead; I feel okay
<p><img src="/files/u10403/shockney9.jpg" alt="" hspace="10" vspace="6" width="268" height="162" align="left" />The French postmodern philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudrillard">Jean Baudrillard</a> <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/03/06/europe/EU-GEN-France-Obit-Baudrillard.php">died yesterday</a> (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0679720200/ref=sib_dp_pt/105-3662130-2734002#reader-link">"or yesterday maybe"</a>). He wrote a lot about simulation and simulacra; if you went to college in the late 1980s like me, you quoted him in your thesis. Lots of stuff about how things in the world were actually perfect simulations of real things, and what that meant for our experiences of them.</p><p>Postmodernists. Weird guys.</p><p>But I remembered—misremembered, actually—a salient bit from his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/America-Jean-Baudrillard/dp/8433925059/ref=pd_bbs_sr_4/105-3662130-2734002?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173293088&sr=8-4"><em>America</em></a>. Tracked it down in a recent issue of the <a href="http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_1/levy.htm"><em>International Journal of Jean Baudrillard Studies</em></a>. It's coming after the break.</p>
BLOG POST
Web sites to read, and an interesting paper
<p>Our blog taskmaster, Christian, told me that my day for posting was going to be the 6th of every month, and that if I failed...well, let's just say he pointed me to <a href="http://www.bmezine.com/" target="_blank" title="body mods">this site</a> and told me to be afraid.</p><p>So here I am, with an easy three hours before end-of-day.</p><p>Let's get started with a couple of blogs you should be reading (other than ours, of course). The action starts after the jump.</p>
Clanton & Associates, Inc.
Jessamine County Fiscal Court
Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS)
City of Grandview
Harvard GSD Executive Education
Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commissions
Salt Lake City
NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
