Exclusives
BLOG POST
Making Better Fake Cities
If you follow the entertainment/business news, you know that <a href="http://corporate.disney.go.com/index.html">Disney</a> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4642116.stm">bought</a> <a href="http://www.pixar.com/">Pixar</a>, the digital animation company that made <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114709/?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnx0dD0xfGZiPXV8cG49MHxrdz0xfHNvdXJjZWlkPW1vemlsbGEtc2VhcmNofHE9dG95IHN0b3J5fGZ0PTF8bXg9MjB8bG09NTAwfGNvPTF8aHRtbD0xfG5tPTE_;fc=1;ft=23;fm=1"><em>Toy Story</em></a>, among other great movies.
BLOG POST
A Tricorder for Mapping Geeks
<a href="http://www.surveylab.co.nz/What_is_ike.html">This</a> is cool, right? A gadget called ike that combines "an array of different sensors, e.g. GPS, Laser Distance Meter, Compass, Camera and operating software into a rugged hand held mobile device, for rapid data capture." Not so useful for a desk jockey like me, but talk about going off to find yourself....<br /> <br /> Via <a href="http://pruned.blogspot.com/2006/03/prunings-xix.html">Pruned</a>
FEATURE
Top Ten Planning Issues Of 2005
From eminent domain to "condofication", Planetizen editors outline the top 10 planning issues from 2005.
BLOG POST
urban teasers
From Pew / Internet: "A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 45% of online American adults have taken virtual tours of another location online. That represents 54 million adults who have used the internet to venture somewhere else. On a typical day, more than two million people are using the internet to take a virtual tour."<br /> <br /> The need to represent urban areas on-line is greater than ever, especially when we consider the impact a movie can have on a City (The Sixth Sense is Philadelphia's best example of a tourist 'push' after release).
BLOG POST
public tech art
I'm finding this a bit late but i really like some of the projects and their potential for further exploration. "<a href="http://www.spectropolis.info/index.php">Spectropolis</a> Mobile Media, Art and the City is a three-day event (October 1-3, 2004) in Lower Manhattan that highlights the diverse ways artists, technical innovators and activists are using communication technologies to generate urban experiences and public voice. The increasing presence of mobile communication technologies is transforming the ways we live, construct and move through our built environment.
BLOG POST
Clean Air, Open Code
<img src="http://www.arb.ca.gov/images/arbheader1.gif" align="right" WIDTH="200" alt="California Air Resources Board" />I was interested to find <a href="http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/html/62/6296.html">this interview</a> with Bill Welt, the Chief Information Officer of the<a href="http://www.arb.ca.gov/homepage.htm">California Air Resources Board</a> (ARB), discussing with ARB is increasingly building models and applications using Open Source software. The interview appears on the <a href="http://www.madpenguin.org/">Mad Penguin</a>
BLOG POST
All Play and No Work for Jack Makes Jill a Better Planner
Several years ago I was with a group of people who decided to approach the makers of SimCity to see if we could convince them to develop a similar but more credible tool for planners, enabling towns and their residents to look at real planning challenges and experiment with different scenarios in their own community. The response was a solid "no, we're not interested, we're interested in making games.â€<br /> <br /> Can't blame them, considering the market for gamers is easily a thousand-fold greater than that for serious minded planners (not to mention realistic planning tools need real data to run credible analysis; imaginary cities don't).
BLOG POST
Top 8 Planning Technologies, 2006
<img src="http://www.planetizen.com/tech/files//20060224cssbccog.jpg" align="right" alt='Online Impact Analysis' />Thanks to a kind invitation from <a href="http://www.siembab.com/">Wally Siembab</a> to present at the well-attended<a href="http://www.southbaycities.org/"><strong>South Bay Cities Council of Governments</strong></a>' Seventh Annual General Assembly, I had the opportunity to unveil my annual list of the top technologies for planning.<br /> <br /> I briefly presented each of the top eight technology tools, and then provide one or more examples of each.
BLOG POST
Shouting out to a New City Site
<img src='http://www.planetizen.com/tech/files//CasitasGeo.jpg' width='300' align='right' alt='Mexican burbs' />My link-fu is strong. Please welcome to the Web <a href="http://burbmag.blogspot.com/">Burb</a>, a site dedicated to suburbs and New Suburbanism. From the manifesto:<br /> <br /> <br /> <blockquote>The suburbs, in short, are the American mainstream. Our major writers, dating back to Updike and Cheever, have focused on decoding suburban life, and today Richard Ford, Chang Rae Lee, Rick Moody and others continue that work. Suburban megachurches are the engine of American Protestantism. Eminem is a suburban boy, and a suburban phenomenon, as are the "soccer moms†and "soccer dads†fought over in the last few elections.<br /> <br /> Yet for those who live there, the suburbs can be a bewildering place. Urbanites who have moved out for more space and better schools gaze out the kitchen window into their new garden paradise and ask, "Now what?†Children of the suburbs return to find their sleepy burbs utterly transformed by commercialization. Those on rural routes watch in dismay as farms and tiny towns are supplanted by mass developments and strip malls. All of these people have common problems and solutions, from commuting to child care to what to put on the side of a house. Burb is for all of them.<br /> <br /> We talk about "the suburbs†as a state of mind, but only now have real connections begun to be made among the suburbs of even a single city, never mind nationally. Burb is proposed as a place where mutual recognition and the single purpose that comes from it might be achieved.</blockquote>
BLOG POST
Back to School
A few hours ago I got home from my first stint as a reviewer of student urban design proposals. That's right, kids: I went from consumer to teacher without ever having to be a producer. This afternoon I ducked out of work and went to the architecture and planning school at UC Berkeley to have a look, with some real professionals, at 18 class projects for a graduate-level landscape architecture class.<br /> <br /> Here's what happened: a few months ago I got a survey asking me how I felt about open space and parks in my neighborhood - West Berkeley, also known as Oceanview - and specifically how I felt about an alley that bisects my block and a couple blocks northward and southward.
BLOG POST
Urban Design and Conflict
After Adam's last two thoughtful posts, I thought I should weigh in here being the resident urban design on Tech Talk. In general, I sometimes share others concerns with marquee architecture but usually when its seen as a way of boosting economic development or the status of a city. I think in those cases, there are far better ways to boost the livability and physical appearance of a place. Thinking of what an "icon" for say, Fort Wayne, would be is an uninteresting question as that city faces other underlying issues that a marquee project simply can't address.
BLOG POST
The Deep Internal Conflict of Urban Planning
No, seriously. As I keep getting into arguments with urban planners about community involvement (they're in favor of it) and bitching about marquee architetecture (and marquee architects) someone else voiced my inner conflict before I got to a keyboard. Here's Robert McDonald on the <a href="http://www.urbancartography.com/">Urban Cartography</a> blog:<br /> <br /> <blockquote>MIT's new Stata Center lurches impressively over Vassar Street, a mélange of surfaces and cylinders intersecting at odd angles. Designed by Frank Gehry, it's seen as the pinnacle of hip, postmodern architecture in Boston (which ain't saying much), and supposedly is surprisingly functional inside despite its odd form. I therefore feel decidedly square saying it but I must: I think it's rather ugly. More than anything, its ornamentation seems ostentatious to me, arbitrary, like a sculpture pretending to be a building. Part of me still believes in that mantra of modernist architecture, form follows function. Politically and spiritually, this at least seems like an honest goal, far more than mere irony and whimsy.<br /> <br /> Yet as I've been reviewing the works of Mumford and Kunstler, I've been realizing how much of modern architecture and modern town planning has been a disaster. Often the scale of the projects has been all wrong, and the projects have not really been focused on human needs at all. There's typically no respect for public space, no creation of places for human interactions. And they are often just plain ugly, all gray concrete and blacktop, which on our New England winters gets pockmarked with salt stains.<br /> <br /> And so I've been struggling between these two parts of myself. I want architecture and urban planning to reflect some of the honesty of modernism, and yet I want beauty and even a bit of whimsy and ornamentation. It strikes me that both post-modernism and modernism have same fault, at least as they are often practiced: An utter lack of interest in what the users of the space want, and what will seem beautiful in the context of its surroundings. Form does not follow the true, human function of the building but instead a perverted function set by someone other than the users. For modern architecture, it became cheapness of construction; for post-modern architecture, it has become hip irony; for urban planners, it became moving cars efficiently. The solution, in my humble opinion (as an ecologist who is admittedly not trained in architecture), is not to abandon "form follows function†but to make sure society gets the function it wants.</blockquote>
BLOG POST
Why Cities Work: Surprise
A few months ago, when I was still taking the bus to work - and walking from San Francisco's Transbay Terminal to my office - my favorite shortcut got strange. And I'm glad it did, because it helped me crystallize one of the necessary qualities for a great city: surprise.<br /> <br /> I'd taken to shaving a few minutes off the march by cutting down a narrow walkway between two skyscrapers. Tall brick on one side, tall concrete on the other. And at the end: pop. The backend of a simple plaza, bits of crummy retail and a Starbucks guarding the front.
BLOG POST
Global Subways Compared
Do I love this? I love this. Fake Is the New Real <a href="http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/">compares</a> two dozen subway systems from around the world, at the same scale. All these fractal diagrams show, incidentally, a city's rough sprawl-to-core ratio, density, and size -- at a glance. Below, London versus Los Angeles (winner: London).<br /> <br /> <img src="http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/london4a.gif" alt="null" /><img src="http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/langeles4a.gif" alt="Los Angeles subway" /><br /> <br /> via <a href="http://la.curbed.com/">Curbed LA</a>
Heyer Gruel & Associates PA
City of Moreno Valley
Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS)
City of Grandview
Harvard GSD Executive Education
Salt Lake City
NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
City of Cambridge, Maryland
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.
