The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

<p>Though Americans are complaining about rising gas prices, demand has barely budged. And when adjusted for inflation and considered as a percentage of household spending, prices are still below the peaks in the 1970s and 1980s.</p>

May 24 - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

<p>Faced with neglect from the city, the residents of Southwest Detroit have successfully begun to revive their neighborhood on their own.</p>

May 24 - The Detroit News

<p>The City of Savannah is picking up where its founder started by adding a new 56-acre mixed-use project originally envisioned as part of its 1733 master plan.</p>

May 24 - The New York Times

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May 24 - Helsingin Sanomat

<p>A proposed long-term lease of the Pennsylvania Turnpike could provide close to $1.7 billion a year -- funding the state's transit and road needs without the need for additional taxes.</p>

May 24 - Philadelphia Business Journal

<p>The plan's approval by the city planning commission comes along with criticism about its flaws and lack of funding.</p>

May 23 - The Times-Picayune

<p>Carfree Times features Röthelheimpark in Erlangen, Germany, as a livable community largely devoid of cars.</p>

May 23 - Chris Steins

<p>A recent report highlights the growing divide between incomes and housing costs in the Orlando area, leading many families to commute further and further to find affordable housing.</p>

May 23 - The Orlando Sentinel

<p>Fairfax County Supervisors have approved a new measure to restrict the development of stores larger than 80,000 square feet, against the protests of the business community.</p>

May 23 - The Washington Post

<p>Planners in Illinois are learning that farmers don't necessarily want their land protected from development -- as many are counting on cashing out the value of their land at some point.</p>

May 23 - Medill Reports

<p>Western-style suburban developments near Cairo, Egypt, have many concerned that about the loss of local culture.</p>

May 23 - The Los Angeles Times

<p>British journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot talks about global warming, car fuel economy, electric vehicles, manipulation of science, biofuels, the "Axis of Evil" on climate change, and "the great moral issue" of our time.</p>

May 23 - Democracy Now

<p>State agencies in California are starting to review projects based on their greenhouse gas contributions, an approach that may conflict with the state's energy policy.</p>

May 23 - California Planning & Development Report

<p>The divide between extreme wealth and poverty in America's cities is growing starker, at the same time it is becoming more politically invisible, writes Bob Herbert.</p>

May 23 - The New York Times

<p>The Slow Food movement has lessons for giving cities a humane density.</p>

May 23 - The San Francisco Chronicle

<p>Are billboard companies exploiting public roadways?</p>

May 22 - The Washington Post Writers Group

BLOG POST

<p>Think big.<br /><br />That’s what the people of Ontario and the Toronto region set out to do more than 5 years ago when they began a visionary planning process for the area known as the Greater Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario, Canada. (The Greater Golden Horseshoe is the area around Lake Ontario that stretches from roughly Peterborough to the east, west through metropolitan Toronto, and around the west tip of the lake to the southern side and Niagara Falls — hence the horseshoe shape.) </p>

May 22 - Anonymous

<p>New publication VerdeXchange offers an interview with Google's Director of Corporate Environmental Programs about the company's efforts to transform its campus into a greener workplace and the future model of corporate environmentalism.</p>

May 22 - VerdeXchange News

BLOG POST

<p>“We underwrite fun,” says Naomi McCleary, Manager of arts for the Waitakere City Council, one of the municipalities that make up the Auckland (New Zealand) metropolitan region. She is referring to the practice of involving artists in the thinking and creation of public places, buildings, streets, bridges; they take an equal seat at the table from conception to completion. According to Ms. McCleary, the results are remarkable. Fun is a partner of beauty and happiness, it is a means toward the creation of objects and places that are beautifully usable. Around the world it is possible to find municipalities that are underwriting this kind of fun, but for every found opportunity, we have several more that are lost. </p>

May 22 - Barbara Knecht

<p>A string of accidents at a military gunnery range - including numerous missed-target bombings, resulting forest fires, and shots mistakenly fired at an elementary school - have strained relations between the range and neighboring communities.</p>

May 22 - Associated Press via Knoxville News Sentinel