Archive for the ‘ Planning ’ Category
Well, I wasn’t going to blog this ugly event (to which JS brought my attention), but seeing as the NYPost has picked it up in addition to the NYTimes and as it’s on the front page of reddit.com, I guess I can mention it briefly. I consider Mac, the professor in the dispute, to be [ READ MORE ]
Herrick, Feinstein LLP, a law firm I consulted and worked for some years ago and now home to a couple of Columbia UP graduates, has created a blog (Herrick ZONE) with information on NYC land use and environment plans and news. [ READ MORE ]
John Forester, Scott Peters, and Margo Hittleman have put together a site of planning practitioner profiles called ‘Practice Stories‘. Practitioner profiles let us hear directly from planners, educators, and organizers about the practical challenges and opportunities they really face. Crafted from edited transcripts of interviews with experienced practitioners speaking about how they handled specific, memorable projects [ READ MORE ]
Nancy Odendaal is touring African planning programs to coordinate a program on educating planning for the challenges of planning African cities, which DM told me yesterday is the hot focal point for study now. She is blogging about it. [ READ MORE ]
[From 3quarksdaily] The City Planners Cruising these residential Sunday streets in dry August sunlight: what offends us is the sanities: the house in pedantic rows, the planted sanitary streets, assert levelness of surface like a rebuke to the dent in our car door. No shouting here, or shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt than the rational whine of a power mower cutting a straight swath in the discouraged [ READ MORE ]
Slate has an article on bicycle parking, which I’m sure will be of interest to at least one of the readers of this blog. [via metafilter] [ READ MORE ]
[Straight from Slashdot] “Solar Roadways, a project to replace over 25,000 square miles of road in the US with solar panels you can drive on, just received $100,000 in funding from the Department of Transportation for the first 12ft-by-12ft prototype panel. Each panel consists of three layers: a base layer with data and power cables [ READ MORE ]
The NYTimes reports on a new book on Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City. I’m sure it’s a worthwhile read, but it’s one that’ll have to wait. I’m deep into the technological emergence of containerization…a place I should have been a couple of years [ READ MORE ]
The NYTimes has this on the dispute over Broadway Triangle, which Columbia did a studio on a couple of years ago. [ READ MORE ]
The NYTimes has a story today on the decline of Bend, Oregon as immigrants from California discover that their quest for a better life has run aground in the current economic storm. Along the lines of Richard Florida’s destination cities for the economically productive, these families sold (or tried to sell) their houses in California [ READ MORE ]
The Bronx Museum sponsored an international ideas competition for reimagining the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. This is JWS’s surely prize-winning entry. A bit of a mishmash of goals (as any good planning actually should be!), but an intriguing set of suggestions nonetheless. I haven’t quite figured out how the raised platform over Park Avenue [ READ MORE ]
The Bloomberg administration today joined cities like San Francisco and Portland in prescribing street design guidelines that it considers desirable both aesthetically and pragmatically. It is supposed to speed up processing, thereby saving the city and developers money, and improve the city’s livability. (I haven’t seen it yet, though.) [Update: The guidelines are available here.] [ READ MORE ]
WSJ has an article on demographic changes in the ‘hip’ cities of the Creative Class during the current crisis. The basic punchline is that people aged 25-39 are still moving to hip cities like Portland, OR (not SF or NYC, I’d note), despite a lack of job opportunities. As a consequence, there is a ‘filtering [ READ MORE ]
A couple of people have emailed this out, but I’ve been so wrapped up in my shift to a text-based computer environment that I’ve neglected this and numerous other important things for a few days. Apparently you can get by in the suburbs of Germany with only a bike. Shouldn’t be surprising. You can do [ READ MORE ]
The NYTimes reports that Flint may be about to aggressively shrink itself down to a most cost effective and attractive form. [ READ MORE ]