Put away the Excel sheet and go for a long walk.
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We often talk about cities in vague phrases and buzzwords that obscure more than they illuminate. It’s time to stop.
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The Strong Towns message is making a difference—perhaps especially with the up-and-coming generation of professionals whose work will shape our built environment. Find out how from these members who are current planning, civil engineering, and public policy students.
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Those two things are all you should need to be able to make sense of your city's zoning code. At least that's the philosophy guiding South Bend, IN planners as they overhaul the city's regulations to be more legible and useful.
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Our preference for the incremental, iterative, and bottom-up is well-known. But does that mean there is no room for big dreams and master plans?
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Early in my career, I helped plan a highway bypass for a small town that I was sure would generate a positive return on investment in the form of economic growth. The only problem? The actual numbers we calculated told a different story.
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There are huge swaths of 1950s and 1960s suburbia that need a bit of TLC—and expensive, top-down “sprawl repair” isn’t going to be up to the task. What’s required is a more patient, grassroots approach. Urban planner John Yung has some ideas.
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As a planner by training, I’m disappointed to see the American Planning Association parrot propaganda about the supposed need for a flood of new federal money for infrastructure. This approach is not conducive to good planning.
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Many of the cities we live in are under intense economic, social, and environmental stress. But how do we start to change the local planning status quo when the public doesn’t trust planners or policy experts?
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It matters what size chunks we build our cities in. Making room for many small-scale development projects on small lots is the universal historical model for a reason, and modern cities could stand to get back to it.
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If granting exceptions to your city’s planning rules is so common as to have become the norm, perhaps it’s time to reconsider the rules themselves.
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It is the experiences of real people that should guide our planning efforts. Their actions are the data we should be collecting, not their stated preferences.
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Jordan Clark and Felix Landry of Verdunity discuss the importance of understanding the fiscal consequences of our development patterns, as well as the ways that cities can use map-based fiscal analysis to make more holistic land use decisions.
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Meet several of the presenters who will be at our North Texas Regional Gathering next month, and learn about the work they’re doing to move their Texas communities away from business as usual and toward fiscally sustainable development.
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New research out of Boston University confirms that those who speak at local public hearings are not representative of the public as a whole. Elected officials seeking to understand constituents’ views should treat these hearings as only one source among many.
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A Strong Towns member shared with us a success story from the city of College Station, Texas, which recently revised its zoning code to make it easier to do incremental development by rehabilitating or expanding older structures.
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“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”
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Nothing good comes of public engagement in which the public isn’t asked questions they can meaningfully contribute to answering. This is not how you build a trusting relationship: a strong foundation on which to work together. This is how you corrode trust.
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11 steps to more comprehensive reporting on zoning changes, new developments and everything in between.
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It is the experiences of real people that should guide our planning efforts. Their actions are the data we should be collecting, not their stated preferences.
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