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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It’s an uncomfortable truth: doing the right thing for our communities usually means doing the hard thing. Or at least the less easy thing. What does this mean not only for the people who design our cities and towns but for those of us who live there?
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Community Builder Jacob Moses converses with Kevin Leier—a social studies teacher at Rugby High School in North Dakota—and a few of his students about their new community building class inspired by Strong Towns.
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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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We should require our local governments to develop some discipline and reliability in their permitting approach. These are practices that demonstrate respect for both our civic institutions and the people they are supposed to serve.
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If a local resident or business owner with a high school diploma can’t sit down and figure out what she can and cannot do with her property in less than an hour, the zoning regime is exclusionary. Here are five guidelines for making it more accessible to laypeople.
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This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck discusses the role of planning in correcting for legacies of segregation and inequality. Is more enlightened policy enough to change course? Or do we need to more fundamentally rethink who has the power to shape cities?
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I don’t know why I’m an certified planner anymore. More importantly, it’s not clear to me why the world will be a better place if I am.
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