Let’s talk about master developers and how all-at-once, large-scale development doesn’t offer the environment in which resilient economic ecosystems emerge.
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A lot of supposedly "innovative" proposals are for things that have long existed in neighborhoods, but you wouldn't know it based on the language that planners use.
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In the postwar era, North American cities bulldozed whole blocks and neighborhoods for freeways, parking, and urban renewal. Old fire insurance maps can help us piece together what happened.
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In the history of urban planning and zoning, pretext has often been used to achieve unstated goals, with (at best) questionable public purposes.
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Through concerted and creative efforts to know their neighbors, listen to resident concerns and educate people on the city’s trajectory, these planning professionals are going against the grain and fighting for the city they love.
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Thousands of Christchurch residents weighed in on how to move their quake-ravaged city forward. Leaders dumped that plan for a top-down rebuild plan created behind closed doors…with predictable results.
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Son las experiencias de personas reales que deben guiar nuestros esfuerzos de planificación. Sus acciones son los datos que deberíamos recopilar, no sus preferencias declaradas.
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A lot of bad public engagement sets the impossible goal of identifying the community’s “vision” for a place by asking people about their preferences—usually with questions they’re ill-equipped to answer. There’s a better way.
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Decades into the Suburban Experiment, many towns and cities have precious few old buildings left. Those that remain could be adapted to new uses—but cities are making that hard.
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Too often, city planners defer to “context” in the most superficial way—privileging the massing of buildings over the deeper forces that define a neighborhood’s identity.
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Big data and new technology make bold promises about solving urban problems. Not only do they fall well short of solutions, but can actually make things worse.
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Community consensus sounds nice. But, as a final standard for planners, it ends up supporting the status quo rather than challenging it.
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What’s missing from most comprehensive plans? Dollars and cents. Here’s a simple reform that will focus the conversation on development patterns that create real wealth.
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A lot of bad public engagement sets the impossible goal of identifying the community’s “vision” for a place by asking people about their preferences—usually with questions they’re ill-equipped to answer. There’s a better way.
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The streetcar suburb was the dominant development type in American cities between about 1890-1930. What lessons can we learn about how to build our cities today?
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Chain stores often claim they can’t break from their standard design templates when moving into your city. Don’t believe it.
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Plano, Texas is the unfortunate object lesson: We can’t solve the Suburban Experiment using the same kind of thinking we used when we created the Suburban Experiment.
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Plano’s first comprehensive plan in 30 years contained good faith efforts to address the city’s looming financial crisis. The city council just scrapped it, reverting to the status quo development approach that caused the crisis to begin with.
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If we’re serious about reorienting our local government towards the urgent needs of people, it’s not enough to invite them to a “table” they neither own nor control.
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It’s time to shift the power in our cities to bottom-up systems that address urgent needs rather than protect the status quo.
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