Blogs & Opinion
"Willingness and Ability" as Drivers of Community Development
The work of planning at some point becomes the work of doing.
Few communities move from planning to executing easily. This is especially notable in weak markets, though it occurs in strong markets too. In weak markets, planning does not typically require anyone to make a commitment. Or to put it more directly, it too seldom requires the community to really make choices.
Choosing Ignorance is Stupid
People love statistics. They let us understanding the world beyond our own senses. USA Today publishes a daily Snapshot which presents a graph of random statistics. Sports talk and business analysis are dominated by statistics. We measure our progress, or lack thereof, and compare ourselves with others, based on statistics about our size, activities and accomplishments.
Urban Design Graduate Study for Planners
Each year a lot of students ask me "how can I get a degree in urban design?" This is a very big question but in this blog I outline
some key questions that those interested in urban design in planning need to
consider.
Does Twitter Support a Better Global Urbanism?
The True Cost of Driving and Travel Behavior
Over the past few years a variety of documents ranging from contemporary media to more serious research efforts have addressed the cost of auto ownership and use. These estimates are often used to address two important transportation issues, the household benefits of using transit in lieu of auto ownership and/or the consideration of household location decisions in the context of the total cost of housing and transportation. Two often referenced sources of research on these issues are the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s (CNT) initiatives in developing a housing and transportatio
Traffic deaths and safety: who's really the safest?
William Lucy of the University of Virginia has written extensively on the question of whether outer suburbs are safer than cities or inner suburbs; he argues, based on traffic fatality data, that outer suburbs are certainly less safe than inner suburbs, and maybe even less safe than cities. (1)
However, Lucy’s analysis is not particularly fine-grained: it analyzes data county-by-county, rather than town-by-town. What’s wrong with this? Often, suburban cities within a county are quite diverse: some share the characteristics of inner suburbs (e.g. some public transit) while others look more like exurbs. So I wondered whether there is any significant 'safety gap" between inner and outer suburbs.
Tea Parties and the Planning of America
I recently had the pleasure of sitting on a panel convened by the Lincoln Instititute of Land Policy to discuss the Tea Party and its effects on local planning (a topic I've discussed earlier on this blog). At one point, the moderator asked if there were any successful techniques that planners could use to effectively deal with Tea Party activists. This was an intriguing question, but also one that I thought was a bit odd. Controversy and conflict are not new to planning; they are built into the very process of American planning because of its inherent openness and inclusiveness.
Betting on the Enduring Attraction of the Printed Word
Like the rare Corpse flower that blooms every several years, the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects is planning to publish yet a new magazine exploring and extolling local design, how it impacts “our everyday life,” and “who architects are as people.” Such an effort at such a time deserves notice.
USA Today: A Rude Wake-Up Call For Cities
LOGAN AIRPORT, Boston – I’m on my way home from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Journalists Forum , an annual event, co-sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Neiman Foundation, in which journalists from around the country convene to discuss, jointly, the fate of our industry and the fate of American cities.
Was Governor Romney Right Suggesting (Perhaps) that HUD Should Be Eliminated?
Set aside whether or not you agree with anything Governor Romney has to say about anything. Set aside whether or not you think it is axiomatic that the people of the United States need a federal agency generally charged with the mission of housing the poor and attending to urban issues.
Candidate Romney may be doing us a favor by putting HUD on the table for us as an American community to evaluate. It does not matter if the world that favors the elimination of HUD is largely comprised of what Senator McCain called Tea Party Hobbits; the question as to the merit of keeping HUD or not deserves our attention.
Winds of Change Blow Through APA 2012
As the APA national conference draws to a close after four days of connecting, collaborating, and conversing, another c-word has been running through my head -- change. Of course, introducing and disseminating change is the currency of such conferences, where sessions are intended to facilitate professional development and transition by introducing attendees to the progressive practices and policies being spearheaded across the professional world. I mean, why else would we attend such events? Surely not only for the raucous opening night party, right? Right??
However, it seems there was more than the usual dose of change in the air during this year's proceedings.
The End of Exurbia? Not Yet
After the Census Bureau released population estimates showing that core counties were (at least in some metro areas) growing faster than exurban counties, the media was full of headlines about this alleged trend. An extreme example came from the Washington Post: "An end to America's exurbia?" (1)
City Planning LOLCATS
APA’s Fast, Funny, and Passionate sessions at the national American Planning Association conferences are designed to entertain and educate. I’m serving as the moderator and a speaker at the Sunday morning session. My talk is called “Pin, Post, and Push to Promote Planning.” The purpose is to share lessons about how planners can use social media to promote planning.
Youth and the Greatest Love of All….What I Learned From Whitney Houston
In Greenwich Village: a Case for a Planning Landmark, or, Simply, a Dash of Nostalgia
There is a certain irony in community stalwarts in testy Greenwich Village wanting to have the stale housing slabs hovering over the bland park composing Washington Square Village declared an architectural landmark that will somehow thwart New York University from overdeveloping further the singular super block.
“Fugataboutit,” would be a relative polite New Yorker’s observation by anyone who has ever been to this dance before, as I have. The plea is really just a feint to get the retro-redevelopment realists involved into a backroom of one of the proposal’s big buck backers to splice and dice the project so it can be swallowed by all without choking to a political death.
Unwillingness to Embrace Demand
At a recent meeting in Washington, DC I was astonished at the demonstrated lack of grasp of how neighborhood markets work. This, after all, was a meeting called by supposed experts in revitalization to discuss revitalization with other experts in revitalization.
Notably missing during six hours of painful back and forth rehashing of Great Society pabulum v 5.0 was any sense of what "demand" means. It's not just that there was a lack of understanding of demand, for three quarters of a day it was as if the very word - demand - was off limits.
Avoiding Undesirable Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Planners strive to anticipate future needs, which sometimes creates self-fulfilling prophecies: by preparing for a situation we help cause it. This is particularly true of automobile dependency. Planning decisions intended to accommodate automobile travel can create a cycle of increased vehicle travel, more automobile-oriented planning, and reduced alternatives. This concept is conveyed brilliantly in the cartoon below, drawn by transportation engineer Ian Lockwood and published in the March 2012 ITE Journal.
Getting into Planning School: How Much do Transcripts Matter?
I’ve had a lot of questions lately from students about how
important transcripts are in the graduate admissions process. Your application
to graduate school is one of the few times anyone will actually read your
undergraduate transcript so it has some importance. However, how much it
matters depends on a variety of factors.
More logical fallacies in planning policy
Ad hominem (arguing against the person rather than the argument) – “Smart growth is in the U.N's Agenda 21 so we have to fight it to stop the U.N's plan to socialize the world.” “Concern about urban containment is just another example of Tea Party extremism.”
Anageon (relying on inevitability)- “Sprawl is inevitable, so there’s nothing we can do about it.”