Community Development
We’re all complicit in change. So now what?
For reasons both mysterious and irrelevant, Citylab’s Facebook page promoted a two and a half year old post on bike theft this weekend. What proved interesting about it, at least to me, is that in explaining market demand for stolen bicycles, it referenced a study on how people perceive different types of crime — finding…
Read MoreHere’s to Zimmerman/Volk and to ‘Attainable Housing’
I should maybe feel at least a little guilty for escaping the cold weather in the North Carolina mountains where I live and heading to Florida over the weekend. But I don’t. The destination was, after all, Panhandle Florida, the vertically challenged part of Florida that folks farther south call “LA,” as in “Lower Alabama.”…
Read MoreThe Human Scale
This weekend, I again watched The Human Scale, a film from 2013, and got more stoked to meet Jan Gehl at the 23rd Congress for the New Urbanism (#CNU23) in Dallas in April. Jan will bring the Congress an update on his human scale work since the film was complete, but the ideas are timeless.…
Read More
Small to Go Big in 2015?
Maybe. Finally. Here’s why.
Those of us who’ve been tangling with status quo protectors in housing design and policymaking got a charge out of Justin Shubow’s Forbes blog post earlier this month. Shubow backhanded modernist starchitects for persisting in their personal artistic vision without regard to the human use of real places: “Modernism might appear outwardly impregnable: it dominates…
Read MoreTransit Oriented Development: A few notes from Winnipeg BRT
This Monday, the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ convened a Transit Oriented Development Summit, to talk about how to make neighbourhoods around Winnipeg’s new Bus Rapid Transit system sing. Right from the start, it was great to see downtown businesses understand that the strength of the spokes adds up to a stronger wheel. Stefano Grande, the head…
Read MorePlacemaking: Preserve, repair, intensify
Placemaking often comes down to preserving, repairing, or intensifying urban or rural landscapes with public spaces at the heart of each neighborhood. Creative placemaking can take that to another level, helping to tease out the character of a place and celebrate it in an unusually insightful and invigorating way. A way that reaches deeper into…
Read MoreWhat This Innocuous Piece of Plastic Says About Our Suburban Future
Okay. So here we are, out west, working on a county-level comprehensive plan. It’s a big county, which means that each day we meet in the lobby of our centrally-located hotel, then journey caravan-style out to one of the various communities we’re serving over the course of a week. Until we get where we’re going,…
Read MoreWhy Placemaking Matters: The ROI of Cities
Thanks to all of you who made last week’s Why Placemaking Matters: What’s in it for me? conversation so interesting. Robert Steuteville, editor of Better! Cities & Towns, jumped in with his own elevator pitch that beautifully connects much of the wonk-speak that I listed last week. Kaid Benfield from Washington D.C. and Brent Bellamy…
Read MoreWhy Placemaking Matters: What’s in it for me?
When a mayoral candidate from my city wrote me to ask me to repeat in writing what I’d said the night before, I realize I need to de-wonk and make my elevator speech more memorable. Why does city planning matter to people who aren’t urban designer types? If I could take an extra five minutes…
Read MoreYou’ve Got Lemons: What now?
A few months ago, I wrote about Leawood, Kansas’ efforts to shut down Spencer Collins’ Little Free Library because it constituted an illegal accessory structure. What made the story interesting is that, while certain advocates were using it as an example of government overreach, a closer look at the facts on the ground revealed that the…
Read More