Development
Next Urbanism Lab 01: The layers that built San Diego
My city’s downtown is built on decades of layers. Planning trends layered upon planning trends. Over its history, through a long list of award-winning vision plans, San Diego has earnestly followed what every other city has done. Not to discount the quality of the plans, mind you. After all, John Nolen did two. Kevin Lynch…
Read MoreFinally Thinkin’ Small: But can we build on what we’ve learned?
As soon as the destructive path of Hurricane Sandy became evident, I got emails and calls from colleagues who, like me, worked in disaster recovery situations on the Gulf Coast. When the clean-up gets underway, could this be an opportunity for the Eastern Seaboard states to apply some of the rebuilding lessons of the Gulf…
Read MoreChicken or the Egg: Who takes the lead on incremental suburban retrofitting?
A proposed Trader Joe’s in Boulder, Colorado, brought up an interesting question this week in a spirited exchange on the Pro-Urb urban issues listserv: In auto-centric places where streets and infrastructure lack any sense of meaningful pedestrian amenity, who should take the lead on turning things around? That is, should developers be required to build…
Read MoreMunicipal Placemaking Mistakes 01: Quantity over quality
Today we begin a PlaceShakers experiment. Through a series of periodic posts, Nathan Norris will explore how cities hinder their own placemaking efforts, wasting time and money by investing in tools, policies and programs that deliver lousy results. In the process, we’ll be looking to you to help flesh out the content through examples, personal experiences…
Read MoreThe New Incrementalism
The latest design trend appears to be designing a place to be realized in very gradual stages. Not in terms of planning for phases of development pods, built-out in a predetermined sequence, but about individual lots changing — evolving — over time. Very rarely now are we designing to build immediately for a project’s absolute…
Read More“The Joel Salatin of Homebuilding”: Revisiting Clay Chapman’s multi-century, $80/sq. ft. house
“You [..] have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.” — Joel Salatin, author and renegade farmer Anyone who’s paid even modest attention to what’s been happening on the food scene over the past five or six years has surely heard of Joel Salatin. Featured prominently in Michael…
Read MoreForm-Based Codes? A picture’s worth a thousand words
If the attendees list of Placemaking@Work, my monthly webinar series, is any indicator, we’re increasingly united in our desire to improve the places we call home, wherever those places might be. Over time, I’ve had participants from Hawaii to Russia, from British Columbia to Saudi Arabia, and many points in between. The common thread among…
Read MoreReady for the Geezer Glut? Then think beyond “aging in place”
Among the Big Issues awaiting communities after we shake off the post-recession blues is what to do about demography. Particularly the part about America’s aging population. The first-borns among the 76-million-strong Baby Boomer generation reached 65 in 2011. And over the next three decades, the geezer slice of the population pie will swell to 20…
Read MoreZoning Reform: Drilling down on key audiences
A couple of weeks ago we discussed the various audiences you must connect with when addressing zoning reform. As we noted, zoning reform is an extremely political, and often-fractious process because it affects the property values of landowners, the business plans of developers, and the legacy of the elected officials. There are two audiences that…
Read MoreElevate Your Thinking: Light, air and connectivity beyond the street
As we increasingly urbanize, relearning the craft of creating human-scaled places, I often — too often — hear that “if we just get the ground floor right” then all will be fine. While obviously a good start, and one that addresses the most immediate of pedestrian interests, I find that this line of thinking ultimately…
Read More