“General Welfare” for the Next Generation

Lately I’ve been thinking about “health, safety, and general welfare” — the basis by which zoning is typically legitimized and measured — and wondering just how great a disconnect needs to form between our purported values and our land use regulations before we admit that something’s not working.

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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…

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Transit 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…

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Urbanists Soak Up Buffalo: PlaceMakers empty their notebooks

The 22nd annual gathering of the CNU wrapped up Saturday night, June 7, in Buffalo. We’re looking forward to the recordings at cnu.org over the next few weeks to fill the inevitable gaps, since the competing sessions and hallway conversations presented the usual embarrassment of riches. Rather than go for a tidy narrative, let’s just…

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Zen & The Art of Traffic Calming

In the view of most urbanists, walkability is a measure of how healthy a city is. It essentially describes how safe and how well-planned a city is for pedestrians, which will in turn determine how often citizens interact with their city. There are so many factors that go in to making a city walkable. The…

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The Road to Prosperity: Real-Time Approaches to Economic Improvement

Across America, too many people believe that “no one will get out of their cars.” The newest data based on the 2012 American Community Survey, shows “it ain’t so,” even for small cities and their surrounding areas. The national trend in the US is a drop of almost 1 percent per year in passenger vehicle-miles-traveled…

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