Just about anybody remotely interested in how the world’s most admired places earned their adulation is going to love Dhiru Thadani’s new book: The Language of Towns and Cities. In it, Dhiru subtitles the book “A Visual Dictionary,” but as L.J. Aurbach points out in his blog review, it’s really an encyclopedia. And it couldn’t come at a better time. Continue Reading
December 3, 2010 | 10:43 am
Dhiru’s Encyclopedia of City-Shaping: Reassurance in Uncertain Times
September 9, 2010 | 11:59 pm
Katrina’s Fifth Anniversary: Getting Real in Mississippi
Every year since Hurricane Katrina mauled the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf coasts, I’ve returned to Mississippi around the storm’s August 29 anniversary to renew friendships and refine my capacity for humility. The friendships have turned out to be the most rewarding outcomes of the 2005 Mississippi Renewal Forum, the historic charrette in Biloxi six weeks after the storm. The humility training is less fun, but it’s starting to take.
What’s clear is how naïve I was about the extent of the devastation and the appetite for “building back better than ever.” At least in the ways we outsiders imagined. Continue Reading
August 27, 2010 | 12:30 am
Sustainability’s Triple Bottom Line: Tool for Commit-a-Phobes?
As a recovering journalist, I’m working hard to suppress old impulses. But habits of a couple decades are hard to shake. Which is why I’m struggling with familiar twitches of cynicism when it comes to “sustainability.”
We’ve reached a point where just about everybody is laying claim to a sustainability strategy, whether we’re talking mining companies blowing up mountaintops or guys selling eight-mile-per-gallon SUVs. Let’s give them this: They have a point, provided sustainability goals are tied to the desire to keep on doing whatever you’re doing in perpetuity. Continue Reading
June 11, 2010 | 4:07 pm
Back to the Farm (And to the Bunker)
Just when reporters were beginning to buy into the hopefulness of “sprawl repair” and “ag is the new golf,” Andres Duany trips them up with visions of the dark side. Or at least the really hard side, as in the hard work ahead if we’re to reverse the direction of 20th century excesses.
“Our wealth as a nation allowed us to become stupid in planning and we separated everything – residential areas, commercial, industrial,” Duany told an Oregon audience May 12. “Our wealth allowed us to do that for 50 years – but those days are over.” Continue Reading
June 4, 2010 | 11:01 am
Planning & Zoning: The Musical
When was the last time you heard someone make the case for the “soulfulness” of zoning? Or capture the essence of “third place” theory in a song?
Unless you’ve been listening to singer/songwriter Melanie Hammet, you probably haven’t experienced the connection, at least not quite in this way and certainly not at this level of sophistication. Continue Reading
April 28, 2010 | 12:31 pm
18th New Urbanist Congress: Best Ever?
What’s constitutes “best ever” depends on the takeaways, right? And when it comes to conferences, we could be talking takeaways that aren’t products of the event itself. Like maybe you got a job or connected with a soul mate. Let’s call that the upside of unintended consequences. Continue Reading
April 23, 2010 | 11:50 am
Zoning: No Longer Just for Nerds
Remember when you could empty a room by trying to work zoning philosophy into a conversation? Okay, you can still do that in most places. But the coolness quotient is on the rise, we swear.
Consider the adoption late last year of a form-based code in Miami, surely one of the most exotic political environments in North America. Very high hipness factor. Continue Reading
