In the seven months since I blogged last, many of us have turned our attention to cataloguing and collecting planning practices of how cities, towns and suburbs are responding to COVID-19 in an attempt to rebuild health and opportunity. Thanks to those of you who contributed to the PlaceMakers Pandemic Response Compendium, currently cataloguing 38 pandemic interventions. From this ongoing crowd-sourced document, we extracted a Pandemic Toolkit of the first 22 actions governments should take to get the economy restarted while protecting public health.
October 20, 2020 | 12:01 am
Pandemic Toolkit: Actions for rebuilding health and opportunity
May 7, 2020 | 6:23 pm
Lessons from the Pandemic: Housing, Retail, Broadband
This is the second in a series of conversations about what comes next in local government policies and processes. Geoff Koski is president of the Bleakly Advisory Group, providing advice to real estate professionals, governments, and non-profit organizations dealing with a wide- range of real estate and economic development-related issues. Read the first post in this series here.
August 29, 2018 | 2:35 pm
The Transformative Power of Walkability (and beer)
I’m suspicious of the words “neighborhood character” in defensive mode. If they once signaled a community characteristic worth prioritizing, the’ve lately become weaponized. A dog whistle for opposition to everything from granny flats to transit to, you know, change. But I’m definitely okay when the character of the neighborhood in question embodies adaptation.
My current favorite example is in my West Asheville neighborhood. It’s a gas station/convenience store redefining the concept of “convenience” for a place in transition.
May 2, 2018 | 1:46 pm
Affordable Housing Finance: Show me the money
In the weeks before the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Savannah, GA, May 15-19, we’re presenting interviews with experts contributing to a day-long exploration of “Affordability: The Intersection of Everything.” A three-hour morning forum on Thursday, May 17, kicks off the discussion, followed by two break-out sessions that afternoon. Below is an interview with Jeff Staudinger, former Community Development Director for the City of Asheville and currently a consultant in affordable housing finance. He’ll be a panelist in the afternoon session, “New Housing Finance (Mostly) Without the Feds,” at 4 p.m.
April 25, 2018 | 4:04 pm
New Housing Finance (Mostly) Without the Feds
In the weeks before the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Savannah, GA, May 15-19, we’re presenting interviews with experts contributing to a day-long exploration of “Affordability: The Intersection of Everything.” A three-hour morning forum on Thursday, May 17, kicks off the discussion, followed by two break-out sessions that afternoon. Below is an interview with Ben Schulman, communications director of the crowdsourcing platform Small Change. He’ll be a panelist in the afternoon session, “New Housing Finance (Mostly) Without the Feds,” at 4 p.m.
January 10, 2018 | 1:50 pm
Resolved for 2018: Fewer delusions, more reality-based planning
Okay, so we’re shaking off the shock therapy of 2017 and ready to move on, right?
Let’s start with admitting some of the stuff a lot of us got wrong about challenges and solutions in municipal and regional planning. Such as: Our misplaced overconfidence in the stability of basic institutions, especially those requiring democratic processes.
December 19, 2017 | 4:01 pm
Year End Reflections: Gratitude for Livable Places
As the year draws to a close, reflection is an important rite of passage: celebrating, mourning, learning, and letting go. 2017 has not been the sort of year in which gratitude is the obvious emotion of choice on many levels. Yet the act of searching for what is beneficial, transformative, and noteworthy helps process through troubling challenges. Year end is a time of accounting for profits and losses, and making sense of what went right and what didn’t. In the city and town planning realm that we discuss here, that often comes down to comparing if our words line up with our actions. Continue Reading
December 13, 2017 | 4:25 pm
The Sidewalk to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions
Sometimes all the right people seem to be at the table, all singing from similar hymnals, and all seemingly focused on transcending growth-as-usual and yet, still, the results fall flat.
Today we look at one of those times.
November 16, 2017 | 1:34 pm
Places that Pay: Benefits of placemaking v2
“Reconciliation is making peace with reality, our ideals, and the gap in between,” via Her Honour, Janice C. Filmon, Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba. Much of our work here at PlaceMakers is about redirecting the trajectory of where we are headed with the targets needed to ensure the wellness of our environment, equity, and economy, so that stopgap measures are kept to a minimum. The studies that quantify how the form of our cities, towns, villages, and hamlets effects this wellness is essential to building the political will to make change. Listed below are the 65 key works I’m most likely to quote, to make the case for developing the city and town planning tools we need to make a difference for the resilience of people, planet and profit. Continue Reading
September 20, 2017 | 1:44 pm
When Coffee Came to London (Not a Starbuck’s story)
Around 1650, coffee came to London. The refreshing and slightly habit forming beverage was a big hit. A new kind of non-alcoholic public house — the coffee house — was quickly invented.
London was a walking city, only the wealthy and businesses had personal transportation. And the weather was famously chancey. So a smart entrepreneur came up with a way of scouting locations.
