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June 28, 2016 | 2:51 am

CNU24 Detroit: Summary and celebration

You know how the sweet spot for blogs is 500 words? Well, this isn’t one of those. It’s the geek’s guide to the 24th Congress for the New Urbanism in Detroit. Feeling grateful for the food for thought, and wanting to keep the ideas fresh. This blog compiles city planning tweets from June 8 through 11 on the subject, grouping the ideas into categories of Community, Equity, Lean Urbanism, Transportation, Infrastructure, Suburban Retrofit, and Architecture, along with inspiration from Detroit and Charleston.

Here’s a shout out to all the Twitter-using urbanists in Detroit who used the hashtag #CNU24 to share this wealth of ideas, and I highly recommend following the credits list at the end, along with many others using that hashtag, whose rich content would require an encyclopedia to truly do it justice. Check out the Twitter feed for the ideas I wasn’t able to cover.

Category Planning and Design, Public Policy, Resilience, Theory and Practice, TransportationLeave a CommentTags Charleston, cnu, CNU24, Detroit, Equity, gentrification, Hazel Borys, infrastructure, Major Joe Riley, suburban retrofit

November 23, 2015 | 12:01 am

Walkability: Good money after bad

Let’s talk about dollars spent. Millions of dollars. 7.2 million dollars specifically, of which 5.5 million came directly from the local economy. The goal? At least according to local leadership, it was to increase quality of life via improved walkability.

First, a caveat: This isn’t going to be one of those pieces denouncing government spending as inherently bad. But neither will it be one that suggests all is well when spending gets characterized as an investment rather than a mere expenditure.

Category Economic Development, Planning and Design, Public Policy, Transportation12 CommentsTags infrastructure, pedestrian, Scott Doyon

September 24, 2010 | 3:46 pm

Fat-tastic! Can Small Thinking Solve Our Super-Sized Problems?

According to a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — more commonly known for crunching global budget and employment numbers — the United States is on track to be 75% obese by 2020.

3 out of every 4. And if you check with researchers at Johns Hopkins University, they’ll tell you to expect 86% by 2030. Continue Reading

Category Development, Planning and Design, Public Policy3 CommentsTags Andres Duany, climate change, cnu, community, Duany Plater-Zyberk, healthy communities, infrastructure, livable communities, local food, new urbanism, public health, retrofitting suburbia, Scott Doyon, smart growth, sprawl, sustainability, transportation, urban agriculture

March 24, 2010 | 11:18 am

Love Ain’t Enough: Put Up or Shut Up

Like any next, big something, placemaking is growing up. And in its role as gawky adolescent, it’s beginning to realize something most of us have long since come to accept: You can’t skirt by on youthful good looks forever.

Today, efforts to create more endearing and enduring surroundings are being subjected to decidedly grown up demands. And with them, smart growthers—from enviros to designers to code reform advocates—are learning one of life’s hardest lessons: Love will only take you so far.

Son, you’ve got to demonstrate sufficient returns. Continue Reading

Category Development, Economic Development, Planning and Design, Public Policy4 CommentsTags economic development, energy use, form-based coding, Hazel Borys, infrastructure, new urbanism, public health, smart growth, sustainability, transportation

February 2, 2009 | 12:35 am

Stimulus Showdown

When the Democrats’ $825 billion economic stimulus seemed to choose same-ol’ over sustainable, Smart Growth advocates and New Urbanists began turning up the heat. Favoring super highways over mass transit, rail, pedestrian, and biking alternatives incentivized sprawl for decades. And isn’t sprawl part of what got us in this mess? Smart Growth advocates believe investing new money in the same old strategies will only make it harder to achieve goals of energy efficiency and community affordability. Almost all of this federal stimulus money will find its way into state and local government bank accounts. So debates on how to spend it will take place in forums in Washington and in state houses and city halls all over America.

Time to talk to elected officials in your community, as well as Congress. For Smart Growth and New Urbanist perspectives on the infrastructure stimulus, go to Congress for the New Urbanism, Transportation for America or Center for Neighborhood Technology.

Connecting streets and the stimulus.
To bolster Smart Growth arguments for how to spend stimulus bucks, the latest edition of New Urban News reports on a study of 24 California cities showing that those with the most highly connected street networks have one third the traffic fatalities of cities with poorly connected street networks. And in the same issue, CNU president John Norquist provides commentary on the stimulus.

– Ben Brown

Category Public PolicyLeave a CommentTags economic stimulus, infrastructure, smart growth, transportation