Green infrastructure encompasses a range of innovative, nature-based solutions, such as green roofs, rain gardens, permeable pavements, and bioswales. These approaches work in harmony with the environment to manage stormwater, reduce urban heat island effects, and promote biodiversity. By integrating green infrastructure into urban planning, we can make our communities more resilient, sustainable, and adaptable to the challenges of a changing climate.
March 22, 2023 | 2:31 pm
Green Infrastructure: Let’s get spongy!
January 18, 2021 | 6:58 pm
Serpentine Maze: Pop-up parks in a time of pandemic
In this week’s post, PlaceMaker Hazel Borys walks us through a pop-up park that she and her friends built. And how it helps implement three of the 22 actions of the Pandemic Toolkit. Click below to launch.
September 8, 2020 | 8:00 am
A Pirate Looks at . . . Seventy? (Reflections on a Long Career, with Six Essentials for Greener, Healthier Communities)
Most people who know my work expect the writing I do in this space, as well as my speaking, to focus on what we should be doing to create and sustain greener, healthier communities. Don’t worry, that’s eventually where this particular piece of writing is going. I can’t help myself when it comes to that subject. But I’m not going to start there: allow me to self-indulge my way around a few personal detours first. I’ll try to make them entertaining.
Continue ReadingJune 4, 2020 | 2:24 pm
Climate Adaptation: A weather report
This is a case study of the application of Scott’s argument that will be presented at the upcoming virtual Congress, CNU28, during the Wednesday, June 10, 2:30pm EDT session, New Tools for Urban Resilience, as well as part of our ongoing series in support of urbanist COVID-19 policy discussions.
Among the lessons the COVID-19 crisis and the protests of the death of George Floyd have hammered home are those connected with, first of all, recognizing vulnerabilities, then having a plan to overcome them before the threats are upon us. We’d be wasting this unwelcome opportunity if we didn’t apply what we’ve learned to building resilience capacities in the face of climate change. The current crises are emphasizing how essential it is to plot a path for adaptation after a disturbance, stress, or adversity. Continue Reading
March 23, 2020 | 1:34 pm
Shelter in Place: Working in a time of isolation
In this time of social distancing without a clear time frame, I’m feeling the need to share some of the things I’ve learned over 17 years of working from a home office. It’s clear that the novel corona virus will disrupt our previous ways of doing business, but it’s possible some parts of that may be good, eventually. For people who are able to return to near former levels of productivity while COVID-19 runs its course, you may be able to contribute to economic stability, and save yourself much of the roughly 6 weeks every year that the average North American spends commuting to work. That’d be a serious bump in productive hours available with major reductions in transportation costs and green house gas emissions.
January 24, 2018 | 7:15 pm
Moving Beyond “Smart Growth” to a More Holistic City Agenda
Originally published almost four years ago and every bit as relevant today.
I have spent most of the last twenty years working on an agenda grounded in, for lack of a better phrase, “smart growth.” That agenda basically holds that our regions must replace suburban sprawl with more compact forms of growth and development; that neighborhoods must be walkable and convenient; that automobile dependence must be replaced with a system of mobility choices in which the automobile is only a part. It is an environmental agenda first and foremost, but those of us who advocate it also believe it to be good for people.
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
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
October 25, 2017 | 11:15 am
Corrosion of Community: Impossible standards as an excuse for inaction
In a coming post I’ll be addressing the long crawl towards walkability, and towards communities where the promise of meaningful transportation choice becomes increasingly realized. Long story short, the process, already difficult, can become harder rather than easier over time for reasons I’ll explain. But first, let’s revisit the struggles of just getting started with this post from several years back. Because before you can work your way into the deep end, you gotta get in the pool.
Community fascinates me. Not just the idea of it, but the dynamics, and how those dynamics end up stoking or choking our collective efforts to be together. Having worked in a lot of different places, I’ve had opportunity to study community in action, at both its strongest and weakest, in all different contexts — economic, political, cultural — and have tried to identify patterns that lead to results.
