NYU CUSP?

"we have to find fast, creative, profitable ways to capitalize on local ingenuity and turn public spaces into treasured community places."

(does anyone else find PPS kinda annoying?)

"By building on an antiquated framework, however, we have created a conflicted, confusing document (which, for instance, still regulates blacksmiths and requires special permits to build a health club—often requiring years for approval and entailing thousands of dollars in consulting fees). As a result, the discussion of what the city of the future should look like is often restricted to those with the expertise to understand the zoning resolution, not those who are most affected by it."

On the first 100 rezonings

Bay Area regional plan. Org by MPO, business & environmental grps. Some nice stamen mapping, but mostly PDF soup.

Tommy Camp lays out the sad decline of physical planning and the marginalization of a profession. 

Stats on the City. Mostly broken down by CB.

South Sudan considers a new capital.

SPURA inching toward a consensus on a set of guidelines. Not the most momentous news, but it's something more than gridlock.

"The hangar on the edge of Floyd Bennett Field has the familiar, post-apocalyptic look of urban decay"

"youarethecity is a research, design and planning practice interested in creating dialogue about the urban environment."

<<Jackson Heights is already a ‘green’ community in that most people in this neighborhood take public transportation, live in compact spaces, shop locally and live frugally. But Jackson Heights also faces a distinct set of environmental challenges. The City Council district that includes Jackson Heights has just 1 acre of park space for every thousand children. Traffic to and from nearby LaGuardia airport pollutes the air and clogs the streets. And Jackson Heights has a larger share of tenants living in severely overcrowded housing than any other neighborhood in New York City.>>

Obviously written by professionals:
<< Maximize opportunities within the core while maintaining it for academic and student-serving uses.>>

On the Plan for New York 1969. Inexplicably one of the only places on the new with photos.

<<The New York City Bicycle Master Plan, issued in May 1997, is the final report of the first phase of the Bicycle Network Development (BND) Project, a joint Department of City Planning (DCP)/Department of Transportation (DOT) effort. The goal of the BND Project is to increase bicycle ridership in New York City, and the purpose of the Plan is to articulate the City's action plan. The BND project is partially financed through the Congestion Mitigation Air Quality (CMAQ) program of the Federal Transportation Equity Act of the 21st Century (TEA-21). The Federal program provides funding for the planning, design and development of bikeways as a means of improving air quality, reducing energy costs, reducing congestion on existing roadways, and helping to provide for lower overall transportation costs. >>

Awfully definite name for a loose collection of proposals, projects, and developments. <<The plan for Lower Manhattan calls for the public and private sectors to partner in support of Lower Manhattan's growth and revitalization beyond the borders of Ground Zero, and to strike the appropriate balance between the commercial uses planned for the World Trade Center site and the need to develop Lower Manhattan as a viable, full-service New York community.>>

<<The vision for Water Street proposes broad integrated changes in the physical environment to sustain the success of Lower Manhattan's key commercial corridor. The character of the Water Street subdistrict calls for ambitious and holistic intervention across each facet of the physical environment. The product of a two year effort, this study was designed to capture and synthesize the views of a broad and inclusive range of stakeholders.>>

<<In December 2006, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg challenged New Yorkers to generate ideas for achieving 10 key goals for the city's sustainable future. New Yorkers in all five boroughs responded. The result is the most sweeping plan to enhance New York's urban environment in the city's modern history. Focusing on the five key dimensions of the city's environment - land, air, water, energy, and transportation - we have developed a plan that can become a model for cities in the 21st century. The combined impact of this plan will not only help ensure a higher quality of life for generations of New Yorkers to come; it will also contribute to a 30% reduction in global warming emissions.>>

<<In September 2010, New York City released the NYC Green Infrastructure Plan which presents an alternative approach to improving water quality that integrates “green infrastructure,” such as swales and green roofs, with investments to optimize the existing system and to build targeted, cost-effective “grey” or traditional infrastructure.>>

Bicycle planning firm in Brooklyn.

Suburbia is not as built out as it seems. Consider the mapping of 8,300 acres of opportunity – vacant parcels and parking lots – in the many small downtowns of the country’s “first suburbs” on Long Island. On the occasion of the release of these revealing new interactive maps, the Long Island Index invites all architects, urban designers, planners, students, visionaries and everyone else interested in shaping our suburbs’ future to help us “Build a Better Burb.” This ideas competition seeks bold design proposals for retrofitting underutilized asphalt in suburban downtowns into innovative and surprising new uses, forms and urbanisms.

Mapping tool from CNT for doing side-by-side comparisons of carbon/expenses/density/etc for US metro areas. Pretty snazzy.

Only a 1.7% increase in residential capacity.

cluster industry with mega-hoist! Gantries in multistory industrial parks!

Bruce Katz suggests reinvesting in Detroit's industrial R&D, focusing redevelopment along a key corridor, and building large new parks

"vengeful sect that attempts to summon the spirit of Robert Moses every December 18th by smashing two chunks of macadam over a flaming can of Pennzoil"

the gsd student journal has a new design. much better.

"The subject of the thesis is a section of Aleppo, Syria's second city. Atta describes decades of meddling by Western urban planners, who rammed highways through the neighborhood's historic urban fabric and replaced many of its once ubiquitous courtyard houses with modernist high-rises. Atta calls for rebuilding the area along traditional lines, all tiny shops and odd-angled cul-de-sacs. For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project to restore the Islamic culture of the neighborhood, a culture he sees as threatened by the West. 'The traditional structures of the society in all areas should be re-erected,' Atta writes in the thesis, using architectural metaphors to describe his reactionary cultural project. In Atta's Aleppo, women wouldn't leave the house, and policies would be carefully crafted so as not to 'engender emancipatory thoughts of any kind,' which he sees as 'out of place in Islamic society.'"

A piece I wrote about my Typology project. Check it out!

forum on cities in comics:
"I kind of think of Gotham as NYC in the 1970s, and Metropolis as NYC in some optimistic urban planner's CGI simulation."

"Founded in 1937, Citizens Housing and Planning Council is a non-profit research organization dedicated to improving housing and neighborhood conditions through the co-operative efforts of the public and private sectors." Notes new leadership in 2006, perhaps getting back in the game after drift?

Sarkozy abandons local govt restructuring and grand planning schemes, goes for transport infrastructure.

"Cite-Jardin" to the south of Paris

Official site of the largest development underway in Amerstdam. 28.000 housing units on a number of artificial islands.

"project is to build communities equipped for the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil." Local food, renewable energy, more self-production. Welcome to the new medieval!

Decrying the closed planning process in the NL, with a somewhat confused idea of the role of design and art. "I never heard of a competition where the least talented designer was given the commission"

great list of planning buzzwords to avoid/ban (UK version)

"The bus lanes in particular, in which no other traffic is allowed, form incomprehensible, empty and as often as not dead fenced-off barriers between and even in the middle of neighbourhoods. There are no landmarks, no stand-out buildings. Noise barriers and roadside greenery for that matter block the view of what lies behind."

Central city residents produce far less carbon than suburbanites, Californian cities have small carbon footprints. Development restrictions are higher in metro areas with lower carbon footprints. More towers in SF, SJ, SD, LA, less development in ATL, TX, etc. Glaeser is lukewarm to a carbon tax, but his proposal mixes (inter)national policy and local implementation, which is unrealistic. Carbon tax seems a good way to go.

APA article on Allston planning on Second Life, the simulation platform used as a civic engagement tool.

Learning from slums. Very clever to present the crossover between Prince Charles, Teddy Cruz and Christian Werthmann.

series of conferences around Dutch planning/design/water management techniques and New Orleans.

on the growth of Almere

on the open planning project and technology in transpo and community planning

competition to re-imagine Grand Concourse on the occasion of its centennial. Sponsored by the Bx Museum and Design Trust for Public Space.

Review of the 4 delta metropool proposals from the 2002 brief.

regional gov't in Amersterdam - what they say they do

regional government in NL

crackpot on the randstad. interesting.

"Waterstudio.NL is specialized in architecture and cityplanning related to living, working and recreation on water."

She of the Most Complete tree collection on flickr.

The BLS runs down the occupation of urban planner. "Urban and regional planners develop plans for the growth of urban, suburban, and rural communities. Others whose work is similar include architects; civil engineers; environmental engineers; landscape architects: geographers; property, real estate, and community association managers; surveyors, cartographers, photogrammetrists, and surveying technicians; and market and survey researchers."

linear park along Watts Branch Stream

"Planners Network is an association of professionals, activists, academics, and students involved in physical, social, economic, and environmental planning in urban and rural areas, who promote fundamental change in our political and economic systems."

"[In her first mayoral run] Palin presented herself as both a defender of small-town Wasilla and an opponent of the curbs on its growth...
Those involved in planning issues at the time say they can recall no major instances where Wasilla used its regulatory power to limit a developer's plans. A local planning advocate, recalls that when she left a planning commission meeting where a conditional-use permit for the Fred Meyer store was approved with only modest restrictions, she saw two company representatives in the lobby, laughing. "They couldn't believe the city didn't care what they did," she said."

1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region

Martin Krieger, physcist planner and photographer. "The city is an archive of its past." Cross-sectional documents of storefront churches, nail parlors, power substations, auto body shops in LA.

Best news from the western front of gentrification in quite a while: "The National Public Housing Museum would be built in a 70-year-old, vacant building at 1322-24 W. Taylor St., the last remaining building from the Depression-era Jane Addams Homes."

awesome flowchart.

"Demographic inversion" proposed as replacement term for gentrification. Question of depth/width/length of the trend. By ed. of Governing mag. Imprecise about inner city vs downtown an what exactly Jane Jacobs wrote.

Food zoning for health reasons in South Central. Great for existing fast food joints. "The councilwoman said she expected city officials to come up with financial assistance for some restaurants."

Proposal to shift housing to Commerce/Treasury and turn HUD's attn to promoting regional cooperation. Federal coordination of land-use policy was aborted back in the early 70's, maybe it's time to bring it back?

"Being trained to develop unusual or extraordinary buildings is not the best preparation you can have [to plan cities]" -Richard Sennett

hilarious booster community site for poundbury

Prince Charles' pet project. Some houses have bricked up windows to imitate the results of glass tax.

Programs to deconcentrate poverty blamed for higher crime rates in smaller cities. to read.

Rightist economic critique of public-private development & eminent domain, from a Manhattan Inst. fellow. Invokes JJ, convention center failures, Kelo.