I put up new blog page (see “Visioning” tab above), with some animations showing different development scenarios. Check it out.
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From the category archives:
Propaganda
I’m working through some podcsts from last month’s Aspen Ideas Festival.
My first pick is Richard Florida on “The Great Reset”.
We have inherited an economy – and a set of institutions, management principles, a way of life – which at every level reflects the old industrial order, which has been collapsing before our very eyes. . . .
I’m not totally convinced of Florida’s theses about the creative class, etc. but he has some thought-provoking statistics and conclusions about the nature of economic development, job creation, urban planning, community strengths, what drives the economy, and how to move forward.
Click here to listen. If you bog down, don’t miss the Q&A at the end (beginning around the 42 minute mark ).
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Continuing my weekly roundups, here’s the best of what I found/read last week:
The Planning Commissioners Journal continued its Planning ABCs series with “R is for Regional”, which had some interesting highlights of prescient planning in America over the past few centuries. I particularly enjoyed reading about Ogilthorpe’s plan for Savannah, which
set a framework for growth by providing for development by planned neighborhood units, focused on public squares, and edged by through streets. A key feature of the plan was the provision of public land reserves for future neighborhood additions.
The plan also provided for Savannah’s urban center to be bounded by small allotment gardens for growing food for family consumption. These gardens were, in turn, rimmed by a network of larger farm plots. Each grouping of ten farms shared a wood lot, providing fuel and game. Oglethorpe’s recognition of the connection between agricultural production and urban vitality remains instructive for planners today.
Since planners sometimes don’t get it right, in contrast to the examples above, the Sustainable Cities Collective post Ecological Urbanism: Redesigning the City urges us to learn from past mistakes:
Related to that is another point of concern deriving from the narrow interpretation of sustainability. Quite frequently, particularly during the last couple of years, sustainability is equated with minimising energy and resource use. I am afraid that applied to the urban realm, the dictate of resource efficiency can produce similar outcomes to those generated by the push for greater functionality which dominated modernist city planning during the previous century. Following such rationale, for instance, one can easily make the argument for the wholesale replacement of the energy inefficient historic housing stock of many cities around the world.
There were good ideas and examples of real-life applications in Mashable’s How Social Media is changing government agencies. “While many government agencies still tend to employ the “broadcast” model when using social media, some are engaging…”
At the local law enforcement level, Web 2.0 technology has been implemented in some departments to give people details about what officers have been up to. At the Bellevue Police Department in Nebraska, Twitter is used to solicit help from the public and Facebook is used as a comment and complaint board for residents. In Great Britain, the Merseyside Police website personalizes information according to neighborhood, also appealing to the public for help as needed.
Finally, a thought-provoking article in The Atlantic tells about a program to address “food deserts”, urban areas in which there is literally no access to fresh food and people are confined to a diet of Cheetos and Big Gulp soft drinks. We’re very fortunate in our choices here, but many poorer areas have been denied that.
When I first began working. . . we had to spend a lot of time showing people maps, showing them the evidence. Of course, when we spoke to the folks who actually lived in those neighborhoods, they were acutely aware that there was no fresh food available. . . The areas where there was no access to fresh food also had the highest rates of diet-related deaths. After we launched our first report, showing a connection between health and food access, people started to pay attention here. City council members and state representatives were surprised. They hadn’t seen anything like that. So we started to feel some movement and some mobilization.
More next week. This is fun.
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I find most of these articles and sites through RSS feeds I monitor or links sent via Twitter. (By the way, my new account there is @TracyDavis.) I’m sharing them here because, if I don’t, many local readers may not see them, and they’re too good to miss.
From the Associated Press (Madison, WI):
On the 10th anniversary of the state’s Smart Growth law, leaders of the Wisconsin Builders Association and the Wisconsin Realtors Association gave the innovative comprehensive planning initiative a qualified endorsement.
At a conclave sponsored by 1000 Friends of Wisconsin called Smart Growth@10, Jerry Deschane, Builders Association executive vice president, said his organization went into the legislative process “kicking and screaming” a decade ago, but participated in the drafting of the law, which he now regards as “a good planning statute.”
Read more here.
My hero of the week is U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, who addressed a Senate subcommittee on the subject of “livability”.
I think by now it’s pretty clear that Americans want the kind of communities that are walkable, that offer a sense of connection to their neighbors. Everywhere I’ve been in the US during the past 16 months–and I’ve been to more than 80 communities in 35 states–people have been telling me they want more public transportation and walkability with less congestion and sprawl.
Read Secretary LaHood’s blog entry, Livability works for rural communities, for more.
And perhaps my favorite this week, from The American Conservative, “Sprawling Misconceptions“:
For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations. . . It’s odd that self-described libertarians such as Stossel are so slow to grasp that government planning makes sprawl ubiquitous. . . First of all, with a depressingly few exceptions, virtually every town in America looks the same. That is, it has the same landscape of arterial roads, strip malls, and residential subdivisions, accessibly only by car.
I got a real kick out of the original post’s hyper-hyperlinks when remarking on the tired accusation that sprawl’s opponents are inflicting their own views and choices on the free market by ‘limiting where they can build’ (author’s quote): “The fallacy of this view has been pointed out about 100 times.”
And in the “Could Be Worse” department, Strong Towns’ report on Minnesota’s “most vulnerable cities” puts Northfield at #573 out of 855. (Dundas is #678.)
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