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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