Category: Public Policy
Smart Growth = Smart Parenting
Put the village on hold. For the time being, it’s gonna take a parent, a councilman and a developer to raise a child.
Flashback 2003: Attending the New Partners for Smart Growth conference in New Orleans, I caught the keynote from a planning official for Vancouver, British Columbia. Now, under normal circumstances,... Continue Reading
Get Real or Get Rich: Lessons for an era of limited trust
It’s a great time to be really rich or really smart.
It’s never hurt, of course, to be able to tap into big bucks or big brains. It’s just that penalties for having access to neither are rising dramatically.
What got me to thinking in this direction was an exhaustive investigative report in last Sunday’s... Continue Reading
Category Public Policy
The Future of Planning: Going meta
“In a world where the peddlers of invention dominate progressive discourse, a willingness to acknowledge--let alone heed--the lessons of history and tradition is a truly radical act.” --Scott Doyon
Check the wiki-hip Urban Dictionary (or watch an episode of Community on NBC) and you’ll find the term meta’s common... Continue Reading
Category Planning and Design, Public Policy
Form-Based Codes? A picture’s worth a thousand words
If the attendees list of Placemaking@Work, my monthly webinar series, is any indicator, we’re increasingly united in our desire to improve the places we call home, wherever those places might be. Last month, I had participants from Hawaii to Russia, from British Columbia to Saudi Arabia, and many points in between.
The... Continue Reading
Coding for Character: The Architecture of Community
My career as an urban designer has been spent, not surprisingly, doing what urban designers do: crafting plans and regulations for municipalities to build great places. A side effect of this, much to my wonderful wife’s chagrin, is that whenever we travel I remain 'on the job,’ annoyingly interrupting her shopping... Continue Reading
“Sustainability” is so ten years ago — Let’s talk “Resilience”
Deep in an April 14 New York Times story on the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami was mention of an iPhone app called Yurekuru that gives warning of an impending quake. The name, said the Times, translates into English roughly as, “the shaking is coming.”
Before the March 11 quake, the app attracted... Continue Reading
Category Public Policy, Resilience
St. Patrick, Charles Dickens and the Role of Beer in Community
This morning I took a moment to reflect upon the challenges and tragedy of the past year -- BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well, Aussie wildfires, the Christchurch and Haiti earthquakes -- until, as a Californian, my mind inevitably drifted back to current events in Japan and their nuclear radiation currently floating its... Continue Reading
Category Planning and Design, Public Policy
Settle Down Now: Is community the new frontier for Generation X?
In 1992, Rage Against the Machine’s Zach De La Rocha offered a dire warning to a restless but aimless Generation X: “If we don’t take action now,” he sang, “we’ll settle for nothing later.” An anthemic rallying cry and yet, just ten years thereafter, Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard was introducing those... Continue Reading
Category Public Engagement, Public Policy
“You’re terminated, hippie.” — Where does that leave local sustainability?
Federal government to sustainability efforts: You're terminated.
In a blockbuster-style showdown, the House Appropriations Committee started a furor this month as they proposed the elimination of HUD, USDOT and EPA sustainability programs in 2011-12, as well as suggesting the rescinding of dollars already awarded by... Continue Reading
Good News: The End Is Near. Really.
More than three decades ago, sociologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death which made the argument that the fear of death, in all its irrevocability and finality, provides a unifying, baseline reality for humans.
We may be overwhelmed and confused by an increasing number of competing “truths,” wrote Becker,... Continue Reading
Category Public Policy