‘Gentrification’ Redux: Wealth, opportunity, community
It’s pretty clear that breaking news in American cities is not going to let us duck debates about race, inequality and public policy. About time, right? Still, it doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere, what with partisans screaming, “You just don’t get it!” to their opposites across a wasteland of failed ideas. We seem to…
Read MoreSuburban Retrofits: A deep dive
A couple weeks ago, Ellen Dunham-Jones produced a Placemaking@Work webinar that she described as a deep dive into the suburban retrofit case studies, with an hour-long lecture in preparation for the 23rd Congress for the New Urbanism in Dallas, April 29 through May 2. This session is free until the beginning of the CNU here,…
Read MoreWe’re All Complicit in Change: So now what?
For reasons both mysterious and irrelevant, Citylab’s Facebook page promoted a two and a half year old post on bike theft this weekend. What proved interesting about it, at least to me, is that in explaining market demand for stolen bicycles, it referenced a study on how people perceive different types of crime — finding…
Read MoreHere’s to Zimmerman/Volk and to ‘Attainable Housing’
I should maybe feel at least a little guilty for escaping the cold weather in the North Carolina mountains where I live and heading to Florida over the weekend. But I don’t. The destination was, after all, Panhandle Florida, the vertically challenged part of Florida that folks farther south call “LA,” as in “Lower Alabama.”…
Read MoreThe Human Scale
This weekend, I again watched The Human Scale, a film from 2013, and got more stoked to meet Jan Gehl at the 23rd Congress for the New Urbanism (#CNU23) in Dallas in April. Jan will bring the Congress an update on his human scale work since the film was complete, but the ideas are timeless.…
Read MoreLetting Love Rule: All urban density is not created equal
Last week we resurrected a look at the preservation movement — asking if, rather than strict adherence to ideology, love of place could ultimately rule the day — so that, this week, we could put a spotlight on Kaid Benfield, the latest addition to the PlaceMakers team, and his thoughts on the issue’s flip-side. In…
Read MoreSimCity Adopts a Form-Based Code?
No, but I do wish they would. Over the holidays, my ten-year-old and I started playing SimCity. As the many other city planners who’ve played the game have observed, it’s a great way to explore basic city building concepts with people who don’t think about it too often. Now as I gripe about some of…
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Small to Go Big in 2015?
Maybe. Finally. Here’s why.
Those of us who’ve been tangling with status quo protectors in housing design and policymaking got a charge out of Justin Shubow’s Forbes blog post earlier this month. Shubow backhanded modernist starchitects for persisting in their personal artistic vision without regard to the human use of real places: “Modernism might appear outwardly impregnable: it dominates…
Read MoreTalkin’ Right, Leanin’ Left: The ‘New Consurbanism’?
Here’s a quiz for you: What’s the “it” in these two quotes? And who’s talking? It “is a radical, government-led re-engineering of society, one that artificially inverted millennia of accumulated wisdom . .” It “offers conservatism a new venue, one where we can couple our desire for traditional culture and morals with a physical environment…
Read MoreThe Wørd: Placemaking Edition
For some reason — perhaps because the weather was poor, I have a 15 year old daughter, and watching movies makes for a good way to cope with both — one of the themes of the Doyon Family holiday break ended up being future dystopias. Not something necessarily aligned with the hopeful messages more commonly…
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