Urban Planning
Basics
Confronting Male Dominance in the Urban Planning Debate
How can we make more space for women's voices in the urban transportation sphere?
August 17, 2017
London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Transportation Vision: Add a Million People While Cutting Traffic By 3 Million Miles Each Day
London Mayor Sadiq Khan's transport strategy for the next 25 years lays out a vision for how his city, expected to add 1.5 million people by 2041 on top of its current 9 million residents, is planning to keep moving while reducing pollution and improving quality of life. The big idea: Cars are the problem, not the solution.
June 21, 2017
Which Cities Are Adding Walkable Housing the Fastest?
As more Americans look for walkable places to live, cities are struggling to deliver, and a lot of neighborhoods are becoming less affordable. A new analysis by Kasey Klimes of Copenhagen's Gehl Studio illustrates how major metro areas have let their supply of walkable housing shrink over the years, contributing to today's housing crunch.
February 4, 2016
Marohn vs. O’Toole: Sizing Up The Great Debate
Last week, Charles Marohn of Strong Towns went head to head with "antiplanner" Randall O'Toole in Lafayette, Louisiana. The debate was billed as an event to help the city with its regional planning process and was broadcast over local radio.
September 15, 2015
Talking Headways Podcast: I’m Not a Scientist
Do you ever think about the ecology of the city you live in? Not just the parks and the smog. Scientists are starting to examine urban ecosystems more holistically: the trees and the concrete, natural gas lines and soil, water pipes and rivers. The natural and the synthetic feed off each other in surprising ways. We're not scientists, but we found it interesting.
November 20, 2014
Fixing a Blank Wall Streetscape With Storefront Retrofits
Every city has places where the buildings present a blank face to the sidewalk. A dark, recessed arcade deadening the pedestrian environment or a soulless concrete wall fronting a windswept plaza.
September 5, 2014
TransitMix: A New App for Your Fantasy Map
I'm a little intimidated by sharing my first fantasy transit map with an audience that I know to include some ardent and accomplished fantasy transit mappers. But here goes: my first attempt.
August 22, 2014
Talking Headways Podcast: Crown Prince of Fresh Air
What would you think of a city planner, out ruffling feathers with his bold ideas about density and urbanism -- who commutes to work an hour each way from his ranch way outside the city? Ironic -- or hypocritical? That's the question we wrestle with in our discussion of Brad Buchanan, the head honcho at Denver's Department of Community Planning and Development.
August 19, 2014
Trading Cars for Transit Passes “in the Middle of the Corn and Soybeans”
This post is part of a series featuring stories and research that will be presented at the Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike/Pro-Place conference September 8-11 in Pittsburgh.
August 15, 2014
What Can an Algorithm Tell Us About How People Perceive Streets?
What makes people feel that a street is safe, and what do those perceptions tell us about different streets? A group of researchers at MIT have developed a formula designed to approximate people's subjective reactions to the way streets look. They hope it will help chart shifts in the quality of city environments over time and prove useful to urban planners and architects seeking to better understand what makes streets appealing.
August 8, 2014