urban planning

Which City Has the Best Parks? Trust for Public Lands Releases Annual ParkScore Ranking.

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) recently released its annual ParkScore index, which ranks the park systems of the fifty largest U.S. cities.  As with all scorecards, the methodology is imperfect and the metrics are somewhat crude; but seeing how U.S. cities compare across uniform parameters is a good starting point for a larger conversation …

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Take a Hike!

Walking is a sufficiently novel idea to be the subject of newspaper stories — as if our ancestors hadn’t been doing it since long before Homo sapiens evolved.  Anyway, walking is the hot new thing in D.C., according to the Washington Post: “Walkable” is a feature sparking sales and energizing future development and redevelopment, according …

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Next American City

…might sound like a new reality show, but NAC is one of the best serious but non-academic urban policy and planning journals around.  It has recently relaunched, replacing the print edition with what might be called Next American Journalism Model: they are supplementing the daily online content with one very in-depth feature per week, which you can buy …

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Why Don’t Californians Talk About Politics?

That was the question posed by a Zocalo forum this evening here in Los Angeles.  I wasn’t there — I was actually at my daughter’s school’s ice cream social, talking with other parents about politics, actually.  But had I been at the forum, I would have mentioned one partial theory that a friend of mine, …

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Urban Sprawl and the Obama Administration

The American Prospect has an interesting article about Shelley Poticha, the director of HUD’s new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities. Poticha is working to encourage a suburban nation to live in ways that make it feasible to walk, take public transit, and bike. Her goal is to make suburban sprawl a thing of the …

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