Planning Pool

For this final instalment of FAIL Week, we take a look at a few places that you would never want to set foot in. These cities and neighbourhoods are meant to be experienced in a bucket seat, and it shows!

1. Eagle Bend, Jacksonville, Florida (The entrance has no sidewalk.)

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According to Walkscore.com, this is the least walkable neighbourhood in the least walkable major city in America, which I think is saying quite a bit. They rank areas based on proximity to services, stores and transit –  all of which are next to non-existent in Eagle Bend, earning them a flat zero. Based on the Google Map view, it isn’t difficult to see why. The gated community is adjacent to a river but not any … Continue Reading

A technologically advanced rain barrel, as captured by Jason Vance on Flickr. Thanks for the Creative Commons photo!

We all know that outdated legislation can often be one of the largest barriers change. Up until 2009, in the state of Colorado it was illegal to have a rain barrel and still is illegal for a majority of its residents. They would probably not hang you for it and it was mostly unenforced but it still had an effect on how infrastructure in that state could be designed, particularly for large developments. You couldn’t bring a development application which included a rainwater collection system no matter what the planned use for that water.

The reason rain barrels were and still are in most circumstances illegal is … Continue Reading

Four country western expansion urban growth model from UNC Charlotte Urban Institute on Vimeo.

North Carolina is one of the states that is losing farmland most rapidly in the US. Researchers at UNC Charlotte and UNC Asheville are using satellite images, development trends, population data, and growth projections to create a visual digital model of what North Carolina may look like in the future.

So far, they have found that four western North Carolina counties (Madison, Buncombe, Henderson and Transylvania) have developed by 500 percent between 1976 and 2006, which is at an average rate of six acres of green space per day! More shockingly, the model predicts that an additional 47,500 acres of forests and farmlands will … Continue Reading

This session took place on October 1.

Uri Avin of Parsons Brinckerhoff and Iain Dobson of the Real Estate Search Corporation discussed edge cities and how they can be transformed into urban places. Avin described Tysons Corner, Virginia, a prototypical “edge city” and the 12th largest business district in the United States. Although Tysons Corner, located just outside of Washington, D.C. in the Dulles Airport corridor, is generally considered to be an economic success, the city suffers from an increasingly dysfunctional environmen. Dobson contrasted Tysons Corner with Mississauga, Ontario, a similar city in terms of square footage, population, jobs, and other statistics, but stagnating nonetheless.

Edge cities are typically suburban commercial, retail, and residential developments built in areas that contained no development 30 years ago. They are usually outside a larger urban area and tend to be close to highways and airports. … Continue Reading

Perhaps the last installment in live blogging from the 2009 CIP conference, this session (held October 3) dealt with growth management, a critical issue for many North American cities. This summary focuses on the presentations of two of the session’s speakers.

Russ Mathew, a planner from Toronto, ON with Hemson Consulting, spoke about the new Growth Plan for Canada’s most populous urban area. The Greater Golden Horseshoe includes the Greater Toronto Area as well as smaller subcentres. Looking ahead to 2031, the Plan sets numeric targets for residential and employment density (an average of 50 residents + jobs per hectare) as well as intensification of currently built-up areas (40% of new housing is to be accommodated within the current built-up area, especially transit-oriented growth centres.) Russ is concerned about the plan’s focus on predictive numeric targets instead of livable design, and … Continue Reading

CEOs for Cities just released a study showing that homes located close to shops, schools, churches, offices, libraries, parks, and restaurants are worth more than similar homes in less-walkable neighborhoods.

The report, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Housing Values in U.S. Cities” by Joseph Cortright, analyzed data from 94,000 real estate transactions in 15 major markets. Cortright found that in 13 of the 15 markets, higher levels of walkability, as measured by Walk Score, correlated to higher home values.

Finalists have been announced at the Reburbia Suburban Design Competition! Cast your vote for the best idea before midnight tomorrow (Monday, August 17).

Currently leading the vote count is Galina Tahchieva’s Urban Sprawl Repair Kit. It offers design solutions for integrating existing suburban prototypes like drive-through restaurants into a more diverse, cohesive and walkable urban fabric. The “T-trees Social Housing Project” has the second-greatest number of votes – it proposes nifty-looking modular towers topped with windmills that supporting prefabricated social housing units.

Meanwhile, an article in yesterday’s Edmonton Journal describes the fierce community resistance that stands in the way of proposals to modestly densify Edmonton’s older single-

The NYC Sanitation Department donated one of these machines for use in the new park's signage. Photo by author.

For over 50 years Fresh Kills was the main landfill for New York City and  the largest dumpsite in the world.  In March of 2001 the site was closed due to pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency, only to be reopened temporarily in September of that year as the receiving site for the demolished World Trade Center buildings.   Now the land, once a symbol of waste and environmental disrespect, is being re-developed as the largest park in New York City—at 2,220 acres it will be almost three times the size of Central Park.  The site will be extensively landscaped with native vegetation and will provide natural ecological areas as … Continue Reading

So my cell phone contract expired about a month ago now, and I thought I’d give life a shot minus the long arm of AT&T.  I purchased a Skype number, so as not to fall entirely incommunicado, but my days are largely spent without the luxury of instant telecommunication.  Overall, things have gone smoothly, but my lack of a phone has led to a series of revelations.  Most apparent is the lack of payphones in Portland, which had me walking all the way to Union Station to make a phone call (a fair walk from where I was located).  Perhaps it’s my unhealthy love of noir detective stories, but the death of the payphone is troubling to me.

Sure, wifi will soon make even cell phones irrelevant, so bemoaning the loss of the payphone is a little … Continue Reading

The High Line, underneath the Standard Hotel. Photo by author.

Pedestrians enjoy a stroll on the completed High Line in New York. Thanks to Gerard Dalmon for the Creative Commons photo!

Two weeks after the opening of the High Line, New York is still reveling in its newest city park. The creation of open space is a rare event in the world’s densest cities, a treasure hunt sometimes known as landscape urbanism. Seoul, Korea recently brought to daylight a forgotten river under the city, opening up a wide boulevard of parks and recreation spaces. Many cities have converted unused belt railways into community gardens or greenways. Now this trend for generating innovative … Continue Reading