Planning Pool

Much is often said about Montreal’s urban successes, however, its suburbs and exurbs are rarely referenced. Pointe-Claire, QC, is about a twenty- to thirty-minute drive from Montreal’s downtown. Its landscape is spread out, dominated by roadways, strip malls and industrial parks, and as a result, is comprised largely of parking lots.

My father wanted to run to a bank machine after we returned from my grandmother’s funeral in Pointe-Claire. This is probably because he needed more cash on hand for the minimum $20 cab fare needed to get, literally, anywhere. Knowing from previous experience how dangerous the walk … Continue Reading

SeeClickFix.com is a new social networking service located in New Haven, Connecticut, that is using the wisdom of crowds to highlight municipal infrastructure problems.

The website is hoping to engage the community by providing tools that increase transparency and communication between residents, governments and organizations. Overall, SeeClickFix.com’s goal is to make it easier for residents to improve their community, using Google Maps.

The best thing about SeeClickFix.com is that it is so easy to use:
See – see a non-emergency issue in your neighborhood
Click – open a ticket describing the issue and what can be done to resolve it
Fix – publicly report the issue to everyone for resolution
The website was started by a group of nerdy software and design entrepreneurs in New Haven who saw the British FixMyStreet.com … Continue Reading

 

I just finished reading The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher, former vice president of New York City Economic Development Corporation. The book is a beautiful compendium of   description of New York City’s guts, covering moving people and freight, providing power and communication, keeping the city clean, and what the city may look like in the future. The Works is well organized, moving from more general ideas and examples to really specific examples. The book is also a pleasure to read. The Works is full of infographics, cross-sectios of streets, maps, illustrations, historic photographs, and charts. It is also full of really interesting facts, like the following description of the pedestrian crosswalk signals in New York … Continue Reading