This article about the idea for “Airport City” to be developed between Detroit Metro and Willow Run Airports, I-94 and the Detroit-Chicago railroad corridor has been sitting in my “to blog” pile for awhile.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Michigan economy and what the possibilities are, including what it would take to get people […]
I think Jane Jacobs, and my planning friends who dig Jane Jacobs, will dig this map of the “regions of influence” of U.S. cities:
The size of a city doesn’t seem to correlate to the size of its influence region, though most of the large areas (which are mostly rural and in the west) seem to […]
Ed del.icio.us’d this article in the Pittsburgh City Paper. They discuss the lack of bus schedules posted at stops and call for “tagging” stops with schedules as a public service. I had a similar idea for Ann Arbor: get some downtown maps, make some “you are here” arrows, and wheatpaste the maps and […]
Murph also writes about his semester project report, called “People’s Place.”
General idea: ground level People’s Food Co-op, below-grade dedicated food co-op parking, second floor public parking, 3rd-5th floors have 40 co-housing units (25% permanently affordable through a land trust), usable green / garden roof. Note no parking included for the residential - they can buy […]
Pranks with a Purpose:
In Los Angeles, Heavy Trash, a coalition of anonymous architects, designers and urban planners, have erected orange viewing platforms outside the gates of three upscale LA neighborhoods to protest what they see as a disturbing proliferation of gated communities.
via WorldChanging.
Richard Florida has been getting a lot of play around these parts since his ideas inspired the Governor’s Cool Cities campaign, attempting to cater to Florida’s “creative class.” Over at WorldChanging, Jaimais writes about the Greening of the Creative Class. He notes the significant overlap between Florida’s “Creative Index” cities and cities on […]
The O’Reilly Radar links to the Social Explorer site, which offers an easy to use, web-based GIS (”mapping”) application for exploring US census data. Having briefly played with ArcGIS, a fancy and expensive GIS package, Social Explorer is a very exciting tool. It’s much more limited, but also much easier to use than […]
(For my planning geek friends via WorldChanging)
ARTHUR is a tool for urban planning that has a physical table-top model with a virtual layer super-imposed over it, viewable with special headsets. When you move a physical object, the virtual models for things like pedestrian flow change in real time. I’d like to play […]
