Smart Growth
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Measuring neighborhood diversity and liveliness with ‘JaneScore’
Perhaps you know about Walk Score, the delightfully intuitive tool that calculates how walkable a neighborhood is and ranks it on a 100-point scale. (My Seattle neighborhood gets an 85; my suburban Chicago hometown gets a 31.) It was cooked up by Seattle developer Mike Mathieu and others to help quantify walkability and promote its […]
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Can we just drive less after the Gulf spill? If only it were so easy …
Photo: Stephan Geyer via FlickrNPR reporter Brian Mann went talking to gas-station customers in upstate New York to find out what they’re thinking about the Gulf of Mexico oil leak and their own responsibility as gas-buyers. He gets some interesting responses, but I’d like to engage in some bloggerly quibbling with his conclusion. Mann finds […]
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New Urbanist progress in Atlanta
Sick of those bloggers going on about sustainable urbanism and walkable neighborhoods? You might like the film version: the new American Makeover project has a short video about the Glenwood Park, a New Urbanist project in the sprawl epicenter of Atlanta. Unfortunately, they don’t get into the economics of who can afford to live in […]
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10 ways cities and towns can kick the offshore-oil habit
With the Gulf oil spill continuing unabated, powering a 21st century economy on a 19th century fossil fuel looks less and less smart by the day. Luckily, we’ve got other options. I described the most promising steps the federal government could take toward reducing oil use in transportation systems last week. But local governments don’t […]
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White flight and the urban-suburban switcheroo
Suburban ChicagoCourtesy Scorpians and Centaurs via FlickrThe idea of racially diverse American cities ringed by mostly white suburbs is essentially flip-flopping, according to the Brookings Institution’s big new demographic report, “The State of Metropolitan America.” The report draws on 2002-2008 census data to find that young, educated whites are moving into cities in record numbers. […]
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Take note, companies: Young workers want urban jobs
Downtown ChicagoPhoto: Chicago Man via FlickrBusinesses ought to consider locating in walkable, culturally diverse city centers because that’s where young workers want to be, according to some liberal commie rag printed on recycled draft cards. No, scratch that, this argument comes from the Harvard Business Review. An article in the May issue opens with the […]
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Britain’s ‘Coed Darcy’ shows the value of sparkling new towns
Sim Darcy: An illustration of the Welsh urban villageCourtesy The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment Coed Darcy is an oddly named urban village that’s going to be built from the ground up over the next 20 years in southern Wales. It’ll have an impressive 4,000 compact homes, plus commercial space and 1,300 acres of […]
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Tapping the power of energy efficiency
One of the fastest-growing states in the nation has the potential to save its residents billions of dollars over the next decade and a half and create thousands of new jobs to boot. How? By adopting several common-sense policies to save energy and investing more in clean-energy research. So concludes a new report focused on […]
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Your street is fat
These California designers and their imaginations. Steve Price shows people what their towns might look like if they were rebuilt along Smart Growth principles. At Narrow Streets: Los Angeles, David Yoon takes comically overbuilt streets in L.A. and Photoshops them down to a human scale. Here’s his reinvention of Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park: On […]
