Jason King at Landscape+Urbanism provides a summary of plans to cap sections of freeway in Los Angeles with a linear44-acre Hollywood Central Park. TPL’s Center for City Park Excellence took a look at this trend a few years ago and provided an article on the capping-freeways-with-parks movement. It should be noted that while the Big [...]
Filed under: planning, transportation | Tagged: decking freeways | Leave a Comment »
A new report just released by AARP’s Public Policy Institute and authored by the Center for Housing Policy says that housing that is affordable, accessible and well-connected to services is essential to addressing the challenges older adults face. The report: Even if older adults cannot or choose not to remain in their homes as their [...]
Filed under: health, planning | Leave a Comment »
DCist has a Flickr feed of photos from the Smithsonian Kite Festival by the Washington Monument this past weekend. Photo by: M.V. Jantzen
Filed under: uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
The newly unveiled global urban news website Citiscope has one of it’s first pieces on slum upgrading in São Paulo, Brazil. Writers Fernando Serpone Bueno and Veridiana Sedeh provide a nice overview of the multi-faceted efforts to improve the living conditions of people in the favelas, such as providing sanitary and drainage facilities, granting property [...]
Filed under: international, renewal | Tagged: brazil, slum upgrading | Leave a Comment »
Sen. Dodd’s Livable Communities Act: a $4 billion bill that aims to establish an Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at HUD and an Interagency Council on Sustainable Communities at the White House, and help empower the federal government to fund smart growth projects at regional and local levels. Willy Staley of Next American City [...]
Filed under: uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Post by Stephen Miller, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy Last month, more than one hundred advocates of urban pathways, greenways and trails from the private and public sectors met in New Orleans for the first in a series of meetings to discuss best practices that encourage physical activity on shared-use pathways in urban neighborhoods. Topics of discussion included [...]
Filed under: partnerships, planning, transportation | Tagged: bikes, trails | Leave a Comment »
The now signed-into-law health care bill, the Affordable Care Act includes new “community transformation grants” that could provide funds for playgrounds, recreational programs and the like that encourage “active living” and access to healthy food. The details and exact nature of this effort are unclear, as the ink has barely dried on the President’s twenty-pen [...]
Filed under: health | Tagged: federal policy | 1 Comment »
Planners have long held up the idea of connectivity – links between people and places that tie everything together. Within park systems, the concept goes back at least to when the walls of European cities came down, as many of them (e.g. Paris), were turned into grand boulevards ringing their cities and linking up places. [...]
Filed under: planning, stimulus funds, transportation | Tagged: bikes, connectivity, parkways/boulevards | 7 Comments »
Pittsburgh goes “sustainable” – brief mention of point state park. (Post Gazette) More on shrinking Detroit, with mention of parks. Ed Glaser makes a great point: “if Mayor Bing tries to do too much, too quickly, without giving enough to the residents who have to move, then right-sizing will justly be seen as yet another [...]
Filed under: uncategorized | 1 Comment »
The U.S. Department of Transportation will now pursue the full inclusion of pedestrians and bicyclists in transportation projects. In a blog post, DOT Secretary Ray Lahood said, “This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.” According to the National Complete Streets Coalition: The statement details what agencies large and small [...]
Filed under: planning, transportation | Tagged: federal policy | 2 Comments »
