More parents with children are living in downtown Minneapolis neighborhoods, says a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. We’ve reported on this trend in places such as Portland, and have made the case that cities need to provide the parks and playgrounds that parents want if they are to have truly diverse neighborhoods from [...]
Filed under: facilities, planning | Tagged: density, downtown, minneapolis | Leave a Comment »
What would our world’s cities be like if they were filled with great public spaces, using human-dominated design instead of auto-dominated design? Our Cities Ourselves, a project of the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) imagines this in ten mega-cities across the globe, from Jakarta to Mexico City to Buenos Aires, asking some of [...]
Filed under: international | 2 Comments »
In our continued documentation of parks’ contribution to city tourism, we again are relaying advice in the New York Times 36 Hours series, this time from St. Louis. The Times notes that “the famous arch, of course, is still there, along with plenty of 19th-century architecture and an eye-opening amount of green space.” Interestingly, the [...]
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Nanjing, one of the oldest metropolitan cities within China, has committed a 460 acre waterfront district to a new smart growth urban design. (The Dirt) Report on upgrades made to Union Square in an effort to make it more pedestrian and bike-friendly. (Streetsblog) Next American City’s Vincent Valk asks “What is Livability?” A report on [...]
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Diana DeRubertis has a nice post at Planetizen arguing that there’s been too much focus on providing trails in the wilderness and not enough where people can actually use them, inside parks on walking loops. The wilderness-like parks seem to be increasingly emphasized at the expense of smaller community parks that provide the right facilities [...]
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NRDC put together a great video that describes Smart Growth in 30 seconds:
Filed under: planning | Tagged: smart growth | Leave a Comment »
Mapping-extraordinaire Eric Fischer has mapped the pictures taken by local residents versus tourists, and the results reinforce the belief that parks can be major contributors to a city’s tourism. A look through the maps of 60 different cities shows concentrations of web-posted tourist pictures in parks and key public spaces (tourist pictures are in red, [...]
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Pictures can say a thousand words, or show thousands of people. Cincinnati’s Indie Summer Series on Fountain Square is proving to be the hottest free ticket in town, and enlivening this central plaza. Urban Cincy’s Randy Simes tells us that the recent repositioning of the Tyler Davidson Fountain allowed for a larger contiguous space for [...]
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Urban Omnibus has a nice piece on public participation in the design of New York City’s Governors Island. There’s also audio of an interview with Leslie Koch, President of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, which led the planning process. Most intriguing is the creative (or incredibly simple) way of asking people to write [...]
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Many readers of this blog will know that we often write about the role of parks within smart growth for their social, environmental and economic benefits. And this relates to climate change as well (see this earlier post). They help filter air and water, provide spaces for people to stretch, socialize and recreate in compact, [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure, planning | 2 Comments »
