The New York Times ran a story on how the city is attracting retirees and making the city more amenable to seniors. Among other items such as light timing at intersections to allow more walking time and places to get a drink of water, the article refers a few times to how parks are a [...]
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Cities around the world are shutting down streets for pedestrian, cyclist and mass transit thoroughfares and plazas, wrote John Mattson in an article in Scientific American last month. Case in point is New York City’s move to shut down portions of Broadway around Times and Herald Squares. These car-free areas in the heart of Manhattan [...]
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We asked Peter Harnik to answer some questions about his new book, Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities, that covers how cities can plan for parks as well as how to create them in “all built-out” settings. Your book addresses many age-old questions about parks and cities. Let’s start with the big one — [...]
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A new study shows that the best way to minimize driving may be through developing around destinations accessible to jobs, shopping and recreation — and coupling that location with walkable block sizes, a good street network and mixed uses. The report was a result of a “meta analysis” by Reid Ewing and Robert Cervero, that [...]
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Ellen Dunham-Jones spoke in a TED presentation on retrofitting suburbia. If you’re interested in how metro areas can retrofit their suburbs into places that turn underused parking lots, mall sites and other moribund areas into walkable places with shops, housing, parks and accessible transit, this video is a worthwhile twenty minutes. In particular, Dunham-Jones mentions [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure, planning, renewal | Tagged: suburbs | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
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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:
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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 | 3 Comments »
