Last week we attended The Raben Group’s policy breakfast with Carol Coletta, president of CEOs for Cities. The purpose of the meeting was to provide an update on the Talent Dividend Prize competition, which will award $1 million in advertising dollars to the city or metro region that shows the greatest improvement in college attainment [...]
Filed under: economics | Tagged: education, research | Leave a Comment »
In November the Knight Foundation released findings from their Soul of the Community study, a three-year project aimed to understand resident attachment to place, what drives it and why it matters in 26 U.S. communities. Of the 10 attributes studied, the top three were: Social Offerings – Places for people to meet each other and [...]
Filed under: economics | Tagged: rankings, research | Leave a Comment »
Access to city parks has always been an important and ongoing topic for planners, landscape architects, and city officials. In the early days, urban parks were only found in upper-class neighborhoods, as those individuals realized the potential for city parks and had the means to create these spaces as well. Parks have since become a [...]
Filed under: international, planning | Tagged: international, research | Leave a Comment »
The 85 largest U.S. cities have more than 1.4 million acres of city parks, according to new data released today by The Trust for Public Land. The city park systems profiled in the report serve 58 million urban residents, offering 11,160 playgrounds, 9,167 ball diamonds, 1,349 swimming pools, 514 dog parks, and 400 public golf [...]
Filed under: planning | Tagged: research, usership | 1 Comment »
We just read a recently released report by the American Public Health Association on public health costs associated with transportation. The report documents the costs of poor transport policies, including the $142 billion the country pays in costs from obesity, the $50 billion from traffic-related air pollution and $180 billion from traffic crashes. The report [...]
Filed under: health, planning, transportation | Tagged: research | 1 Comment »
Active Living Research is out with a synthesis of research showing that communities economically benefit from parks and walkability. The report, entitled The Economic Benefits of Open Space, Recreation Facilities and Walkable Community Design was led by Lilly Shoup of the University of Maryland and Reid Ewing of the University of Utah. For any park [...]
Filed under: economics | Tagged: research | Leave a Comment »
A new study says improved access to trails, parks and recreation programs can help address the nation’s obesity problem, but shrinking budgets are a real challenge to actually doing this, as reported by Science Daily. What’s badly needed, the researchers said, are more recreation facilities and non-motorized trails, with information about them made readily available [...]
Filed under: health | Tagged: research | Leave a Comment »
Transportation for America this last week released a report on a dire situation for pedestrians in the nation’s cities. In the last 15 years, more than 76,000 Americans have been killed while crossing or walking along a street in their community. More than 43,000 Americans – including 3,906 children under 16 – have been killed [...]
Filed under: planning, transportation | Tagged: federal policy, research, walkability | 2 Comments »
We get this question a lot, and there are a lot of meanings people use or perceive. For the The Trust for Public Land’s survey of city park systems, the general answer is that a park is anything set aside for the public from natural areas to plazas to trails to neighborhood parks. Taken all [...]
Filed under: planning | Tagged: research | Leave a Comment »
Last week, TPL released the results from its annual survey of park systems in the nation’s 77 largest cities. We thought it worthy to delve into the data a bit in a couple of posts. We’ll start off with acreage, a measure that can be looked at a couple of different ways, using the top [...]
Filed under: planning | Tagged: research | 3 Comments »
