Comments on: City Rankings: Safe, Slow, Delicious or Cantankerous?

By: Bill Steiner

Bill Steiner — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:06:00 +0000

I do a place making training program in Orvieto, headquarters of Slow Cities, and involve the city and Slow Cities folks in the training. What Slow Cities advocates is creating a people-centered approach to city planning, and focusing on quality of life. They very much look at cutting edge technology to make this happen. Orvieto’s government is driven by a plan to improve the quality of life which it calls “Guide for the Betterment of Orvieto”, a rather nice way to describe city goals. I believe the Slow City approach can be applied in larger cities like Irvine, particularly if directed at the older core.
Bill Steiner

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:05:00 +0000

This article reminds me of an interesting conversation with Chinese planning officials. The planning design office in San Francisco helped to organize a tour to important US cities for a delegation of Shanghai officials and planners so that facilitated the discussion of what could me a good image / model for Shanghai's New Pudong area. Among cities such as San Francisco, Boston, New York, Chicago, ... Guess what was the answer from most of them? Las Vegas.

On the other side of the Pacific Rim, the perception of identity could be different for some people! The good news is that Shanghai did not choose to go that way.

Nam-Son Ngo-Viet