Planning for Global Warming: In the News
The best illustrated planning research blog on the internets appears to be on summer hiatus but I saw a couple of things this week that, against my better judgment and unforgiving schedule, got me thinking a bit more vis-à-vis Global Climate Change. And What Planners Can Do About It. And What Planning Researchers [...]
Notes on Bogotá vs Curitiba
Curitiba, Brazil
Bogotá is interesting and important for many reasons but I write only to draw some quick comparisons between it and the Latin American success story probably best known by U.S. planners: Curitiba, Brazil. We mostly know Curitiba for its visionary mayor, Jaime Lerner, who made as much progress as anyone in a [...]
Women’s Quiet Revolutions in Work, Home … and Travel?
October 2007 Update: My article on this topic and these data has now been published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Summer 2007 issue, available as a free download here.
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Dear PhD students and junior faculty especially:
1. This post is partly about how one never knows where research questions will pop up. Be [...]
Kahn, On Green Cities
Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment
Matthew E. Kahn, Brookings Institution Press, 2006.
Matthew E. Kahn is a Professor at the Institute of the Environment at UCLA. He blogs on environmental and urban topics at greeneconomics.blogspot.com.
To read Chapter One of this book go here.
My “Green Cities” book was published in September 2006. Now [...]
A Video of Sex, Lies, and Commuting
Click on this graphic for a video of a talk I gave at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, on February 2, 2007, with a full powerpoint accompaniment. (It’s at the bottom of the page; I could only get the realplayer version to work.) Following a too kind introduction by UoT professor Amrita Daniere, [...]
Manville, on Why We Don’t Use Congestion Pricing
Guest post by Michael Manville, UCLA.
Along with David King and Donald Shoup, I recently completed an article on the politics of congestion pricing, and Dave, Don and I are beginning another project on the same topic. Congestion pricing is getting a lot of press of late, and moving closer to reality, but politically it still [...]
Place-Based vs Person-Based Community Development Policies
Planning debates over the relative merits and consequences of place-based (e.g., policing, enterprise zones, business improvement districts, neighborhood investment strategies, infrastructure, the gamut of supply-side urban development strategies, downtown redevelopment) versus people-based (e.g., training/education, some housing assistance programs, welfare as we knew it, means-tested transfers generally) are omnipresent, yet so far as I can tell [...]
Acey, On Why Don’t the Poor Have Water in Africa? Exit, Voice & Loyalty
First things first. Even though I have had my very own blog for a full year, with literally several hits a day, I am slowly, surely grasping that it may not all be about me. What if I am an insignificant excess of affected punctuation in the big top of all things scholarly? [...]
Rejection Letter to Professor Plumbago
(Guest post by Chris Plumbago, associate professor of urban planning at the University of Columbus. He/she invites comments or favorite examples of your own amusing, tragic, or tragically amusing rejections as comments. P.S. I am not Professor Plumbago.)
Dear Dr. Plumbago:
I am writing to inform you that your paper, “Understanding Roadside Ecology: Methodological [...]
Olshansky, On Planning Following Catastrophic Disaster: Research Challenges
(Guest post by Rob Olshansky, professor and interim head of the urban & regional planning program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)
I have been studying post-disaster planning for several years, with a particular interest in catastrophic disasters. Fortunately for society, these don’t occur very often. But this infrequency poses a challenge to the [...]
City Rankings: Safe, Slow, Delicious or Cantankerous?
Planetizen plans to release a plain-speaking ranking of planning programs soon, based on both objective and subjective data. (Update: Their “Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs” was released November 1, with the “top 10 overall” summarized here.) At the same time, ACSP launched an ongoing investigation into “planning school assessment,” which will be [...]
Forsyth, On Writing and Tenure
In 1997 I was invited to talk about writing and tenure at a student-sponsored workshop for doctoral students in planning. After that talk several members of the audience asked me to publish it in a forum, like JPER, that would be fairly accessible to their doctoral colleagues. As I showed it to other doctoral students I received a similar response. After more deliberation than it probably needed, I decided to go through the process of getting it in wider circulation. While it is not the kind of scholarly research or education article that I promote in the main text, there seems to be a great need of at least some doctoral students and new faculty to have an accessible starting place for thinking and talking about issues of writing, scholarly communication, and tenure practicalities. It is in that spirit that I offer it. [...]
Global Climate Change and Cities
I likely don’t know your governor’s name, so you might not know mine: Mr. Schwarzenegger, über-body builder, actor, businessman, and celebrity politician. A Republican as well, he signed a very green bill into law last week aimed at substantially rolling back the state’s contribution to greenhouse gases, mainly via much toughened regulatory caps. [...]
Manville on Downtown Revitalization: What, How and Why?
I’ve been thinking a bit recently about downtown Los Angeles, which led in turn to my thinking about downtowns in general. Downtown revitalization is one of the oldest policy projects in urban planning and calls to rescue the downtown, or assertions that a city is nothing without a 24-hour downtown, are common in conversations about cities. So too is the idea that downtown is having a comeback. The American downtown, at long last, seems to be growing again. Fueled by loft conversions, the Los Angeles downtown is growing as well (which has led to a curious boom in stores devoted to dog-pampering).
Aside from dogs and their needs, what should planning researchers ask about when they ask about downtown? I can think of three broad questions. [...]
Top Secret: UCLA Housing Affordability Research Initiative
As do many, our university has a real estate center — The Richard S. Ziman Center for Real Estate — which sponsors faculty research on housing and related topics. In urban planning alone, we have a fair sized group (i.e., Blumenberg, Burns, Cuff, Leavitt, Loukaitou-Sideris, Mukhija, Ong, Richman, Stoll, Takahashi) interested in what could [...]
A Young Planning Academic’s Guide to Professional Etiquette
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Sandi Rosenbloom is right about a good many things, but the vital role of faculty mentoring has to be up there. When she was ACSP president I once nervously, stupidly, and drunkenly blurted out how, “while FWIG is a great idea, it’s a pity its mentoring activities don’t extend to junior faculty of, um, [...]
Academic Blog = Friend of Information, Enemy of Thought?
This site is meant to distribute short, not-ready-for-formal-publishing essays, ostensibly about urban planning research. But one could fairly ask if the venue suits the tactic. Indeed, does a self-published spiel amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy mixed up world, given its pronounced lack of editors, deadlines, referees or, really, [...]
On California Infrastructure
Where to start? If this was the first lecture of a class on infrastructure, I’d probably run on for an hour about the wide variety of things and problems and places the subject covers, and then close with a proposed organizational and analytical scheme for making our way the following weeks. Part of the [...]
Co$t$ of $prawl?
Is sprawl costly and smart growth cheaper? That would depend on what you mean by sprawl, smart growth, and costly.
If sprawl is defined as low density or fragmented development, smart growth is the opposite of sprawl, and costly is average per-capita public expenditures aggregated to the county level, then Carruthers and Ulfarsson report [...]
Markets Attack!
Abstract: Revisiting the markets vs planning debate, but this time from a position of moral and intellectual superiority.
First, this post would be better titled, “Planning vs. Markets (Or, Why Plan?),” but for now I am sticking with the more iconic Hollywood/military imagery. Second, kindly enjoy this typically pithy comment on planning thought, action, and [...]