Urban Design

Community Investors Are Doing What Big Dollar Retail Investors Won’t

July 20, 2023 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Create! Crowdfunding, Development, Local Economy, Urban Design

Lyneir Richardson has been helping Black people buy the block since 1991 or 1992. Then a new lawyer at the First National Bank of Chicago, Richardson occasionally had to take on pro-bono assignments that popped up related to the bank’s community reinvestment obligations. One such pro-bono assignment sent him to his childhood neighborhood on the West Side to work on loan documents for a $100,000 loan from a community-based organization to a barbershop on Chicago Avenue. “The amount of the loan, $100,000 or $100 million, didn’t matter. It was the same documents, a promissory note, a mortgage,” Richardson says.

Mini-Forest Revolution

May 24, 2022 Hannah Lewis, Resilience.org. Create! climate crisis, Forests, Paris, Urban Design

Over the course of the twenty-first century, Paris’s average summer temperature is expected to rise as much as 5.3°C (9.5°F) (or as little as 1°C [1.8°F]) and the number of days per year with temperatures higher than 30°C (86°F) could increase to forty-five days from the current average of ten days.4 Rising temperatures will come with more frequent and extreme storms, flooding, and drought. A 30 percent reduction in the flow of the Seine River is expected by 2080; along with the Marne River southeast of Paris, the Seine provides nearly half of the city’s drinking water.5 Ironically, the river also poses increasing flood risks as climate change increases the likelihood of extreme precipitation events. Paris is not alone.

Biddeford, Maine Fights Urban Heating

August 21, 2021 Lori Valigra and Priyanka Runwal, Bangor Daily News. Create! climate crisis, Energy, Global Warming, Urban Design

Biddeford, Maine — Duane Dennison knows more than most about the effects of hotter summers and heat lingering into the night: He lives near the Saco River in a tent community of about 20 people experiencing homelessness. As temperatures soared into the mid-90s Aug. 12, the 61-year-old painter sought relief at the Seeds of Hope Neighborhood Center, which offers air conditioning, snacks and a place to socialize for up to 30 people at a time. His options to cool off in the summer are the cooling shelter, swimming in the river or hanging out at the local supermarket’s meat department. “It’s harder in summer than the winter,” Dennison said of trying to stay comfortable outside. Like many other Maine cities, Biddeford is regularly experiencing temperatures far higher than surrounding suburban and rural areas.

Saving Nature And Humanity Without Sacrificing Either

November 15, 2020 Charles Whitaker, Climate Conscious. Create! climate crisis, Food and Agriculture, Public transportation, Urban Design

Saving nature without sacrificing modern life is the preeminent challenge of our time. It is a complicated problem that must be attacked simultaneously from multiple angles. Failure to act on one angle will invalidate efforts on other angles. This problem must be addressed in two distinct phases. First, we must stop living in a manner that actively harms both ourselves and the natural world. Then, we must learn how to create a world where both nature and humanity thrive. This two-part article will explore how we can reorganize our civilization to be compatible with such a vision.

The Year Of Car-free Streateries

May 19, 2020 Mike Eliason, The Urbanist. Create! Energy, New Economy, Transportation, Urban Design

Seattle - As our city starts to open back up, several issues are becoming quite apparent in our urban villages. In many, there is inadequate space on sidewalks to adequately social distance. There is also inadequate space to order and wait for food from restaurants for pick up. And given that restaurants will be extremely limited in the number of patrons that can dine in them, they will need to utilize the space in their parking lots or adjacent streets to allow dining with proper distancing measures. This is an opportunity to prioritize businesses and pedestrians like none we’ve ever seen. We will need space so that our small businesses and restaurants can survive Covid. And given that we may be over a year away from a vaccine, these changes could not only be long-term, but the impetus needed to vastly improve livability in the densest parts of our city.

To Fight Neoliberalism In Cities, Planners Must Work With Activists

May 15, 2020 Rachel Bondra, Rabble.ca. Create! Activism, Housing, Transformation, Urban Design

I was surprised, in my first week of class as a graduate student in urban planning, to hear the death knell of my chosen field. In an unco-ordinated move, each of my professors at CUNY Hunter College had assigned Thomas J. Campanella's essay "Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning." In the essay, Campanella describes urban planning as a trivial profession that is mired in bureaucratic procedure and lacks disciplinary identity, authority and visionary capacity. One reason for this, say some contributors to Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism, is that, as a profession, urban planning has too long been focused on creating products (i.e. housing and roads) rather than imagining cities as places that might sustain humans and the environment.

Green Design Has More Impact When Local Residents Are Involved

January 4, 2016 Eilis O'Neill, www.earthisland.org Create! Environment, Food and Agriculture, Urban Agriculture, Urban Design

By Eilis O'Neill for Earth Island Journal - Raindrops are falling slow and heavy on the concrete walkways, children’s playgrounds, and brick, V-shaped apartment buildings of the Bronx River Houses, one of New York City’s largest housing projects. But today’s rain won’t slide off the roofs, walkways, and hard-packed lawns into the Bronx River across the street. Instead, it will gather in the project’s bioswales, rain gardens, enhanced tree pits, and blue roofs, which together can capture 32,000 gallons of water. Unlike the monotonous lawns and ordered trees that characterize the landscaping here and at other housing projects, the rain gardens add a splash of yellow, a spray of white flowers, and an explosion of bushiness.

Communities Can Take Back Power In City Planning

April 15, 2015 Zara Nasir, www.truth-out.org Create! City Planning, Urban Design

Although low-to middle-income residents are most affected by zoning and land use decisions in their neighborhoods, they are rarely given real power in the city planning process. Instead, city planning departments and developers rig the process so that their interests are served, at the expense of local residents. The problem is, most times, residents don't know they're getting played. "Throughout the city, community groups tend to be seduced by what city planning claims is an open process," said Tom Angotti, director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. "The truth of the matter is, a lot of communities don't know zoning. [Information] is filtered through planners who have a stake in the game, which is to get the zoning through."

Green Cities Are Better For Us

July 6, 2014 Erin Anderssen, www.theglobeandmail.com Create! Environment, health, Urban Design

If Canadian city-dwellers don’t notice nature in their midst, maybe it’s because they have been conditioned not to. Cities are about concrete, pollution and traffic jams, not kayaking and ducks. You go to the cottage for a bit of fresh air on the weekend, then brace for another week on the urban island, spending too many hours in a fluorescent-lit cubicle in a forest of other cubicles. But a growing body of research suggests the cost: Cities are the main human ecosystem – 60 per cent of us now live in metropolitan areas with more than 100,000 people – but they also make us sick, depressed and anxious. By contrast, being around blue water, green trees and space makes us healthier, more productive, even more generous – a positive effect known as “biophilia.”

Squatting For Justice, Bringing Life To The City

May 14, 2014 Miguel A. Martínez, www.roarmag.org Create! Urban Design

You may disagree, as I do, with some squatters and dislike the way they manage the building. This may also occur with any social movement. Take, for example, a controversial environmental action or policy — some are so single-issue oriented that you might think they do not address the core source of ecological problems. Regarding squatters, their economic troubles for daily survival, their academic obligations if they are enrolled in the university, or just their easy-going way of living may produce a low level of activities or social and cultural vibrancy compared to the standard expectations of those who conceive the city as a permanent off-limits growth machine. Obviously, it is this framework and its associated prejudices which prevent a careful consideration of the particular circumstances of every squat. The central or peripheral location of the squat, the speculation and gentrification processes surrounding them, and the more or less conflicting relationship between squatters and authorities, may determine the reach of the outcomes. In fact, these utopian, heterotopian and liberated urban spaces are also constrained by those and similar not-always-so-tangible powers. I prefer to highlight the outstanding qualities of most squats. First, squats are built by squatters, active citizens who devote a great part of their lives to providing autonomous and low-cost solutions to many of the city’s flaws (such as housing shortages, expensive rental rates, the bureaucratic machinery that discourages any grassroots proposal, or the political corruption in the background of urban transformations). Second, squatters move but squats remain as a sort of “anomalous institution”, neither private nor state-owned, but belonging to the “common goods” of citizenship, like many other public facilities.

Tactical Urbanism: Citizen Projects Go Mainstream

May 3, 2014 AP, www.ap.org Create! Community, Urban Design

The city painted a crosswalk and installed tennis-ball green signs, but the cars just kept on zooming through. But rather than wave a white flag, Sarah Newstok grabbed an orange one instead. The Memphis mother of three zip-tied some recycled plastic shrubbery pots to the signposts on either side of McLean Boulevard and filled them with brightly colored traffic flags. On each bucket is a laminated sign: "Use a flag to help you cross." And voila! She'd committed an act of "tactical urbanism." The trend, which started out as a guerrilla movement but has increasingly gone mainstream across America and globally, can involve something as simple as the corrugated plastic speed limit signs going up around New York City or as large as a "pop-up 'hood" of rehabbed shipping containers to demonstrate the viability of a worn-out Salt Lake City neighborhood. The main criteria for an act of tactical urbanism are that it be simple, relatively inexpensive and quick, says urban planner Mike Lydon. "Tactical urbanism is the use of short-term or temporary projects to test out or to demonstrate the possibility for long-term change," says Lydon, a principal with the New York City-based Street Plans Collaborative, who takes credit for coining the phrase several years ago.

The Revolt of the Cities

April 23, 2014 Harold Meyerson, www.prospect.org Organize! Elections, Urban Design

Pittsburgh is the perfect urban laboratory,” says Bill Peduto, the city’s new mayor. “We’re small enough to be able to do things and large enough for people to take notice.” More than its size, however, it’s Pittsburgh’s new government—Peduto and the five like-minded progressives who now constitute a majority on its city council—that is turning the city into a laboratory of democracy. In his first hundred days as mayor, Peduto has sought funding to establish universal pre-K education and partnered with a Swedish sustainable-technology fund to build four major developments with low carbon footprints and abundant affordable housing. Even before he became mayor, while still a council member, he steered to passage ordinances that mandated prevailing wages for employees on any project that received city funding and required local hiring for the jobs in the Pittsburgh Penguins’ new arena. He authored the city’s responsible-banking law, which directed government funds to those banks that lent in poor neighborhoods and away from those that didn’t.

How To Curb Gentrification

April 12, 2014 Julia Wong, www.inthesetimes.com Create! Housing, Urban Design

CJJC’s analysis busts the biggest “development” myth: Gentrification is not inevitable—it can be prevented before it starts and stopped in neighborhoods where the process is already underway. The report proposes a comprehensive policy agenda to mitigate the effects of ongoing gentrification and prevent further displacement. “Since the government has taken such a key role in creating gentrification,” Clark says, “it can also help fight it.” The proposals envision a “move away from overreliance on the private market to meet the housing needs of our communities.” The group hopes to put an initiative on the ballot in Oakland that would ban the kind of harassment techniques landlords use when they’re trying to evict tenants, including refusing to perform maintenance or threatening to report undocumented tenants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

After Death Of Radical Mayor, Mississippi’s Capital Wrestles With His Economic Vision

April 6, 2014 Laura Flanders, www.yesmagazine.org Educate! Cooperatives, Urban Design

On his way into work every morning, Chokwe Lumumba, the late mayor of Jackson, Miss., used to pass a historical marker: “Jackson City Hall: built 1846-7 by slave labor.” Mayor Lumumba had a plan. Believing that history of a new sort could be made here in Jackson, he sought to use public spending to boost local wealth through worker owned cooperatives, urban gardening, and a community-based approach to urban development. His vision, developed over years in social movements, not only prized black experience and drew on the survival strategies that black Americans had come up with over the decades, but also set out to prioritize in the city’s policies the very people who until now had been on the bottom of the state's list. The goal, he said, was “revolutionary transformation.”

What The US Would Look Like As Mega-Regions Instead Of States

February 6, 2014 Tom McKay, www.policymic.com Educate! Government, Urban Design

America 2050 project proposes that we begin to view the country's urban areas not as discrete metropolitan areas but as interconnected "megaregions." Megaregions are areas where large cities and the spaces in between share "interlocking economic systems, shared natural resources and ecosystems, and common transportation systems." They identify 11 in the U.S. — Cascadia, Northern and Southern California, the Arizona Sun Corridor, the Front Range, the Texas Triangle, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, the Northeast, Piedmont Atlantic, and Florida (it's kind of dangling off on its own there, anyhow). In other words, these are the areas in which residents and policymakers are the most likely to have shared common interests and policy goals and would benefit most from co-operation with each other. It's especially important, because as the Regional Plan Association notes, "Our competitors in Asia and Europe are creating Global Integration Zones by linking specialized economic functions across vast geographic areas and national boundaries with high-speed rail and separated goods movement systems."

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