Group items tagged

Planners Network is an association of progressive planning. Our members are professionals, activists, academics, and students involved in physical, social, economic, and environmental planning in urban and rural areas. We serve as a voice for social, economic, and environmental justice through planning.

LocalData is a new digital toolkit designed to help community groups, professional planners and government agencies modernize community-led data collection of place-based information. THE NEED Across the country, community groups, planners and government agencies collect parcel-level information about communities. Typically, the process for collecting, transcribing and cleaning this data can be confusing, lengthy and disempowering. LocalData transforms this process with technology. LocalData began as a 2012 Code for America project with the City of Detroit. Three Code for America fellows (Matt, Alicia and Prashant) identified a need for local data in Detroit. Though community groups were actively surveying neighborhoods and using this data - neighborhood level surveys took a long time and further stressed the under-resourced technical assistance providers that were assisting this effort. Additionally, comprehensive city-wide surveys were taken infrequently, often involving multiple partners, with months of surveying and transcription.

The SmartCode is a unified land development ordinance for planning and urban design. It folds zoning, subdivision regulations, urban design, and optional architectural standards into one compact document. Because the SmartCode enables community vision by coding specific outcomes that are desired in particular places, it is meant to be locally customized (also known as "calibrated") by professional planners, architects, and attorneys.

The Codes Study is a collaborative effort led by Hazel Borys and Emily Talen, and contributed to by many public and private planners, tracking the prevalence of form-based codes worldwide. As of November 2012, we've tracked 433 codes that meet criteria established by the Form-Based Codes Institute (FBCI), as well as an additional 14 form-based guidelines. 252 of these are adopted, with others in progress. Even though form-based codes are 30 years old, 82% have been adopted since 2003.

We wrote this guide to introduce creative placemaking to transportation planners, public works agencies and local elected officials who are on the front lines of advancing transportation projects.

We are a team of civil engineers, planners, and sustainability specialists with expertise in land use planning and zoning, municipal finance, transportation planning and design, stormwater management and green infrastructure implementation, and urban design and placemaking. But, design of elaborate, expensive infrastructure projects is not what we do. The leaders of our organization spent the majority of our careers with large firms designing complex, expensive projects, only to later realize we were making things more economically fragile and unsustainable. We acknowledged that before we could do more of the types of projects our communities need, we'd have to change how people think about the way we have been planning and building our cities and neighborhoods. Rather than sit back and wait, we started VERDUNITY to help lead this change.

What is the World Urban Forum? The Forum has become the preeminent conference on all things urban. It brings together government ministers, mayors, diplomats, grassroots women's organizations, youth and slum dwellers groups, planners, engineers and architects, academics, and the private sector as partners working for better cities.

Compass Blueprint offers a complete toolbox of planning services, trainings, videos, and a other resources to help planners, local governments, and citizen groups do their jobs more effectively.

This article is about power structures in society and how they interact. Specifically it is a guide to seeing who has power when important decisions are being made. It is quite old, but never-the-less of great value to anyone interested in issues of citizen participation. The concepts discussed in this article about 1960's America apply to any hierarchical society but are still mostly unknown, unacknowledged or ignored by many people around the world. Most distressing is that even people who have the job of representing citizens views seem largely unaware, or even dismissive of these principles. Many planners, architects, politicians, bosses, project leaders and power-holder still dress all variety of manipulations up as 'participation in the process', 'citizen consultation' and other shades of technobable.

From Original Minds: Conversations with CBC's Eleanor Wahctel. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright © 2003 by Eleanor Wachtel. All rights reserved. Jane Jacobs is variously known as the guru of cities, an urban legend-"part analyst, part activist, part prophet." In the more than forty years since the publication of her groundbreaking book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), her influence has been extraordinary-not only on architects, community workers, and planners but also on Nobel Prize-winning economists and ecologists. As one critic recently put it, "Jacobs's influence confirms that books matter. It isn't easy to cite another writer who has had a comparable impact in our time."

This toolkit can help planners, public health professionals, and the general public include health in the community planning process. Developed in partnership between the American Planning Association's Planning and Community Health Research Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Healthy Community Design Initiative, the toolkit is composed of four elements that work together to achieve this goal:

The California Planning Roundtable (CPR) is an organization of experienced planning professionals who are members of the American Planning Association (APA). Membership is balanced between the public and private sectors, and between Northern and Southern California. The mission of the Roundtable is to provide a forum for prominent planners to exercise creativity and leadership in promoting understanding of California's critical public policy issues, and recommending action.

SFI's Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research effort is creating an interdisciplinary approach and quantitative synthesis of organizational and dynamical aspects of human social organizations, with an emphasis on cities. Different disciplinary perspectives are being integrated in terms of the search for similar dependences of urban indicators on population size - scaling analysis - and other variables that characterize the system as a whole. A particularly important focus of this research area is to develop theoretical insights about cities that can inform quantitative analyses of their long-term sustainability in terms of the interplay between innovation, resource appropriation, and consumption and the make up of their social and economic activity. This focus area brings together urban planners, economists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and complex system theorists with the aim of generating an integrated and quantitative understanding of cities. Outstanding areas of research include the identification of general scaling patterns in urban infrastructure and dynamics around the world, the quantification of resource distribution networks in cities and their interplay with the city's socioeconomic fabric, issues of temporal acceleration and spatial density, and the long-term dynamics of urban systems.

Placemaking, a collaborative process by which we (residents, architects, activists, community leaders and planners alike) shape our public realm together, is fundamentally about inclusion and shared community ownership.

The first award, the Innovative Planning Tool Award, highlights the best new contribution to the development of open planning tools. This year's winner for goes to Infill Score, a free open source tool for measuring a community's readiness for infill. This tool provides citizens, planners, and elected officials with a self-assessment tool and action planning tools to focus public and private sector investment and accelerate the implementation of sustainable communities. Congratulations to Infill Score.

the U.S. Economic Development Administration sponsored this project to develop new tools to support strategic economic development planning in rural regions. The goal of this work is to help rural planners assess their region's comparative strengths and weaknesses with respect to fostering innovation-based growth. The project's data and tools, however, can be used equally well in any type of region-urban, exurban, metropolitan or custom-based depending upon need and purpose.