The urban planning questions we should be asking about these businesses. I have been involved in many downtown community plans professionally and have been active in my own neighborhood on economic development concerns and the question that I hear asked most often is along the lines of Why can’t we get a Starbucks (or Trader…
After reading and discussing the article, The CTA’s Blue Line has a big problem, I’ve decided I need to weigh in on this. Because, guess what, the Blue Line does not actually have a big problem – in fact, it’s a victim of its own success! That doesn’t mean there isn’t any problems that can’t…
Complete Streets is a great thing – a real sea change in designing our streets for people rather than cars. But, unfortunately, sometimes we still get the engineering mindset when it comes to deploying complete streets policy: In West Allis, a working-class Milwaukee suburb, the state proposed adding bike lanes to a six-lane highway that…
In Chicago, where I live, land use planning is largely the domain of the zoning code. The Alderman has control over granting variances to the zoning code (Aldermanic prerogative). Thus, the Alderman’s office has tremendous control over whether anything gets built because, despite the fact that Chicago’s zoning ordinance was re-written only 10 years ago, much of…
I would like to follow-up on my Planning for People in Jefferson Park post and expand a bit on what it means to “plan for people”. For at least the past 60 years, the architecture, planning and engineering professions have fundamentally changed the way they designed cities. Cities, a creation of the human race for…
If you plan cities for cars & traffic you get cars & #traffic. If you plan for people & places…via @PPS_Placemaking pic.twitter.com/MxYvlTS9fS — TODERIAN UrbanWORKS (TUW) (@TODUrbanWORKS) July 9, 2014 Recently there has been a surge of planning work being done in my neighborhood, the once sleepy corner of the northwest side of Chicago…