Urban Planning Blog

Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized. We are integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road projects. We are discouraging transportation investments that negatively [...]

Pfizer said it would pull 1,400 jobs out of New London within two years and move most of them a few miles away to a campus it owns in Groton, Conn., as a cost-cutting measure. It would leave behind the city’s biggest office complex and an adjacent swath of barren land that was cleared of [...]

Research by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that since 1995 federal funding for low-income housing assistance has dropped by over 20 percent, both as a share of GDP and non-military discretionary spending. Meanwhile, the number of low-income renters spending more than half of their income on housing costs has increased by over [...]

LaHood is a conservative Illinois Republican with little transportation expertise and almost no administrative experience, who has earned a LCV lifetime voting score on critical environmental issues of 27 percent, and who maintains deep financial connections to the very industries he’s now supposed to regulate. Everything is not perfect, right? Alex Steffen at WorldChanging comments [...]

The Obama transition team announced the chair of the newly-created office of Urban Policy. Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion will head the new White House office of Urban Policy: Carrion is a well-liked, pro-development official who has tried to enhance his limited power through an alliance with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and gives the New York [...]

“Because he [Obama] began as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, he understands at the local level is really where you can impact change and that local government can play a vital role as we try to jump start our economy. So having somebody in the White House, because there are so [...]

Amidst all the hype and talk about China’s oh-so-beautiful capital, little is known about entire ‘ugly’ neighborhoods hidden behind temporary walls. Would this really work in a real democracy?

The destruction caused by hurricane Katrina allowed for revamping New Orlean’s public education system. In the aftermath of the disaster, the local school boards have been replaced by charter schools that are although are publicly financed are run independently. This experiment is seemingly working as test scores are increasingly significantly. Does this indicate a shift [...]

While often unseen or overlooked, 1 out of every 100 Delhi residents earns a livelihood as a wastepicker. As a group, these informal garbage men and women collect over half of the city’s waste. The City Fix shares a video that highlights the plight of the wasterpickers and their almost daily harassment by the police. [...]

University and college rankings are always disputed regardless of the methodology they employ. The U.S.News and World Report rankings is the most used and oft-cited list although it has been repeatedly rubbished by academicians and professionals. These rankings are often based on reputation which is a self-feeding circle and endowment size which also like reputation [...]

I bet many homeowners have received cease and desist letters from the authorities for an unauthorized construction on their property. More often than not, the ignorance of the homeowner is attributed to the lack of permits. But not so in this case. Read an actual letter sent to a man named Ryan DeVries by the Michigan [...]