Neighborhood Development
Urban Planning 101 – Walkability
You’ve probably never heard of Collingwood, Ontario. It’s a smaller municipality on the north shores of Ontario, Northwest of Toronto. They have a YouTube channel where their planning department takes a look at different planning principles of planning and aspects of what they do. This video is a segment on walkability. You can check out [...]
Night of the Living Burbs
When I was a kid, I grew up in a subdivision in Clinton Township, Michigan (a northern suburb of Detroit). Despite being part of the urban sprawl that is the greater metro United States, this neighborhood was about as non-walkable as could be. There were (and still aren’t) any sidewalks, many of the houses were set fairly [...]
One man’s trash is another man’s….Home? Or Park Perhaps!
In case you haven’t heard, they do things a little differently out west. They always have. But the latest developments in Berkeley are even more interesting than one would think. Berkeley resident Gregory Kloehn has been working at retrofitting shipping containers and dumpsters, into homes and even places of business in his Oakland, California warehouse [...]
Block Mother
I’ve been following DetroitBigfDeal‘s stream on vimeo lately and there’s some interesting stuff on there. This latest video, even only a few minutes long, is a story about how as planners, we must never lose sight of planning being about people. Give it a watch.
Are Urban Villages a viable option for Detroit?
Two years ago, a handful of us Wayne State graduate students explored the concept of transforming the city of Detroit from the urban sprawl model that currently takes hold into an Urban Village model of small local downtown-like districts and greater population density. The result was a 43 page document exploring these options and case [...]
Book Review: Last Harvest, How a Cornfield Became New Daleville
There’s a few things from my old blog that I think still deserve to stay alive, and this is one of them. Two years ago, I started graduate school, and this book review was my first assignment. It’s pretty comprehensive as far as book reviews go, and covers a lot of what happened the New [...]
Conceptualizing Woodbridge
Recently, our Wayne State 2011 Capstone team finished our neighborhood study on Woodbridge, a neighborhood adjacent to Detroit’s Midtown. Our client was the Woodbridge Citizen’s District Council, a locally elected body that oversees (in some regards) the neighborhood as a whole. We held meetings, canvassed neighborhoods, surveyed the land, interviewed residents, researched solutions, walked around [...]
Harnessing the Power of Soup
When planners and community leaders look at an old neighborhood which is in need of revitalization efforts, a common train of thought is to appeal to a community of artists. They are willing to live in low income areas (either by choice or out of necessity) and work to improve those areas through their artistic abilities. But project [...]
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