Placemaking

One promising trend in urban planning is the push from a growing number of U.S. cities to reduce minimum parking requirements for new developments. As the name suggests, parking minimums require developers to build a certain amount of spaces, regardless of whether a community wants or needs them. The result is an excess of parking that can lead to more vehicle pollution, worsen traffic congestion, and drive up housing costs. In some cases, the steep cost of building parking prevents a project from moving forward at all.

These instances of road repurposing and placemaking are born from pain and anger, and yet they have brought communities together and created beauty.

Cattle gates for pedestrians in NYC. "Antiseptic cities." This is what auto industry officials tell the New York Times they envision for self-driving cars.

A public plaza built two years ago as a "people's park" surrounding Detroit's iconic statue will not be made permanent, thanks to a vote on Tuesday by the City Council.

Planner James Rojas calls “Latino Urbanism,” an informal reordering of public and private space that reflects traditions from Spanish colonialism or even indigenous Central and South American culture

Last week, Gracen Johnson over at Strong Towns introduced the phrase "places I don't want to sit" to describe the lousy, leftover public spaces where someone has plopped down a bench or two as an afterthought. The seating, in these cases, helps crystallize how unsalvageable our public realm becomes when everything else is planned around moving and storing cars. Who would actually want to sit there?

Indianapolis is building public support for a major street redesign the same way DIYers and tactical urbanists do: by testing out temporary changes.

This post is part of a series featuring stories and research that will be presented at the Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike/Pro-Place conference September 8-11 in Pittsburgh.

When I first got started making NYC bike advocacy and car-free streets videos back in the late-1990s on cable TV, I didn't know who William "Holly" Whyte was or just how much influence his work and research had on New York City. A few years later I met Fred and Ethan Kent at Project for Public Spaces. I got a copy of Whyte's 1980 classic, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which in its marvelously-written, straightforward style is the one book all burgeoning urbanists should start with.