This Middlebury College project sounds cool.  

Starksboro asked students from nearby Middlebury College to spend the semester interviewing its residents to document what they value most about the place. It intends to use their thoughts to influence decisions about its future.

In particular, officials here are counting on the project to help steer a revision of the town plan next year, a process that often leads to zoning-change proposals that incite bitter debate.

“The key is to project beyond immediate controversies over applications for subdivisions and to say, ‘Let’s envision the future that we would love to have,’ ” said Prof. John Elder of Middlebury, “at which point there is considerable agreement.”

 It also sounds an awful lot like a fairly typical UEP Field Project.  When are we going to make the NYT?

There's a firestorm brewing surrounding the Mass Turnpike Authority's latest revenue-generating proposal.

The MTA wants to significantly increase tolls in the tunnels that connect East Boston to the rest of the city.  Understandably, this has set many Eastie residents, business owners, property owners and representatives into a panic.

MA House Speaker Sal DeMasi has offered an alternative proposal: Hike the state-wide gas tax instead.

I can understand the potential argument that it would be unfair to tax all MA drivers to cover MTA's debt.  But would it be fair for the MTA to single out a neighborhood that's on realatively unsteady economic footing as it is?  (Here's the 2000 Census data for East Boston).

For the record, this very unscientific poll finds overwhelming support for raising the gas tax instead of the tunnel tolls.

First-year UEPer Kendall Webster forwarded this email from a friend of hers (slightly edited; this is a family blog):

oh man, i just watched this movie

A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash

and now i'm kinda bugging out. i think i'm going to look into moving to new zealand anyway, even with obama as president. i read all these books, like "the end of oil" "resource wars" "the hydrogen economy" and a bunch more like them two years ago, and i became convinced it was just a matter of time before [stuff] started to collapse. now i'm seeing the current economic disaster as the beginning of the real collapse, and i'm still really not ready. i've got the boat, and the food, and the gas, but not enough food, and no weapons, and not enough training/ practice on the boat which isn't even in the water right now. my old plan was to have sold the house and gotten out of here, but i got so caught up in trying to make ends meet and work and all, then the election... it kinda got pushed aside and i was feeling good about america again. now i think it's too late and we're [in loads of trouble] no matter what.

sorry for that big spout off. i'm spending the day tomorrow shopping for some [freaking] guns and buying more food. you must think i'm nuts.

Yesterday a small group of us UEPers piled in a van and drove over to Amherst for a symposium called "Regional Green Infrastructure and Landscape Urbanism: New Directions for Planning."  It was a collaboration between the Tufts, Harvard, MIT and UMass Amherst planning programs.  I think we all really enjoyed the talks by Peter Lowitt and UMass profs Elisabeth Hamin and Jack Ahern.  Also, the appetizers were fantastic.

After the talks, UEP prof Justin Hollander asked the audience to consider the implications of the current economic troubles on the prospects of green infrastructure in the near future. This is something that I've seen a lot of chatter about lately.  There seem to be two general schools of thought on this.  One says that a bad economy will make it harder for us to make policy and planning decisions that are good for the envorinment; this is what recent articles in Time and the Wall Street Journal seem to suggest. 

The other school says that the stumbling economy -- the rising price of oil over the long term, the credit crunch, and all the rest -- present a great opportunity to remodel our economy and come out with something a lot healthier for all of us; this is suggested in pieces by The Architect's Newspaper and AlterNet.  It's also strongly advocated by people like Van Jones, who spoke at Tufts this past Earth Day, and Bill McKibben, who I saw speak in Jamaica Plain shortly thereafter.

Both in their talks and in response to Justin's question, Peter Lowitt and Jack Ahern argued that green infrastructure such as green roofs and the use of watersheds to treat waste water often actually save money -- the trick is that you usually have to look long-term, which is not always easy for people (or municipalities) to do.  Which is obviously encouraging, but it poses another question: So, why aren't these things done more often?

It made me think of the book I'm reading in my spare time (Ha!  "Spare time" -- more like "random minutes on the train when I don't feel like working through my zillion pages of weekly class readings") -- George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant!  It's been sitting on my bookshelf since it came out just before the '04 elections, and I finally pulled it out because I'm starting to realize just how much the frustrations we run into in the world of planning and policy might be due (at least in part) to failures of language, framing, and connecting issues to common values. 

I'm sure a lot of you have a lot more expertise on this stuff than I do.  But it seems to me it's probably something that we need to get better at.

(Oh, by the way...Obama to create an Office of Urban Policy!)

A gradual shift leftward, perhaps?

Indeed, much of Obama’s very strong victory is rooted in these cutting edge demographic trends, which Democrats are now turning to their advantage.  Immigrants, minorities, young people, college graduates and metro residents, both in cities and suburbs, are all part of the mix, helping to expand Democratic support in America’s rising areas.

Or rather, what can cities expect from President Obama?

A day after the election, Planetizen has a look.  Their conclusion:

In the end, as Planetizen blogger and land use law professor Michael Lewyn reminds us, the hands-on work of urban planning, zoning and development are firmly in the hands of local government and therefore won't be directly impacted by a new president. But if the evidence is to be believed, an Obama presidency will be much more hands-on in making decisions about urban policy, particularly when it comes to significant investments in infrastructure for energy and transportation.

Sorry to be repeating themes lately, but the election has obviously been dominating popular discourse of late, and this is the obvious way to tie it in here.  Plus, speaking for myself -- on top of last night's big event, this has been an especially hectic couple of weeks schoolwise, so I really haven't had a chance to branch out much.  But expect things here to get mixed up again soon.

City Limits goes quite a bit more in depth than the Philly Daily News did a couple weeks ago regarding the respective urban agendas of the two major presidential candidates.

I don't think I need to remind anyone reading this to VOTE, do I?

Two more days, folks.

Richard Reep at New Geography critiques some of Central Florida's original New Urbanist communities and concludes that they display "a glaring lack of employment, raising questions about their sustainability and long-term viability."

Reep intends his analysis to be an indictment of New Urbanism in general.  Does it hold up? 

For one, have NU communities within existing metropolitan areas ever promised to be entirely self-sufficient?

Moreover, do these places even fit the definition of New Urbanism?  I've never been to Florida, but it doesn't sound like the communities Reep talks about quite adhere to NU's stated intent to develop "within walking distance of transit stops, permitting public transit to become a viable alternative to the automobile," nor to create "transit, pedestrian, and bicycle systems" to "maximize access and mobility throughout the region while reducing dependence upon the automobile."  And the NU charter promotes "infill development within existing urban areas" (emphasis mine), which doesn't seem to be the case with at least Celebration.  Plus, Celebration (and others?) isn't zoned as particularly dense; an aerial shot of it (right) actually makes it look kind of, well, sprawly.

Thoughts?

While still an undergrad at the University of Florida, first-year UEPer Gabe Lopez-Bernal created a website called Transit Miami to, in his words, "expose the potential for intelligent growth in a community crippled by urban sprawl, imprudent transit-oriented development, congestion, and an abusive development policy."

A fantastic idea.  But has it worked?  Well, because of his website (and the traffic it has generated), Gabe has been asked to participate in think tanks.  He has attended conferences.  He has given speeches on behalf of Miami's mayor.  And Gabe and his writing team (all current or former transportation engineering and urban planning students) have been featured in numerous newspapers and websites.  So, I think the it's safe to say the answer is yes. 

 Just take a quick look and you'll understand why.

Last Saturday on his excellent website FiveThirtyEight.com (seriously, if you're as obsessed with presidential politics as I am and haven't yet bookmarked/RSS-feeded that site, you must do so now) Nate Silver looked at the demographics of the places Barack Obama and Sarah Palin have visited since August 29th, and, in what may well constitute your Unsurprising News Item of the Day, he found that Obama has spoken to much more racially diverse areas than has Palin.  From this one could deduce that Obama has been paying attention to larger municipalities, and without looking up the actual numbers, I'd guess that Detroit, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Denver, St. Louis and Milwaukee are in fact bigger than anywhere Palin has been. Choose your own set of implications here. 

Of course, this analysis has a shortcoming: Sarah Palin is not John McCain.  Minor detail, right? 

Well, the next day the Philadelphia Daily News wondered explicitly: "Do the candidates have an urban agenda?"

Here's the short answer they were given:

"John McCain basically has one underlying proposal," said Ed Schwartz, president of the Institute for Civic Values in Philadelphia. "Cut taxes and things will get better. There is no urban policy built into that, because urban policy involves an investment."

Schwartz said Obama's plans are very different.

"You look now at Obama's proposals and they are responsive to the things that cities need," he said. "He talks about community development. He talks about a transition to work and re-entry. He's saying that this is an absolute priority."