People in Cleveland, Detroit, Flint and Youngstown, and in Bilbao, Leipzig and Turin, have plenty of ideas about what cities can do with vacant and abandoned land: urban agriculture; watershed restoration and stream daylighting; side-lot programs; extensive park networks; public arts zones; new museums... Read On 

The Pattern Cities blog calls our attention to the new report on Tactical Urbanism, which focuses on a variety of short term urban design and placemaking actions, ranging from street fairs to guerrilla gardening... Read On 

A few days back I asked for examples of connection-activated civic squares, public squares that serve as both a symbolic and functional heart of the community, but where people connecting between transit lines form part of the square's activity... Read On 

The city of Bellevue, Kentucky has became the first in the Greater Cincinnati region to fully adopt a form-based zoning code. Unlike traditional zoning regulations, which focus mostly on land use type, the form-based code focuses on the overall built environment. Bellevue's code ensures that new development will fit into the city's existing pedestrian-friendly urban fabric... Read On 

The news this week that Detroit's population plunged more than 25% to just 714,000 in the last decade shouldn't be surprising. The city's collapse is as well-documented as it is astonishing - the population peaked at nearly 2 million in the 1950s, driven in part by a post-World War II auto industry boom now long gone... Read On 

A timeless topic of conversation in the planning world is whether tearing down a major road improves traffic flow and/or quality of life. Earlier this week NPR looked at a couple such cases and concluded that this approach does indeed work - sometimes:.. Read On

Case studies in select large cities have found that fringe services, including payday lenders, check cashers, pawn brokers, and money transmittal companies are more geographically accessible to predominantly minority neighborhoods while traditional banks are more accessible to white neighborhoods... Read On 

One of this week's big American news stories was the release of new Census data for the state of Michigan, which revealed that the city of Detroit underwent a stunning population decline between 2000 and 2010. Detroit shrank by 25% during the decade, and its population fell to its lowest level since 1910-before the era of Big Three dominance. The city seems to be locked in a death spiral... Read On