Richard Florida in CityLab — Inner-City Growth and Competition

Two new studies explore the movement of businesses and people back to the city, but outside the central business district. Over the past decade or so, inner cities have staged a comeback, leading to what’s been dubbed a “great inversion” as people and jobs move back to and near downtown, and poverty and disadvantage increasingly take up residence in the suburbs. Read more: Inner-City Growth and Competition in the U.S. - CityLab

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From CityLab — Why Reston, Virginia Still Inspires Planners 50 Years Later

Official Trailer: Another Way of Living: The Story of Reston, VA from Rebekah Wingert-Jabi on Vimeo. 

It’s rare for a 1960s suburban development to exert a cultural pull distinct from its neighboring city, but Reston pulled it off. 

Situated about 20 miles from Washington, D.C., in what used to be northern Virginia farmland, this settlement has attracted generations of urbanists for its people-first brand of development. When Robert E. Simon Jr. bought the land and planned his flagship project, he insisted on walkability, density, access to nature and green space, and diversity of races and income levels. He didn’t invent these principles—his inspirations were hundreds of years old—but he and his successors managed to realize them at a scale and level of success that hadn’t been seen before. Read more: Why Reston, Virginia, Still Inspires Planners 50 Years Later - CityLab

From CityLab — Why Race Matters in Planning Public Parks

Houston is embarking upon a $220 million parks project called Bayou Greenways 2020, a 150-mile network of continuous hiking trails, biking paths, and green space that will run throughout the city. When completed in 2020, it will make good on plans made by the urban planner Arthur Comey in 1912 to connect the city’s parks with the many strips of bayous scratching open the Houston landscape. Residents approved by ballot referendum a $166 million bond in 2012 to pay for the Bayou Greenways 2020 project, and for improvements to the near-50,000 acres of park space in the city. The goal is to connect the area’s bayous and parks to neighborhoods spanning the region. 

While this connectivity is the stated priority for this massive parks overhaul, not everyone in Houston is feeling it. In fact, connectivity seems to matter most only to Houston’s whiter and wealthier residents. When the city’s parks and recreation department conducted its Master Plan Parks Survey in 2014, the majority of respondents replied that they wanted their neighborhoods and parks linked to biking and walking paths. The problem with that survey is that about two-thirds of the respondents were white with household incomes over $75,000. This is clearly not a good starting point for Houston, one of the most racially diverse, (and heavily segregated) cities in the country. Read more : In Texas, Houston's Bayou Greenways 2020 Parks Project Aims To Meet the Needs of People of Color - CityLab

From @CityLab — The Robert Moses Vs. Jane Jacobs Opera Is Almost Here

The Robert Moses Vs. Jane Jacobs Opera Is Almost Here @CityLab

Posted by The Sidewalk Ballet on Monday, October 19, 2015

From CityLab — 77 Metro 'M' logos in one @markbyrnes525 graphic

Which is your fave? 77 Metro 'M' logos in one (@markbyrnes525) graphic - http://t.co/64DP45WEFt pic.twitter.com/nGYloCGUvv

— eric jaffe (@e_jaffe) June 8, 2015

Chris Burden died on Sunday. He was 69.

From @CityLab "When it comes to thinking critically about what makes cities run, Burden’s genre-spanning career places him among the most useful, inquisitive artists of our time."

Posted by The Sidewalk Ballet on Monday, May 11, 2015

How Much Sprawl Costs America — $1trillion+ according to new report

How Much Sprawl Costs America @CityLab @LitmanVTPI

Posted by The Sidewalk Ballet on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Free eBook — @CityLab Books: The Future of Transportation

Post by The Sidewalk Ballet.

From CityLab — "Simple and Universal Law Governing Pedestrian Behaviour"

Big city sidewalks can feel like an inexplicable dance of elbows and shopping bags and baby strollers and pigeons and texting. But a group of crowd scientists has whittled the chaos to its core and found that, far from unpredictable, foot traffic follows a mathematical formula elegant for its simplicity. From Shibuya Crossing to Times Square we're all performing invisible calculus: computing other people's speeds and trajectories and adjusting our own accordingly. More at: University of Minnesota Researchers Propose a "Simple and Universal Law Governing Pedestrian Behavior" - CityLab

@transitmixapp — from amateur sensation to agency consideration @CityLab

Post by CityLab.

Streets Are Safer for Drivers But Not for Pedestrians @CityLab

Post by Project for Public Spaces.

"A lot of people don’t walk because they are afraid it will kill them before it makes them healthier" @CityLab http://t.co/agAp1qhn3g

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) December 30, 2014

From CityLab — What Really Happens When a City Makes Its Transit System Free?

When Jean-Francois Mayet became mayor of Châteauroux in 2001, the town’s transit system was descending into irrelevance. Each of Châteauroux’s 49,000 inhabitants took the bus, on average, 21 times per year, well below the 38 per annum average for small French cities.

Mayet, a member of France’s socialist party, did what few mayors confronted with a struggling mass transit system would do: he made the whole thing free.

Ever since, the otherwise ordinary French town has become a canary in the coal mine of transportation policy, closely watched by the dozens of other municipalities in various stages of free transit experiments.  Read more CityLab - To save a struggling mass transit system

From CityLab — 5 Key Themes Emerging From the 'New Science of Cities'

In the past few years, a remarkable body of scientific research has begun to shed new light on the dynamic behavior of cities, carrying important implications for city-makers. Researchers at cutting-edge hubs of urban theory like the University College London and the Santa Fe Institute have been homing in on some key properties of urban systems—and contradicting much of today's orthodoxy. Their findings have begun to feed into recent and upcoming gatherings on the future of cities—including lead-in events for the U.N.'s big 2016 Habitat III conference on sustainable development—and arming leaders in the field with new ammunition in the global battle against sprawl.

In one sense, these lessons are not so new. Legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs was famous for her prescient insights about the emerging sciences of “organized complexity” and what they offered for a more effective approach to urban planning—insights she published all the way back in 1961. (In fact, physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute likes to say they are just doing “Jacobs with the math.”) Read more: 5 Key Themes Emerging From the 'New Science of Cities' - CityLab

From CityLab — The Devastating Impact of 30 Years of Sprawl, As Seen From Space

How much have cities in Texas expanded in just the past few decades? A "truckload" I believe is the appropriate regional answer, and now we can actually see those urban centers spread like slime mold with a series of amazing satellite-based animations. More at: The Devastating Impact of 30 Years of Sprawl, As Seen From Space - CityLab

From CityLab — The Number One Thing We Could Do to Improve City Life

At this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, CityLab asked a group of journalists, professors, and non-profit leaders to predict the future of livable, walkable cities. "If I could have one wish for people who live in cities," says Conservational International's M. Sanjayan, "it's that we find ways to connect back to nature, to remind [people] that nature isn't out there—outside the cities—but right in their homes where they live." Other panelists include Luís Bettencourt, Geoffrey West, Alissa Walker, Jeff Speck, and Jennifer Pahlka. Read more: The Number One Thing We Could Do to Improve City Life, According to Geoffrey West, M. Sanjayan, Jennifer Pahlka, and More - CityLab

From CityLab — The Future of Transportation: How Getting From Here to There is Changing Forever

Dealing with disasters, small or large, is all about movement. Getting people away from the danger, bringing emergency response operations toward the danger, transporting casualties to medical services, delivering supplies and materiel to support these operations, and managing this movement through areas with infrastructure that may be either damaged or loaded beyond capacity. Threats like earthquakes and terrorist attacks give no notice, but one thing we know for sure — the water will keep rising. The growing consensus is that while attempts to halt climate change and rising sea levels are necessary, coastal cities have no choice but to prepare for its inexorable encroachment. Read more: The Future of Transportation - CityLab