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From Project for Public Spaces — Place Governance through Neighborhood Planning Offices

Photo by Eric Sehr.

Imagine if your local city planner worked around the corner from your home in a storefront on your neighborhood’s shopping street. You wave at them through their window on the way to work, you drop by sometimes for a chat, and you may even be on a first name basis. For nearly two decades that’s exactly how it used to work in Toronto, Ontario. Embracing an innovative model of Place Governance, in the 1970s the City decentralized its planning department intoNeighborhood Planning Offices located in the very areas they served. 

When Jane Jacobs moved from New York City to Toronto in 1968, her adopted city was already well on its way toward reasserting itself as a city for people. After experiencing its first tastes of expressway construction and urban renewal and witnessing the destruction these strategies wrought in many cities south of the border, a movement led by young community activists and idealistic politicians was ready to overturn the status quo. In 1970, they worked with local residents and business owners in the Trefann Court neighborhood to put urban renewal plans for the area into their hands. In 1971, they stopped the construction of the Spadina Expresswaythrough the heart of the city. And finally, in the 1972 election, a host of reform candidates, including Mayor David Crombie, swept to power in city council with a new vision for a human-scale city. Read more:  Place Governance through Neighborhood Planning Offices

We need to start talking about this Vancouver. #vanpoli #VanRE #urbanplanning We need #publicspaces & public voices. https://t.co/zvmc8B0GHr

— sine nomine♿️ (@mssinenomine) April 17, 2016

From NY Daily News — How can we save our beloved neighbourhood mom-and-pop shops?

How can we save our beloved mom-and-pop shops from gentrification? @NYDailynews https://t.co/K453vhn7sS food for thought for #Vancouver

— Wes Regan (@411Regan) April 7, 2016

It starts with the sign, the one that says FOR LEASE or FOR RENT or simply AVAILABLE, with a phone number printed underneath and maybe the name of a real-estate firm. The sign appears not on an empty space, but on a building that’s home to a long-established business — say, an old-fashioned general store like Winn Home & Beauty, which anchored a block on the busy commercial corridor of Court Street in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood.

Next come the rumors. Did you see that the Winn store space is for lease? A local blogger writes a post, and the comments section fills with laments. News travels along the nearby sidewalks, on social media, at school drop-off. Did you hear? Oh, no. Not another one. Read more: How can we save our beloved mom-and-pop shops from gentrification? | NY Daily News

Jan Gehl "spent four decades unlearning
his [planning and architecture] education.” @citiesforpeople @ArchReview https://t.co/rarrX9eNw0

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) April 13, 2016

Urbanarium City Debate #4 — Create a City-wide Plan #urbanariumvote

#urbanariumvote Tweets

From Strong Towns — Why mixed-income neighborhoods matter Lifting kids out of poverty

There’s a hopeful new sign that how we build our cities, and specifically, how good a job we do of building mixed income neighborhoods that are open to everyone can play a key role in reducing poverty and promoting equity. New research shows that neighborhood effects—the impact of peers, the local environment, neighbors—contribute significantly to success later in life. Poor kids who grow up in more mixed income neighborhoods have better lifetime economic results. This signals that an important strategy for addressing poverty is building cities where mixed income neighborhoods are the norm, rather than the exception. And this strategy can be implemented in a number of ways—not just by relocating the poor to better neighborhoods, but by actively promoting greater income integration in the neighborhoods... Read more: Why mixed-income neighborhoods matter: Lifting kids out of poverty — Strong Towns

Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff talks to Charlie Rose about the future of cities

Thousands of people a week are signing up for New York City's free WiFi hotspots: https://t.co/HK28T0BOE9 #LinkNYC pic.twitter.com/DRMdHZzVyZ

— Brian Fung (@b_fung) April 8, 2016