Planners take Boston

I returned yesterday from the American Planning Association National Planning Conference in Boston.  It was a great time hanging out with fellow students and professionals learning about what is going on in planning.  My tweets cover some of the highlights, but a rundown of the sessions I went to are as follows:

• "City Planning 360: GIS for Intelligent Cities" showed some of the power of the new ArcGIS 10 platform.
• Adapting and using Dedicated Port Areas
• An opening keynote from Michael J. Sandel
• How to evaluate "authentic" features of suburbs and how they can be used during suburban retrofits
• Turning a small town train station into a transit village
• "LEED Guidance for Neighborhood Development" where speakers called out Grand Rapids as an excellent example and case study for writing 'green' standards into a comprehensive plan.
• Green preservation and economic growth in the North Loop area of Minneapolis
• Transportation and climate change
• Using social media as a means of public participation
• Regional food systems planning
• "Leveraging the Value of Older Buildings"

I can talk in greater detail in person.

I also went to a Boston Red Sox game against the Tampa Bay Rays, which was pretty cool.  Fenway Park was neat and being able to sit up on the green monster because the game turned into a 16-5 blowout by the Rays was awesome.

Fenway Park

From the Green Monster

Bullpens

Spring Break Connections

I survived the first week back from break! It ended yesterday with an assignment that had a due date of 5pm on a Saturday.  Ridiculous, but I survived.  Now, to recall what I spent my time doing over break with Boulder County.

I have already explained the first day, but on the second day I attended a meeting for the EnergySmart program in the morning. It is an energy efficiency program that was recently awarded some federal money to help homeowners and businesses to increase efficiency by providing rebates on certain things.  The simple parts are replacing light bulbs, but it moves up from there to tune up HVAC systems, insulation, roofs, and appliances such as industrial refrigerators.  Check out a press release here.

Later in the day, I met one of the county land use planners and talked about land use planning and things like the urban growth boundary system the county and municipalities have set up, and site plan review.  Boulder also has a transfer of development credits (TDC) program that is pretty neat.  In the county, a home cannot be larger than 6,000 sq ft, which is a decent size, but with development in recent years (pre-housing crash) it was normal to see larger than 10,000 sq ft homes in rural areas.  The TDC program allows owners of smaller homes give up the ability to expand their homes up to a certain amount in exchange for money and the footage given up can be used by the purchaser to build a larger home that would normally not be allowed.

Finally, I ended my Tuesday by meeting with a couple of county transportation planners.  We briefly talked about the push for alternative modes of transportation in the county, and then onto a specific project - the Eco Pass.  The Eco Pass is a bus pass that a business or neighborhood can purchase for employees or residents.  What we talked about more was the community Eco Pass.  The county has done this with Lyons where the county pays RTD the projected cost of the route that runs into town, and every resident gets a pass to use.  As ridership increases the cost would presumably increase, but it allows every person in the small town to get on a bus and not drive into Boulder or wherever else they go.  The county was working on setting this up for Nederland as well, and this is where I come in.  In order to figure out how much money they owed RTD, they needed some data about how people paid for their bus fare, so they were not paying double for those people who already had a free fare.  So, I rode the bus up and back 3 times over the rest of the week to get some preliminary data, talk to some drivers to maybe get them interested in helping out, and just to see the beauty of Boulder Canyon.

On Wednesday I had a meeting with another person in land use talking about the response to the Four Mile Fire and what is being done to help affected homeowners and some more about Boulder, like the 50ft building height limit in the city, rising property values, and what is "sustainable" in the different municipalities.

On Thursday I had yet another meeting in land use with a forestry person, again talking about the fire.  We discussed how if progressed, what actions were taken, and how better control of trees could have prevented much of the damage.  Growth was allowed so the forest was all trees instead of a more natural grouping of trees with open grass spaces between that could have allowed the fire to burn itself out easier.

I also attended a transportation master plan meeting.  Finally, on Friday morning I was a part of a meeting to revise a set of maps showing different social welfare programs across the county.

It was a great week, and I learned some valuable things about planning from it.  Maybe I need to move there next...

Trains Down the Middle

I am back from Colorado, but providing an update on what I did for most of the week is on hold while I work on settling back in and reorienting myself to "school."

I managed to buy a crazy amount of groceries, unpack, and clean up my room today, so hopefully the update will be sooner rather than later. For now, I leave you with a video a few of my classmates made to promote center-running light rail along the Woodward Avenue corridor in Detroit:

Detroit needs better transit options. You should submit some comments about it. More information at Transport Michigan.

Spring Break in Boulder

If you have seen my Twitter or Facebook recently, you might know that I am on Spring Break.  For break, I am participating in a job placement program that the architecture and urban planning programs put on.  I requested a placement in the Denver/Boulder area of Colorado and ended up with a placement at Boulder County Public Health working with a University of Michigan urban planning alum in the environmental health department.

I started there today.  I got to work on some computer mapping and began reading through a study of different communities and how they go about using planning of the physical environment to benefit public health.  Later in the week it looks like I will get to meet with some people doing land use and transportation planning too.

The benefit of being placed in Boulder (beyond the weather, mountains, and beer) is being able to stay and catch up with my buddy Jon who is going to school out here now.  It has been a great time!

I'll try to write more when the week is finished.

The Future of Planning

Last Friday, the University of Michigan played host for the Michigan Association of Planning Student Conference.  There were also students from Michigan State, Western, Eastern, Central, Wayne State, and Lawrence Tech who attended the day-long event.  Unfortunately, because of work, I missed the afternoon session, but I did manage to catch some morning presentations, enjoy lunch, and make it back in time for the social gathering at Grizzly Peak, a local watering hole.

An opening talk was given by the Dean from LTU, on the topic of "Tales of Detroit & New Orleans Climate Change."  There are some interesting parallels between the two cities even though the problems of one occurred by natural disaster and the other by much more human oriented reasons.  Detroit can also look at New Orleans to see how it might be able to do some of its rebuilding.  However, the most intriguing part of the presentation was the suggestion that, because of climate change, Detroit and the rest of the Midwestern rust belt can rebound.

Most booming cities of the last few decades have been in the south and the west, or what is often called the Sun Belt because those regions have a much warmer climate, not to mention natural resources, space, and people.  People want to be where its nicer, but with climate change increasing temperatures these places may become unbearable for certain periods of time.  The Sun Belt is also prone to greater numbers of natural disasters than Michigan is, and those may increase in magnitude or happen more often.  So, it was suggested that if Michigan and the upper Midwest can maintain a minimal amount of diversity and create a decent economic climate, people will return once again.  There will be another shift from the Sun Belt back to the "Great Midwestern Greenbelt" where our summers will be like northern Arkansas and our winters like southern Ohio.

Beyond this presentation, I went to a session of student presentations on data visualization, urban agriculture in Detroit, light rail on the Woodward Avenue corridor in Detroit, and the concept of a "Recovery Park" for a Detroit neighborhood.  These were all good presentations and showed some of the diversity of what planning students from around the state are working on.  Unfortunately, by missing the afternoon session, I was a bad peer and missed all of the presentations given by my Michigan classmates.

The conference was pretty good for what I made it for, including a delicious lunch and drinks afterwards.  It was nice to take a break from the normal schedule of classes for this, and seeing what other students are doing was cool instead of always seeing professors and professionals talk about their stuff.

Expanded Horizons

Every year, the University of Michigan planning program puts on Expanded Horizons.  It is a 5 day break from classes and takes many of the first year planning students on a trip to explore some city withing driving distance of Ann Arbor - all for a class credit (assuming we manage to participate and turn in a short paper when requested).

I returned from this one week ago.  Our destination this was Philadelphia, PA (which has a ridiculous number of one-way streets)!

Last Wednesday morning the planning students crammed onto a bus for our 11 hour ride to the City of Brotherly Love.  The trip went like most long rides and all of us were relieved when we finally arrived at our hotel: A Holiday Inn Express right in the center city.  After settling in, we went to wander downtown a little to grab some dinner and drinks.

On Thursday morning, we met up with the director of the Preservation Alliance, piled onto our bus again, and took a tour of the city learning everything we wanted to know about Philadelphia.  We went past Independence Hall, through Society Hill, Temple University, and many other places (some pretty sketchy).

After our tour, we went to Reading Terminal Market for lunch.  An indoor farmer's market, Reading had just about every kind of food you could want and was simply a unique place with many different people wandering its crowded paths.

In the afternoon we began splitting into groups, which went to various organizations throughout the city, to see what kind of planning-related activities were happening.  My first one was Greensgrow urban agriculture.  Like any urban agriculture project, Greensgrow was doing a lot with sustainability, education and outreach, and supplying healthy, locally grown foods via the market and the CSA (which includes some kind of protein with the vegetables each week).  However, it was interesting to learn that they did not start out of the local foods movement or for social justice issues, but rather as a way to simply use vacant land.

The farm is located on the site of a former factory that polluted the ground with many heavy metals and is an EPA-classified brownfield.  To "fix" the site, it was covered over by a concrete slab, so none of the farming is actually done in the ground of that site.  The first farming they did was for-profit hydroponic lettuce, which was sold to high-end restaurants in downtown Philadelphia.  Eventually they moved in the direction to where they are now as they responded to the needs of the neighborhood and added a nursery and market, etc.

Much of what they sell is grown above the concrete in raised beds within greenhouse structures or is purchased from other local farmers to distribute in the neighborhood.  They are just beginning to break even on the food growing side of their enterprise, but have been able to rake in money from selling flowers and other plants from the nursery to cover expenses.

On Thursday night, we held a social event and met up with a bunch of planning students from UPenn (Ivy Leaguers!) at the bar.

Friday was a continuation of meeting various organizations, and in the morning I went to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.  Here we learned about how they are working to make Philadelphia more bicycle and pedestrian friendly.  Various types of bike lanes are being implemented and we walked down to look at one that included a buffer zone between drivers and riders.

Another project was the conversion of parking meters into bike racks.  As the city converts to parking kiosks for entire blocks of spaces and the old meters are removed, the poles are left behind and places to lock bikes to are being bolted on.  Other projects included larger bicycle trail systems and general education for drivers, riders, and pedestrians.

In the afternoon was my final session.  A group of us walked down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and talked with the executive director of the Fairmount Parks system (who has a niece that went to Calvin).  We began at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where Rocky ran up the steps and ended down near city hall.  Along the way we learned about the green space, traffic concerns, and current construction projects.  There are a couple of new and remodeled museums along the way as well as many other civic buildings such as the library.  It is quite the historic stretch of road: created as Philadelphia's ChampsElysees during the City Beautiful movement.

If I had to pick a session I didn't go to, but wished I had it would be Postgreen ... or Interface Studios: joint creators of the LEED Gold or Platinum, 100k home.

We spent Friday night bowling and socializing.  Making sure we got to know all the people who went on the trip - another purpose of such a trip.  Many of us ended up walking to the Piazza at Schmidt's, a development by Tower Investments - where a number of others went for one of their sessions.

Later in the night, a number of us decided it would be cool to head over the Delaware river to Camden, NJ - one of America's most dangerous cities.  Probably not the best idea ever.  The place seemed like a literal ghost town, and after talking to some police officers who said we were a "huge red flag" we went back to where we came from.

Saturday morning we did some community service work cleaning up parks and a business district.  We disposed of trash, raked, weeded, mulched, etc.

That afternoon, a number of us went to Tony Luke's to get cheesesteaks and then ended up at the bar to watch the Michigan-Indiana football game with the Alumni Club of Philadelphia.

Overall, it was a fantastic trip that allowed me to see a different city, learn quite a bit, and get to know my classmates a lot better.

In Defense of Calvin College

A couple of weeks ago I went to the bar with a friend and met up with his sister and a co-worker of his.  During the course of conversation it was brought up that I would be attending graduate school for urban planning, something my friend's sister though was pretty cool as did his co-worker.

Having a few drinks, the co-worker decided to rant to me a little about dumb street design and poor planning from the last few decades, which I heartily joined in on.  He wondered how I got into the whole urban planning thing, especially for someone from Calvin College, so I told him about being a geography major and taking an introductory course in planning while at Calvin.

This happened to be when the conversation shifted a little.  Having apparently attended Calvin for a while, the co-worker was surprised Calvin offered a planning course, and made the quick conclusion that it was probably one of the few good classes the college offers (he took philosophy classes).

His distaste for Calvin continued to be shown by talking about how Calvin abandoned it's campus in the city for the suburban real estate it currently occupies.  In some ways I agree with those sentiments, but we shouldn't direct the heat solely upon the school.

Calvin had grown beyond what the old campus could sustain and badly needed to undergo some kind of expansion.  Given that fact, they expanded to a location where the land was available.  We shouldn't fault them on jumping at such an opportunity, especially since suburbanization was the name of the game when these events took place.  It was not the school, but rather an entrenched societal ideal that came more into play.  Also worth mentioning is the fact that the former campus "in the city" was almost outside of the city.

To look back with disgust, I think, is inappropriate.  Instead, we should look at what is happening in the present and for the future.  Progress is happening.

Calvin has increased its presence in the downtown area with the creation of the (106) South Division Art Gallery.  The school has also begun to subsidize bus rides on the Rapid making them cheaper for students.  Unfortunately, there are many complaints to these.  The main one I see is that Calvin is not doing enough and should be doing more, such as fully subsidizing the Rapid so it is free and not just cheap.  I'm in the camp that says Calvin should do more too, but we can't just complain.  I think it really boils down to the administration and policy makers moving slowly and cautiously, which in many ways is quite admirable.  A lot of thought has to go into such decisions.

I also don't think we should compare Calvin to Grand Valley.  A lot of the arguments for making the Rapid free center on the fact that GVSU does it for their students.  Many differences should be noted.  First, GVSU is much larger than Calvin, although this is probably not that important in the grand scheme.  Next, there is actually a legitimate reason to offer free service to GVSU students: they have a campus downtown and often take classes there and out in Allendale and need a way to get between campuses easily.  Calvin doesn't have that issue.  Most students either live on campus or nearby, so there is no necessary reason to give free rides.  The closet comparison to Calvin would be Aquinas.  Aquinas only has one campus, albeit closer into town, and they offer a discounted rate of 40 cents.  This is comparable to Calvin's 50 cent fares.

Other reasons abound for Calvin (and Aquinas) to hop on board with free fares, and I would love to see that happen.  I think it is most important to realize that people at Calvin actually care about these kind of issues and some progress is evident.  It is also important to continue to pursue various avenues and push for quicker implementation of positive policies.

Finally, we should be grateful for what Calvin is as a respectable educational institution that is actually moving (however slowly) into greater harmony with the city.  At least we're not Davenport, who just recently abandoned their downtown campus for one out in the sticks by M-6.

Rant out. Good night.