I published an op-ed in the Michigan Daily online today, arguing for the need for greater collaborative planning and innovation to foster sustainability on campus and in the city and region. Here’s the full text: If you’ve been away over the summer, you may have missed some exciting new developments here on campus! Did you […]
The Art (and Science?) of Designing Urban Planning Processes
In June I published an op-ed in the Detroit News describing my research on urban renewal in Detroit in the 1940s. I concluded with the observation: The voices of citizens affected by renewal must be heard. Dramatic, large-scale projects can have harmful and unexpected consequences. The history of urban planning has shown success occurs through […]
How Should Detroit Plan for the Future?
The Detroit News published an op-ed I wrote about lessons learned about urban renewal from my undergraduate thesis. Detroit is facing big problems: declining population, budget deficits and a stagnant economy. Discussions about fixing the city has generated dramatic ideas, including the Detroit Works Project — Mayor Bing’s roadmap for the city’s future. The plan […]
ArborUpdate.com Shuts Down
The website ArborUpdate.com, which I helped found in Summer 2004, has decided to shut down. The last post includes a number of interesting comments discussing the website’s history. I created the website, which operated as a non-hierarchical editorial collective, to discuss news and civic issues in Ann Arbor. Since it was founded, personal blogging has […]
Detroit and the Limits to Urban Decline
Since the middle of the 20th Century, no American city has experienced the severe economic shock experienced in Detroit. Analyzing the housing of the city, I found the city’s shrinking housing stock has declined at almost precisely the same amount per year, every year: 1% of the existing stock lost. This underlying regularity, independent apparent […]
The Paradox of Cheap Parking, in Real Time
Last spring, I heard about an interesting dataset about Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I lived for four years as an undergraduate student. Busy with the flurry of activity leading up to my completion of graduate school, I stored it away to look at later. After all, real-time information on cities is hard enough to come […]
Michigan Campus Activism Guide Published
Although it has been a while since I’ve written about the University of Michigan, I thought I would note the publication of a book by my friend and U-M senior Mollie Bates. An Art and Design senior, in collaboration with the progressive paper the Michigan Independent, Mollie has designed and produced an 80-page, full color […]