Promoting bicycle ridership has become a widespread mission across many regions, ranging from small towns to large cities. In California’s East Bay, the East Bay Bicycle Coalition (EBBC) has grown to be the primary advocacy group to make bicycling more feasible and safer on a large scale. The organization’s “guiding principles” include the following: Make [...]
After reading articles about residents growing vegetables in their backyards and seeing community gardens sprouting (pun intended) up in dense cities, I have become intrigued by this idea of growing your own produce instead of purchasing it at your local market. Is there a real future for this contemporary practice or will it continue to [...]
Wednesday, June 5th at 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. EDT Join Global Site Plans on Twitter on Wednesday, June 5th from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. EDT for a live Twitter chat. This month’s topic is Social Equity and Inclusiveness. What’s a Twitter Chat? A Twitter chat is simply a preset, organized time to tweet on a pre-organized [...]
Oakland continues to bring new development and innovation to its neighborhoods. Next up is the MacArthur Transit Village (MTV), an impressive urban planning initiative to be built in Temescal beside the MacArthur BART station. Much like Fruitvale Village, this transit-oriented-development (TOD) brings some much-needed land use planning to a space currently occupied by a massive [...]
How do you achieve social equity and inclusiveness through urban planning? In order to answer this question, we must first define these terms. PolicyLink defines equity as such, “Just and fair inclusion. An equitable society is one in which all can participate and prosper. The goal of equity must be to create conditions that allow [...]
How can we most effectively prevent crime? America has invested a lot of money in its prison system. In fact, the FY 2013 budget requests $8.6 billion for federal prisons and detentions according to the US Department of Justice. However, there is a different, more contemporary thought process that does not agree with this type [...]
A big Global Site Plans welcome to our newest blogger, Robert Poole from the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Robert Poole recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Anthropology and a minor in City and Regional Planning. He grew up in San Diego but now resides in Berkeley, where he has become intrigued [...]
On the first Friday of every month, 20,000 people scour the streets of Oakland to participate in a unique event that plays host to art exhibits, performers, food trucks and numerous intriguing sights. First Friday has been a showcase for the city for the past seven years. It exemplifies the city’s every-growing identity that reflects [...]
Like many of its Bay Area counterparts, Oakland, California is a city full of diverse neighborhoods, comprised of unique identities blending and interacting to form one of the region’s primary destinations. Temescal is one such example where you can see the local history while experiencing the recently emerged culinary and art scenes that have come [...]
Nested in California’s East Oakland is a culturally vibrant neighborhood known as Fruitvale. In 1999 the city began construction on a transit-oriented development project called Fruitvale Village, which was completed in 2004. This successful urban planning initiative exemplifies smart-growth, as it brings transit, commercial and residential sectors into one small area while preserving the unique character [...]
The Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART as it is commonly known, is an expansive public transit system in California’s San Francisco Bay Area that has a reputation for being unsafe. Transit police is not a concept unique to just this system, but the BART Police are a strong presence throughout the 44 different stations nevertheless. [...]
I have lived in Berkeley, California for four-and-a-half years now. Of the many unique characteristics in this region, including the bordering cities of Oakland and Emeryville, the one trend that has stuck out most to me is the sudden changes in landscape design. One block with freshly paved road may be neighbored with old streets [...]
On the evening of January 29, 2013, roughly 150 people gathered in SPUR’s Urban Center to listen to San Francisco’s Planning Director speak about the city’s present state and future initiatives in an event contentiously titled “The Meanies and the War Mongers: Recent Planning Lessons from SF.” John Rahaim spoke in a direct manner that [...]
“Where you live is probably a bigger determinant of your health than whether you have health insurance,” as quoted in a Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative (BARHII) report from 2008. In West Oakland, where 45% of the residents make under $25,000 a year, according to statistics from Mandela Market Place, liquor stores outnumber food [...]
Affordable housing is scarce in the city of San Francisco. Low-income residents and students a-like struggle to get by in a city that is so full of opportunity, yet so economically biased. One viable option towards solving this crisis is utilizing secondary dwelling units, aka “in-law units,” as a way to provide living opportunities that [...]
