Planning should be participatory; however, it’s often very difficult to get stakeholders to contribute to planning processes. Mail-in survey return rates are low, and more often than not, residents don’t want to sit through a Saturday morning design charette. Marketing online and social media platforms give urban planners and architects a set of contemporary tools [...]
Planning consultancies offer a wide range of advice on matters concerned with planning, development, and environmental issues which surround a building project. They are involved in a number of different types of projects, for example: Town centre improvements; Business parks; Airports; Smaller building works for companies. In all of these projects it is important that [...]
One of the most important components of your work as an urban planner is engaging community stakeholders. For urban projects in the main street district, the downtown development authority, city leadership, planning and zoning commissioners, historical district commissioners, architects, and neighborhood residents are all integral partners. Projects that deal more with regional issues require collaboration [...]
What is crowdsourcing? For those uninitiated, the term essentially means problems or queries are broadcast publicly and everyone is invited to respond with solutions or ideas. Crowdsourcing itself is not a new concept. Municipalities and cities often looked to “focus groups” or town hall meetings to garner public opinion about city projects. However with the [...]
During rainfall and snow storms, 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and stormwater are released into New York City’s waterways. These discharges are called Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOS). CSOs occur when treatment plants are overwhelmed by water flows that are more than twice the design capacity. A number of sustainable methods of stormwater management have [...]
The sky is limitless, they say. So if there’s no space to your left, or to your right, or below, then look up! Land, limited in the City of Los Angeles, is slowly becoming a commodity. And as new land becomes occupied by never-ending construction projects, it’ll eventually vanish so we need start thinking straight, [...]
Setting up an e-mail marketing campaign won’t take years or many board meetings. It’s simple to do, especially if you receive direction from a professional web marketing company to provide insight on e-mail campaign designs and e-mail marketing campaign packages. For example, one company Global Site Plans gains expertise from is MailChimp, which is a [...]
A “build it and forget it” method may not be the wisest of decisions for an urban planner when creating a website. It is a myth that a website can sustain itself after it’s developed. In fact, similar to your business, a website must be constantly maintained if you want it to continue to thrive. [...]
While social media is changing the way designers collaborate and connect, face-to-face networking is still an important step in gaining industry distinction. At roughly 3.5 inches by 2 inches, business cards carry significant influence in this networking process. As designers, urban planners are expected to make a statement with their business cards. What kind of [...]
“Here in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, we have 200,000 cars a day going through the Gowanus Expressway. Our community complains about asthma, cancer, respiratory disease … but the excuse for neglecting us is that it is too expensive to mitigate” -Elizabeth Yeampierre, Executive Director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center Elizabeth Yeampierre’s words highlight a number of the environmental [...]
Public space is an essential element for the sustainability, vitality and sanity of a dense urban environment like New York City. In recent years, NYC’s urban planners and transportation engineers have made efforts to give back to people the spaces that were previously controlled by cars or abandoned industrial sites. Some of the most interesting [...]
Having a website is essential in today’s web-driven world. Many businesses use their websites to help drive sales, leads, and advertisements. Environmental design, urban planning, and architecture businesses can benefit from websites as well. In a previous blog about promoting your business online, I constantly mentioned creating a website first and foremost. Online advertising is usually [...]
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defined the 10 principals of the concept of Smart Growth in response to the development paradigm – “bigger is better.” While growth is important for communities, if not carefully planned for, it can lead to transportation issues, declining home values, environmental degradation, and health problems. Small towns like Mammoth Lakes, [...]
With 468 stations and 842 miles (1355 km) of track, the New York City subway is one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the world. The layout of many of these stations prevents riders with motor, auditory, and visual disabilities from accessing these facilities with ease and thus creates a user-designer gap. Visually [...]
Can you imagine a small apartment, let’s say about 344 square feet, transforming into 24 different rooms? It’s possible. Well, at least when architects and engineers choose to focus on such a concept anyway, but the fact is that it has been done. Space is becoming more of a commodity, particularly within the city, such [...]
Trees are important for cities. Environmentally-speaking, trees provide important environmental inputs and outputs. Aesthetically-speaking, trees can provide a sense of beauty to a city. Planners and landscape architects have long-recognized the importance of trees and other plants in urban design.Tampa, Florida has a long-established grassroots organization that has helped bring trees to the city. The [...]
Brownfield sites prime for building. Derelict architecture crying out to be regenerated. Both are common sites up and down the United Kingdom, but why? With a long standing housing shortage only predicted to get worse, what are we doing to utilise these potentially valuable resources? The value of the land on which they sit is [...]
A number of non-profit and community-based organizations have been exploring New York City’s potential to be a center for urban agriculture. Added Value and the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn, New York have been working to foster community development and sustainability in a number of innovative ways. Eagle Street Rooftop farm is a 6,000 [...]
School building design and quality, and its relationship to student achievement is a growing area of interest for architects, urban planners, and designers. However, in New York City, when educational performance is assessed by administrators, building quality and design are rarely taken into consideration as detrimental factors. In addition, schools located in low-income neighborhoods tend [...]
In 2009, Abengoa Solar Inc. filed an Application for Certification (AFC) for its Abengoa Mojave Solar Project, a proposed project for electrical power production, located near Harper Dry Lake in San Bernardino, California. Now, in the Mojave Desert, lies a construction of solar panels that will be generated by parabolic trough technology and solar heat [...]
