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Edition

Looking Ahead to 2020: Events for Planners

October 21, 2019 By Clement Lau

CalendarCan you believe that it is almost November? With 2020 fast approaching, I would like to highlight twelve events that planners, architects, and landscape architects can look forward to in the new year.  Continue Reading Looking Ahead to 2020: Events for Planners

Filed Under: Feature Posts, Los Angeles, Planning, Professional Development Tagged With: ACSP, Active Living Research, AEP, AIA, APA, ASLA, conferences, congress for new urbanism, continuing education, NACTO, Parks and Recreation, SORP, UCLA Extension, ULI

Cool Freaking Shoes, Publishing, & Third Places

July 27, 2019 By Michele Reeves

art of Luis GutierrezAt a large common table at a fave coffee shop early last year, I spied a man alternating between working intensely on his computer, and furiously sketching on a pair of canvas Vans. (Okay, spied is a bit dramatic, he was sitting right across from me!) Honestly, I was mesmerized by his drawings… their color, abstraction and dimension. His focus. His switching between computer work and sketching. I was desperately trying to figure out how to surreptitiously take a photo of the whole thing… but I’m not so good at that. (I always forget the sound is on when I try to take a secret picture… busted!)Continue Reading Cool Freaking Shoes, Publishing, & Third Places

Filed Under: Arts & Culture, Feature Posts, Portland Tagged With: cafe culture, placemaking, Ray Oldenburg, shoe art, The Great Good Place, third places, urban environments, Xolo, XoloArt1

Book Review: Urban Green Spaces

July 21, 2019 By Clement Lau

book cover - urban green spacesParks and other types of urban green spaces are often perceived as nice-to-haves rather than must-haves.  However, as I have argued and shared in numerous articles (like Nurturing Neighborhoods), urban green spaces contribute significantly to the quality of life in communities and offer benefits well beyond their boundaries.  For those who share this perspective or want to learn more about the relationship between parks and health equity, I suggest reading the book Urban Green Spaces – Public Health and Sustainability in the United States (2019) by Viniece Jennings, Matthew H. E. M. Browning, and Alessandro Rigolon.  The intended audience for the book includes researchers, students, and practitioners in urban planning, parks and recreation, public health, and other fields.  As a park planner and ‘plannerd,’ I found this book to be a page-turner and finished it in one sitting during a flight.  Highlighted below are three issues that stood out to me:Continue Reading Book Review: Urban Green Spaces

Filed Under: Feature Posts, Los Angeles, Parks & Recreation Facilities, Planning, Review Tagged With: Alessandro Rigolon, environmental gentrification, health equity, intersectional, Matthew H. E. M. Browning, park equity, Parks, urban green spaces, Viniece Jennings

What happens to refugees after deportation?

June 27, 2019 By UrbDeZine

The following account is from Adam McLane.  He is a San Diego internet and digital marketing entrepreneur and a christian pastor.  Like many in the border city, he was a frequent visitor to Mexico.  As a result, he witnessed the humanitarian crisis unfolding at the border and felt compelled to aid the refugees.  He occasionally posts updates on his Facebook page.  He posted the following testimonial on June 22, 2019.

Continue Reading What happens to refugees after deportation?

Filed Under: Border, Feature Posts, San Diego Tagged With: border crisis, Border Patrol, ICE, refuagee crisis, Tijuana

Book Review: Wild LA

June 16, 2019 By Clement Lau

book cover - wild LANature is everywhere in Los Angeles.  That is the main message you will get from reading the new book “Wild LA: Explore the Amazing Nature in and Around Los Angeles” released by Timber Press.  While we may all be aware that wildlife can be found in the Santa Monica Mountains or the Angeles National Forest, many of us probably do not think of Los Angeles as an area of incredible biological diversity.  But the truth is that there is a tremendous diversity of species in L.A. and there are many stories to tell, according to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the authors of the book: Lila Higgins, Dr. Gregory B. Pauly, Dr. Jason G. Goldman, and Charles Hood.Continue Reading Book Review: Wild LA

Filed Under: Environment, Feature Posts, Los Angeles, Parks & Recreation Facilities Tagged With: Charles Hood, Gregory B. Pauly, Jason G. Goldman, Lila Higgins, Los Angeles, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, nature, Wild LA

Meeting Park Needs Through Mobile Recreation

May 26, 2019 By Clement Lau

screenshot NYC parks mobile rec vans programHave you heard of mobile recreation?  Essentially, this is the idea of bringing recreational resources to communities, especially those that lack parks.  UCLA professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris was perhaps ahead of her time when she said in 1995 that “the ever-changing urban form and social ecology of neighborhoods calls for a flexible rather than rigid park design and for spatial layouts that can be easily changed in response to future needs… One can even think of mobile parks-spaces whose equipment and furniture can be transported to other parts of the city if the need arises.”Continue Reading Meeting Park Needs Through Mobile Recreation

Filed Under: Feature Posts, Los Angeles, Parks & Recreation Facilities, Planning Tagged With: Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, mobile recreation, mobile recreation vans, NYC Parks, underserved communities

“We Are a Movement”: Students advance Embedded Planning at the 2019 National Planning Conference

May 14, 2019 By Jonathan P. Bell

messages on board re embedded planning
We Cannot Plan From Our Desks! is the rallying cry of Embedded Planning.

A district citizens’ group from East Harlem, in anticipation of a meeting it had arranged with the Mayor and his commissioners, prepared a document recounting the devastation wrought in the district by remote decisions (most of them well meant, of course), and they added this comment: “We must state how often we find that those of us who live or work in East Harlem, coming into daily contact with it, see it quite differently from . . . the people who only ride through on their way to work, or read about it in their daily papers, or, too often, we believe, make decisions about it from desks downtown.” I have heard almost these same words in Boston, in Chicago, in Cincinnati, in St. Louis. It is a complaint that echoes and re-echoes in all our big cities [emphasis added].

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Continue Reading “We Are a Movement”: Students advance Embedded Planning at the 2019 National Planning Conference

Filed Under: Feature Posts, Los Angeles, Planning, Professional Development Tagged With: American Planning Association, City Planners, City Planning, Embedded Planning, Florence-Firestone, Future Planners, Los Angeles, Planning Theory, Praxis, South Central Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, Unincorporated, unincorporated areas, unincorporated communities, Urban Planners, urban planning

What are we doing wrong?

Are America's destitute worse off than India's?

April 27, 2019 By Jim Chappell

Dateline: January 1968, New Delhi. “Beautiful city, people friendly, but very crowded, solid people in the parks, living in the fort, camped out in the railroad station.”

Dateline: January 2019, Mumbai. “There are very few beggars on the streets, unlike the hordes of homeless in San Francisco and other American cities.”

Continue Reading What are we doing wrong?

Filed Under: Affordable Housing, Feature Posts, San Francisco Bay Area, Travel Tagged With: homeless, Mumbai, San Francisco

A Walk to the Park

March 18, 2019 By Clement Lau

Crosswalk signal button“That’s a walk in the park!”  Most of us are familiar with this expression which is used to describe something that is very easy to do.  Ironically, a walk to a park may actually not be a walk in the park for a variety of reasons.  For example, there may not be a park within walking distance (typically defined as a half-mile) from one’s home.  There may also be physical and social barriers that often make walking to parks challenging and undesirable, such as a lack of infrastructure like sidewalks and crosswalks, traffic safety concerns like speeding vehicles, and crime issue like the presence of gangs. Continue Reading A Walk to the Park

Filed Under: Feature Posts, Los Angeles, Parks & Recreation Facilities, Planning, Transportation Tagged With: 10-Minute Walk Campaign, Los Angeles County, Los Angeles County Pedestrian Plan, National Recreation and Park Association, Safe Routes to Parks, Step by Step Pedestrian Plan, Trust for Public Land, Urban Land Institute, Vision Zero, Vision Zero Action Plan

How the Spectrum of Light can be used in Landscape Architecture

March 9, 2019 By David McCullough

ornamental grass backed by sun lightOriginally published in the author’s own blog under the title of “Spectrum of Light.”

Light is not often the first thing that one thinks of when considering the built environment, but in fact, as to the photographer, light is a primary ingredient to the success of any site design. In contrast to other professions that utilize light, the impact of light on the built environment is constantly in flux. In its complexity there are three types of light: continuous, absorptive and emissive. In the science of the light spectrum, the fact is that light behaves like a wave and is defined by its wavelength frequency. Simply put, light of different wavelengths is perceived as different colors.Continue Reading How the Spectrum of Light can be used in Landscape Architecture

Filed Under: Feature Posts, landscape architecture, Professional Development, San Diego Tagged With: landscape, landscape architecture

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