urban planning, Kendall Square, Cambridge Wade Roush wrote: Companies, merchants, and residents in the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge banded together last week to form the Kendall Square Association, a non-profit group whose mission, according to its new president Tim Rowe, is to “im...

This is a few loosely connected thoughts and observations, prompted by the sudden, intense sensation, while on the DLR to Greenwich last week, of travelling through occupied territory. The Xanadu-like compound that is Canary Wharf was the topic of an earlier post , and here I just revisit some of it...

Los Angeles and countless other cities - Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta come to mind - are far more friendly to cars than people, having been built according to land use policies that all but put people behind the wheel. It's an unsustainable model, and it must change. That was the message transportat...

For most of my life, I never considered myself ‘a gamer’, which is to say, ‘gamer’ has connotations of Really Enthusiastic People Who Rule Deathmatches. Sure, I’m the same age as video games, and so gaming history and my own history run parallell. Video games are just a...

Click the image above to view the full photogallery. As real estate watcher SocketSite plugged in and found over the weekend, the Port of San Francisco has posted a multi-part doozy of a Seawall Lot 337 proposal to their site. A proposal chock so full of renderporn that we really don't know what the...

Or rather, recycle them. The way certain suburbs and exurbs have been hollowed out by 1) foreclosures and 2) high gas prices (see: six months ago) has some city planners in a bit of a froth over what to do to save them. A few professor types have even envisioned suburbs becoming the slums of the fut...

This post is seventh in a series of my Social Media Principles.  The base post is 10 Social Media Principles . Principle #7 - Context is Fluid – How you view an object today will be different tomorrow.  Don’t destroy tomorrow’s value.   In my humble opinion, most of the business failures we...

This is a companion piece to my 10 Principles of Social Media series. This post illustrates Principles 2 and 4. For quite some time, I was an urban planner.  I worked for some agencies, but for most the time I was a consultant.  I worked with all levels of government from tiny towns to the Feds. ...

Sorry for the lack of posts - I've been having quandaries - about blogging in general and also about the cookie contest. (Only one group has submitted. It seems the cookie contest is DOA this year.)  Here's something I meant to post about last week. I just finished a project about crea...

Could the city's discretionary review process be headed for the grave? Building permit apps are normally: ...delegated to the Planning Department, which approves applications that meet the minimum standards of the Planning Code. ... From time to time the Commission will review a permit application. ...