Booked on Planning

As access to information and technology has improved over the past 20 years, so has the field of Hazard Mitigation. What began as an “everyone for themselves” approach to hazards and natural disasters has evolved into a complex system of not just responding to these events in a coordinated manner but preparing our communities in advance. Hazard mitigation planning reduces loss of life and property by minimizing the impact of disasters. It also pays for itself as every $1 spent on hazard mitigation, see’s $6 in savings. With so much at stake, communities across the nation are developing strong hazard mitigation plans to combat the increasing rate and severity of natural disasters caused by a rapidly changing climate. In many ways, hazard mitigation planning and climate planning go hand in hand. 

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Historic preservation as a field has evolved dramatically since its inception with the preservation of George Washington’s house. This evolution can be seen in the changes within each of the three editions of Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice. During our discussion, the authors stressed the need to stop separating preservation from other government functions. Planning, preservation, and architecture go hand in hand, but so many communities either ignore preservation or keep it as a separate pursuit. “Preservation seen as preserving old buildings is very limited in scope. It’s much more than that, much broader than that.” We also discuss how good preservation projects are achieved. You must first figure out what you have, then what you want separately, and finally figure out how to put them together. As a final takeaway, we talk temenos. Listen now to figure out what temenos has to do with historic preservation.

Links:

• Website: http://tylertopics.com
• Book: https://tylertopics.com/writing/books/historic-preservation-book-2/

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In its fourth iteration, the Geography of Urban Transportation has evolved alongside our transportation system. What has not changed however is the need for good data to understand why people make the choices they do. Often it’s a reaction to policy decisions that have created an auto dominated culture. As the authors point out, American’s do not love cars any more than other countries, but our policies have set in stone the infrastructure for an auto-dominated culture. We have to drive to get to our destinations in many cases. But what we need to do is get off the highways and start taking a multimodal approach to transportation planning. Transportation is so engrained in our daily lives that simple transportation solutions do not exist. Transportation impacts housing, employment, commerce and many other facets of city life. “Transportation is essential to understanding the world.”

Links:

•  New York Times Article on Portland’s Transportation Future https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/21/climate/portland-emissions-infrastructure-environment.html

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Rachel Carson became a guiding spirit of the modern environmental movement with her groundbreaking 1962 best seller “Silent Spring.” It forced us to reconsider our fundamental faith in science and technology. Carson discussed her findings and with plenty of examples makes a passionate plea for the future of the planet, calling on us to act as stewards of the environment. In this episode we dive into the details of the book, the parallels with today’s campaign against climate change, and how this book, heavy in the details of chemical applications of the 1950s, applies to our daily lives and work.

 Links: 

• The Biggest Little Farm Documentary: https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/  
• 2017 New York Times Article on Carson's work and its impacts today https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/us/rachel-carson-ddt-malaria-retro-report.amp.html 
• USDA Report on Pesticide Use https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/june/pesticide-use-peaked-in-1981-then-trended-downward-driven-by-technological-innovations-and-other-factors/  

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Zoning tells us what we can do and where. It was created as a way to organize our cities and separate uses that were incompatible such as a factory from a housing development. But the way we zone land is contrary to the rest of the world which is neither good nor bad, just different according to the author Sonia Hirt. We talk in this episode about how zoning is part of American culture and how our approach to development differs from European countries. For example, residential zoning, a concept that has come under fire recently for the way it was used to further segregation, does not exist in countries like Germany.  While zoning might appear to be ordinary and routine, the fact that categories were created in the first place means that it is not actually neutral.  The conversation wraps up with a short discussion on shrinkage in legacy cities whether growth means goodness or if shrinkage is actually okay.

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Pedestrian safety is trending in the wrong direction with the number of pedestrian deaths in the U.S. hitting record highs. Former Streetsblog USA writer Angie Schmitt dives deep into the topic in her latest book “Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America.” Schmitt discusses the dangers of America’s transportation infrastructure as it relates to pedestrians and bicyclists, expressing hesitation that autonomous technology is going to solve the problem. "If we analyze these patterns, they tell us very clearly that pedestrian deaths are not just random acts of God or bad luck, nor are they the result of individual decision-making or laziness (although both bad luck and bad decisions often play a role)," Schmitt writes. "Pedestrian deaths are part of a systemic problem with systemic causes." 

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In our very first live podcast recording we sat down with author Ilana Preuss to discuss her new book “Recast Your City: How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing”. The book was released during the height of the Pandemic, but the problems we saw with shrinking retail, empty storefronts, and closing businesses was a long time coming. In this episode Preuss explains why the old model of economic development did not work and how small-scale manufacturing can support a new, more equitable approach. Thriving economies result from creating great places. Building great places results from a bottom up approach that reaches out to local entrepreneurs already in your community making products and taking risks. 

Links:

·       Recast City

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The assumptions and approaches that go into building and managing America’s transportation system are wrong. Author Charles Marohn explains the issues as he sees it from an engineer’s perspective who also happens to have a background in planning as well in his book “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer”. We can spend a lot less on transportation, get places quicker, and have better places to live that are safer, wealthier, and have more opportunities. It all starts with ending strode construction and instead designating roads and streets separately. All transportation decisions need to clarify whether the facility will be a high speed connection between places or set the framework for building a place. As long as we continue to muddle the difference between a road and a street, thereby creating strodes, we will continue to make bad investments that are dangerous.

Links:

·       Strong Towns Aligning Transportation with a Strong Towns Approach Course

·       Strong Towns website

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We turn on a light switch or run a faucet every day without thinking about how it works. Without the electric grid, a very complex but outdated system, we would not be able to do either. In this episode, we discuss Gretchen Bakke’s book, The Grid: the Fraying Wires between Americans and our Energy Future. We are reaching a critical breaking point with our archaic system of delivering power to homes and business across the U.S. A transition to renewable energy is necessary, but how do we accommodate all the clean energy generated without advanced methods for storing that power? We discuss the solutions and how planners can be more involved in the conversation.

Links:

Solar@Scale Webinar Series: https://icma.org/events/solarscale-webinar-series

Energy Justice Workbook: https://iejusa.org/workbook/

Great Plains Institute Cobenefit Opportunities: https://betterenergy.org/blog/solar-energy-projects-natural-systems/

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Over 50 years later Ian McHarg’s seminal book Design With Nature is still teaching us how to plan with nature, not against it. “We design with nature, the with is very important.” We are joined in this episode by Frederick Steiner, co-executive director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology. We dive deep into the parallels McHarg makes between space and the importance of understanding natural processes and ecology. We discuss the connection between McHarg’s work overlaying physical maps and today’s digital version of Geographic Information Systems. While the book was very much a product of its time, it has proved to also be timeless.

Links:

PBS Documentary series Race - The Power of an Illusion episode 3—“The House We Live In”: https://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-about-03.htm 

Multiply and Subdue the Earth (1969) PBS documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nBFkARCP0I 

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