PlanIt

The Metropolitan Council has partnered with the Resilient Communities Project (RCP) to provide support for communities implementing their 2040 comprehensive plans. One of the projects that RCP and the students worked on in the 2020-21 academic year was "Enhancing Woodbury's Urban Tree Canopy." Through this effort, RCP assisted the City of Woodbury with their Tree Canopy plan engagement process and created an engagement toolkit that can be used by any other community. This episode explores the process and results of this project.

In 2020 we experienced an unprecedented pandemic ; we witnessed businesses, schools, and offices close; many of us started working from home; we adopted rigorous health and safety guidelines; and we didn't visit our families and friends. Our Cities suffered similarly, with tax loss, lack of funding, and extenuating circumstances to respond to the communities' needs. Many of them have come out stronger with lessons to take into the future. In this episode, we hear from Todd Graham at the Metropolitan Council about the big picture economic impact of the pandemic, and we talk with Meg Beekman from the City of Brooklyn Center and Anne Kane from the City of White Bear Lake about the measures they have implemented in their communities.

How are highways and highway improvements planned? What agencies are involved in ensuring that the region’s transportation system is operating smoothly? What is the process from envisioning a highway project to implementing that change? These are some of the questions that we explored in this episode. Listen to our conversation with transportation professionals from Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), Melissa Barnes, Molly McCartney, and Brad Utecht.

What happens at the United Nations Climate Conference every year, and why do these international negotiations matter for Minnesota? What can Minnesotans contribute to and learn from this international conference? We asked these and other questions to Climate Generation’s Sarah Goodspeed and the Metropolitan Council’s Eric Wojchik about their December 2019 attendance at the COP25 in Madrid, Spain.

Following Episode 26 of our podcast about planning in Scotland, we continued exploring planning topics in another part of the world. In this episode we had a conversation about economic development and private investments in Nairobi, Kenya; specifically the Village Market development complex. Hamed Ehsani, Managing Director of Green Hills Investments talked about the process, opportunities, and challenges of developments in Kenya.

As the population of the Twin Cities metro area grows, the economy has become more prosperous. However, the impacts and positive outcomes of the growth in the economy are not distributed equitably in the region. Some geographic areas or populations have been excluded from the prospects of a strong economy. In this episode, Tawanna Black, from the Center for Economic Inclusion talks about the role of planning and local governments in advancing equity in economic growth.