It’s so gratifying to see the responses coming in from readers, particularly the recent posts under “More or Less’ below. My thanks.
And further to the discussion, here’s an arrival from Joe Urban in Minneapolis, aka Sam Newberg (www.joe-urban.com):
Even urbanists agree that certain improvements need to be made in suburban development, especially since suburbs will absorb most of the 100 million new Americans in the next four or so decades. We have to start getting it right more often. For those of you involved at some level with suburban development, this will be of interest to you. Last week The Planning Center, based in Orange County, California, released a report entitled ”Five Steps Toward a New Suburbia.” Download it here – Five Steps Towards a New Suburbia. The report is a follow-up to last year’s “The New Suburbanism: A Realist’s Guide to the American Future.”
This is exciting for me because I contributed a couple of the case studies that appear in the report, the bulk of which was written by Colin Drukker of The Planning Center and Joel Kotkin, an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. The “Five Steps” takes a measured approach to the planning challenges of suburbia and looks at how to improve it from an economic, environmental, physical, social and governmental perspective.
The case studies provide concrete examples of successful suburban development and strategies from around the country. More importantly, by offering some solutions, the “Five Steps” report gets a number of ideas out on the table for discussion. At least I hope so, but you’ll have to read for yourself. For more information, contact either me or The Planning Center at www.planningcenter.com.
While I’m somewhat sceptical of Joel Kotkin’s apologias, this looks good.
i did not apologize for anything. you are clearly
not aware of the work I have done before but have
a cartoon version in your head.i have been writing about urban and suburban villages for over a decade. just because i don’t worship at new urbanist altar does not make me opposed to all planning,
the wonderful thing about new urbanists is they think they invented every good idea although virtually all the cases I cited pre-dated them or violated some of their ideas (cars, suburbs, sprawl, single family homes)
there are sections in the report I do not fully subscribe to but note I was a consultant who wrote most but not all the document.
joel