Please post your pictures and other pertinent information about your summer research experience.
Sustainability and Planning
Sustainability focuses on the natural and the built environments, but it is also tied closely to social and economic concerns. Discuss what the following phrase means as it relates to urban development “A sustainable society meets the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. How do cities garner support for sustainability?
Urbanism
Read the information attached. Can you incorporate this approach in Baton Rouge, La., why or why not? What problems might arise and how would you get past those perceived problems? Describe your ideal urban area. List the pros and cons of such an area.
Urban Planning and Revitalization
Communities across the United States have evolved from small settlements along rivers to agricultural communities to centers for trade to large industrial cities and finally to postindustrial metropolitan areas. Urban areas occupy a small fraction of America’s landscape, yet have become the location of the majority of residential, commercial, and industrial land uses. Challenges now exists with demographic shifts and long term migration from the center city to the urban and suburban fringe. These shifts have resulted in aging infrastructure and relocated and abandoned businesses. What are the pros and cons to revitalizing these areas? As a planner what becomes a necessary first step in revitalizing these areas? How can greenspace be used as a selling point?
New Urbanism
In the 1980s a new movement called New Urbanism brought the importance of physical design as a major tool of community planning. This movement arose from the visionary work of a number of architects and planners across the United States. Explain the concepts of New Urbanism and the impacts it has had on development. Also consider the negatives to this new movement.
A Historical Perspective of Design and Planning
Looking at the past can provide an understanding of how design and the planning process has been greatly influenced our future. Read Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” and comment. Examine the City Beautiful Movement and the inherent problems of this approach.
Planners and the Design Process
In this week’s lesson we will be dealing with the design process. It is often difficult to seperate the definition of good design from good planning, good design emphasizes creative and innovative planning solutions. Design involves the incorporation of an aesthetic component into the process of planning. Design looks for solutions; it is believed that most people or more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions. Design has been defined as “the imaginative jump from present facts to future possibilities.” Planning should seek to create wholeness within a particular area. The first question I would like for our class to consider is: Which should be desgined first–open space or buildings?
Fredrick County 2030 Comprehensive Plan Update
Video from Frederick County’s 2030 Comprehensive Plan Update Public Information and Input Meeting on December 15, 2010.
Please review this video and respond to the class.
Urban Forestry 