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Yep.
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In recent months, Dr. Jackson has released another scholarly book, an edited collection on the topic, called Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Wealth, Well-Being, and Sustainability (Island Press), and he is also the host of a four-part miniseries called Designing Healthy Communities, which will air on public television starting this week. The series, which features a companion book, is clearly meant to sway public opinion.

"If we are going to change the way we build our communities, it has got to be done because of the demand of the citizenry—a demand that the average, very busy local political leader can understand," Dr. Jackson says. "We humans are so adaptable that we look at the world that we are in and we think, It has to be this way. But everything around us was an idea in someone's head before it was built. In large part, the idea behind the series is to alter what's in our head."
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In the mainstream media, the work of Dr. Jackson and researchers with similar interests has been pithily condensed to a variation of this eye-grabbing headline: "Suburbia Makes You Fat." But his focus in Designing Healthy Communities is actually broader than that, with as much emphasis on our need for social connection and beauty as on our need for physical activity. (...)

The series also laments the loss of a social contract in America, looking at places like Detroit, Syracuse, and Oakland, Calif., where crushing poverty or pollution have hampered or even dissolved once-thriving communities. (...)

He also challenges the free-market, individualist ideology that has become popular in recent years. Communities and public health are things we build together, with the help of good planning and effective government, Dr. Jackson contends—even as companies that sell junk food, oil, cars, and sprawl pump money into politics and advertising to try to push society in the other direction.

"The fundamental paradigm that nobody else matters but me is making us fundamentally unhealthy and unhappy," he says. "This is a myth that has been foisted upon us by those that profit from this belief system."
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richard_jackson chronicle_of_higher_education sprawl cities urbanism socialtheory socialcritique

Some great ideas here:
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What does a Healing City (or town, or community) look like…and feel like? We propose eight dimensions of a Healing City. Use these as a guide to understanding and exploring the concept, and to assist in the development of your own interpretation of a Healing City.
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cities healing_cities urban_planning

Just learned about this site the other day. Given women's historical role in civic leadership (at the municipal level, via committees and clubs), and how that role was been maligned as small and "boob-ish" when metropolitanism grew in strength and favor, initiatives like "Shetroit"'s are important in getting women back in the game. This is especially the case now that new urbanism (also male-dominated) is trumpeting certain traditional values, which women pioneered and should own.
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Shetroit’s mission is to help create an enriching space in which the women of Detroit can weave community. Shetroit’s vision is that by bringing women together to support each other in realizing their self-worth and recognizing their strengths, new heights of feminine leadership can emerge.

As Shetroit grows, the site intends to encourage “using the Internet to get off the Internet” by nurturing connections that help build and encourage all facets of our individual life journeys that focus on self-esteem and the power of learning to love ourselves.
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women urbanism urban_renewal detroit shetroit cities city_smarts

+1 on more urban trees. Few things improve a streetscape more. It seems that higher urban temperatures help trees grow, and then of course more trees also mitigate the urban heat island effect.
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Despite other conditions that might have influenced this faster growth, the researchers have determined that the hyper-growth speeds are largely attributable to the higher temperatures in the city. They confirmed this hypothesis with seedlings grown in a lab under similar temperatures and conditions.

Trees can provide a number of benefits to urban areas. Their positive impact on property values has been documented extensively. Urban trees have also been found to provide a significant economic benefit to cities due to their role in stormwater treatment, energy use reduction, air quality improvement and carbon sequestration.

Trees have also been found to help counter the urban heat island effect that is apparently helping them grow much faster – a negative feedback loop that suggests planting more trees in the city makes a lot of environmental sense. The warmer temperatures caused by the urban heat island effect are certainly causing problems in cities, but they're also creating what have turns out to be ideal conditions for tree planting.
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trees urban_forest cities amenities atlantic_cities

Great article about how we went from this:
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Browse through New York Times accounts of pedestrians dying after being struck by automobiles prior to 1930, and you’ll see that in nearly every case, the driver is charged with something like “technical manslaughter.” And it wasn’t just New York. Across the country, drivers were held criminally responsible when they killed or injured people with their vehicles.
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to this: "'If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars,' says [Peter] Norton. 'That's practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago.'"

jaywalking cars cities automobile atlantic_cities

Some amazing captures by Brandon Stanton (see the video). So much diversity, yet the people seem somehow rooted in and belonging to NYC: they're unified as New Yorkers, even though they're often so different. It struck me how often the sitters blended into the background the were posing in front of, as though ingested by the place, literally incorporated, and belonging to it entirely.
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Stanton, who has no formal training in photography, told me that the real barrier to taking street portraits is the very normal human fear of rejection. “Especially when you start, a lot of people are going to say no,” he says. At first, the rejections sting. But he says that after all the thousands of interactions he’s had, he doesn’t really register them any more.
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street_photography nyc brandon_stanton photography cities diversity

Great interview. (I had no idea urbanists were supposed to 'hate' Joel Kotkin.)
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Meet Joel Kotkin, a guy who is reviled by smart growth advocates and new urbanists everywhere. Kotkin, an author and trend-watcher, is fond of dashing urban dreams with cold, hard numbers. Talk about the “triumph of the city,” and he’ll parade out a long line of Census figures that show that, sorry, the suburbs are still kicking demographic ass in this country.
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joel_kotkin grist urbanism cities interview

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...sustainability is about more than new technologies. At its most basic, “sustainable” means enduring. A sustainable community is a place of enduring value. Doug Kelbaugh, the dean of the University of Michigan School of Architecture, put it this way, “If a building, a landscape or a city is not beautiful, it will not be loved; if it is not loved, it won’t be maintained and improved. In short, it won’t be sustained.”

Distinctiveness involves streetscapes, architecture, and historic preservation but as Cortright points out, it also involves cultural events and facilities, restaurants and food, parks and open space and many other factors. “Keep Austin Weird” is more than a slogan; it is a recipe for economic success. A distinctive city is a city that the young and well-educated want to live in, that boomers want to retire to, and most certainly a city that people want to visit.
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I have mixed feelings reading this. Victoria BC fulfills some of these criteria, yet Victorians have let their downtown become ugly and empty (they have done everything BUT sustain it), and they neglected the historic preservation of a key piece of industrial archaeology, thereby failing to sustain it (the historic Johnson Street Bridge). Natural beauty is great (and Victoria has plenty of it), but natural beauty has to be enhanced by built beauty, and in that department, some cities fall down, badly. Meanwhile, there are other cities, with far fewer natural beauty resources, that manage to build up beautifully.

beauty sustainability endurance cities atlantic_cities uli tourism

Words of wisdom from David Rothkopf. He is so right:
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I love it when Ron Paul says, “If we get rid of government, freedom will sweep right in.” That’s just not what happens. What happens is that a bunch of elephants stampede in because they’re in a position to take advantage of it. Meanwhile, if you get government out of the way, the people who need government, they don’t have it.

There’s this myth that government doesn’t belong in the marketplace. If that were true, there would be no canals, no railroads, no highways, no internet. The government was a critical partner in many of the biggest innovations in U.S. history.

But if you buy into that for 20 or 30 years, and you say, “smaller government, smaller government programs,” who gets squeezed by that? It’s the cities. And the problem is that, as that happens, it accelerates. Kids drop out of school. Neighborhoods decay. Businesses leave. The tax base goes down. Cops get fired. Teachers get fired. It’s a cycle of pain.
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cities grist david_rothkopf economy politics

Can bike lanes create new jobs?
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The answer seems to be yes — at least in the case of Long Beach, California. More than 20 new bicycle-related or bicycle-inspired businesses have opened at last count. I toured some of these business with Charlie Gandy and Melissa Balmer during a recent trip to Long Beach to meet these entrepreneurs, and prospect for locally-sourced goods and services for our conference. Twenty new businesses is a lot, especially in this economy, so you may be skeptical of these numbers (I was); but after meeting some impressive young people, I can assure you that it’s all real.
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There follows a review of the businesses.
I'd say that my observations in Portland confirm the article. Cycling is another way of bringing "life at 10km per hour" (or slightly more) into streets (vs cars at 50km per hour), which contributes to capturing interest *in* the street.

jobs economy bicycles cities

Yes, much more productive to see both cities and small towns through an economic lens, and to encourage resilience in place and civic engagement.
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“To me, it seemed a little preachy,” he says. “These people who lived in urban areas would come out and tell me how to live, tell me that you shouldn’t enjoy living where you do, you shouldn’t like your job, you shouldn’t feel good about the lifestyle that you’re living because it’s bad, and what we’re doing is good. What you’re doing is dumb and what we’re doing is smart. What you’re doing is sprawl, and what we’re doing is smart growth.”

(It’s interesting here to pause and ponder if “sprawl” is one of those words that naturally sounds odious – like “phlegm” or “yuck” – or if it has just taken on that connotation as a result of so much sneering).

Marohn says he has realized over the past decade that he and the New Urbanists are actually often talking about the same thing. The urban experience and the small-town experience have more in common than people think. And they’ve both been distorted by the suburban experiment. The picture looks different. In cities, it looks like an army of surface parking lots has devoured our downtowns. Small towns have also been hallowed out at the core and nipped at their edges by encroaching subdivisions.

But the effect is the same, Marohn says: an erosion of civic space, which has led to an erosion of the financial viability of communities. And this is the language he uses to talk about planning – the language of economics, of debt and prosperity and gas prices.
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cities atlantic_cities sprawl density

Sounds <ahem> good to me...
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The whole idea here is that we don’t have to accept cities as noisy places, that apartments can be private and roads can be calmer and whole neighborhoods can sound, if not like the countryside, then something more humane.

“To just accept the status quo is turning our back on innovation and design,” Antonio says, “and why we’re doing this in the first place.”
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cities atlantic_cities noise urban_design

This quote/observation is just crazy. My observations of Portland drivers are that they are overwhelmingly deferential to bicyclists, and to call Williams "too dangerous" for cyclists strikes me as just plain weird. (Full disclosure: I'm currently living in an apartment that overlooks this bike corridor.) It makes me wonder what people actually want. I've noticed that many people here (including younger ones) really fear density (Portland overall is very low density, population-wise), and resist changes that would densify the city. They like the suburban-y feel of these eastside neighborhoods, but want all the goodies that gentrification also would bring. Meanwhile, the racial question in Portland is IMNSHO huge. Every time I'm out and just chat casually with strangers who happen to be African-American, I get the impression they think it's weird that a white person (female) is talking to them. Why would that be the case, if not for the fact that is *is* unusual? Neighborhood sports games (at Unthank Park, of all places) are observably segregated, as I've seen: white adults playing some version of softball, while black kids hang out dribbling a basketball in a separate play lot a few yards away. So much bs. For example, this:
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"I'm not selling my property, so I don't give a shit," says Goldsmith. But while the city help for new businesses has been great, in the hubbub of bikes, cars, and buses, Goldsmith no longer feels safe biking down its main business street. "I love living here, I love being here... but I don't bike with my kids on Williams anymore—it's too dangerous."
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portland race bicycles cities density gentrification

Not sure I'm ready for this...
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The built environment, Boltuch and his colleagues believe, is in need of a social network of its own. So today they’re launching one – called Honest Buildings – that could connect people to the physical spaces where we live and work, the landlords (or companies) that own them, and the tuck-pointing guys and architecture firms who want to compete for our business.

The scope of the site is a bit mindboggling; as of this morning, you can type in any address in America on Honest Buildings and generate a page devoted to it. Imagine, in other words, if Facebook came pre-loaded with a basic profile for every name in the phone book.
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socialmedia buildings architecture cities atlantic_cities technology honest_buildings

Some great ideas for public seating here:
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The boring benches installed in urban areas around the world are purely functional: you take a seat for a little while, and then you leave. But why shouldn’t public furniture be visually interesting, comfortable and even interactive as well? These 14 chairs, benches, loungers, tables and more often double as art objects, with designs that consider a wide range of needs.
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public_space seating benches urban_design cities furniture

The endangered middle class...
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Several thousand years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that citizens who loved money above all would divide into rich and poor, with class war and mob rule the unhappy result. That’s a message Republicans still have a chance to deliver this election cycle. But it’ll take a change in the way they think about cultural politics to do it.
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atlantic_cities class_distinctions class politics cities

Corporate brand imagery as kudzu. Great points.
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The logo-ing of our cities and neighborhoods is this process in reverse. Instead of borrowing the ambiance and associations of a place, the product infests it with its own characterless generica, diminishing and voiding out its authentic qualities. The omnipresent logos, like a kind of corporate kudzu, cover and conquer all.
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richard_florida atlantic_cities branding marketing cities advertising

Fascinating article about how we perceive scale, the scale of the cities we live in:
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We often have a certain sense of cities’ importance and size, but this is too often founded on a fairly parochial context; our perceptions of cities are based on other cities we are familiar with or that are around it, and we neglect to recognize how big or small cities really are.
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cities atlantic_cities scale

Fascinating history and analysis of the politics that have made Paris the political entity it is today. Conclusion:
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We know from history that any institutional change in the governance of cities is a long and difficult process. Today, the issue is clear, the potential solutions are limited, and the months following the presidential election are a rare political window of opportunity. It will be fascinating to see if Greater Paris is able to organize itself to meet its challenges, if it will give itself a government appropriate to the ambition it needs to have for the future, or if it will continue to wallow in the gridlock of individual interests being put before those of the metropolis.
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paris stephane_kirkland amalgamation politics cities

Must-see.
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The film, “Thinking Cities,” focuses on how cities are using Information Communications Technology (ICT) to start to come up with these solutions. It highlights interesting projects in cities like Boston, Seattle, and Stockholm where ICT is being used right now to address issues like waste, energy use, and civic engagement.
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cities geoffrey_west urbanization smartplanet