AIA Arkansas – Tactical Urbanism

Mike Lydon gave a great presentation this morning on tactical urbanism, which is not really a new idea, but centers around revitalizing urban and even suburban areas through grassroots community actions like parklets, or complete streets initiatives, or pop up streets, or better blocks programs. All of these blurbs will yield incredible results on google.

The gust here is that for years our zoning overlays have created roadblocks to development and better communities through design and planning. By tactically creating smaller initiatives and documenting feedback you can better catalyze change.

More to come in part 2.

7 billion reasons

I got goose bumps while watching this.

Now, imagine for a second, that we could take just the US (that’s right, start right here at home – a novel idea for sure) and build an infrastructure that connected every major city via rail.  Then begin to build those major cities into megacities by increasing access to local and regional public transit, increasing incentive to build vertically (need to address city planning big time) – can anyone say “GENIUS”!? We could house more people in less space – OH TO DREAM! – leaving more room for farming, nature preserves and whatever else you can think of.

Urban Facelift and EDP

This past week, the local Emerging Design Professionals group in conjunction with Content Design Group, hosted it’s last gallery of the year – a display of work for the Urban Facelift Competition.  The gallery was featured in the Times Union, as was the winning entries.  I came in Third Place.  The article and my winning entry is below.