What is Urban Blight, and what causes it?

Urban blight, also known as urban decay, refers to the deterioration and decline of city areas, usually due to neglect, economic downturn, or poor urban planning. This phenomenon often leads to vacant buildings, rundown infrastructure, and declining property values. The result is a negative impact on the quality of life, reduced economic activity, and increased social challenges such as crime and unemployment. Let's explore what causes urban blight, its effects, and examples of cities that have faced this issue.

Causes of Urban Blight

1. Economic Decline: When industries or businesses shut down, cities can lose a significant portion of their economic base. This was seen in places like Detroit, where the decline of the auto industry left vast areas of the city abandoned.

2. Suburbanization: As people move to the suburbs for better housing, schools, and safety, inner-city areas can experience depopulation and neglect. This “flight” to the suburbs can drain cities of their middle-class residents and tax revenue.

3. Neglect of Infrastructure: Lack of investment in public infrastructure like roads, public transport, and utilities can lead to the decay of entire neighborhoods. Over time, the area becomes less attractive for residents and businesses.

4. Poor Urban Planning: Bad zoning laws and lack of long-term planning can create environments where buildings and public spaces deteriorate faster. For example, areas with mixed-use zoning (residential, commercial, and industrial) without proper planning can suffer from blight due to incompatible land use.

5. Political and Social Factors: Corruption, mismanagement, and lack of governance can accelerate the decline of urban areas. Social factors like crime and poverty can also contribute to the decline, creating a cycle that’s difficult to break.

Effects of Urban Blight

• Vacant and Abandoned Properties: Empty homes and commercial buildings become common, leading to a decline in property values. In the U.S., it is estimated that there are over 17 million vacant properties nationwide, with many in blighted urban areas.

• Increased Crime: Blighted areas often see a rise in crime due to a lack of social cohesion and economic opportunities. Studies show that abandoned properties are linked to higher rates of vandalism, drug use, and other illegal activities.

• Economic Decline: The decline in property values and loss of businesses can result in a reduced tax base, making it difficult for cities to fund public services like education, police, and fire departments.

• Health and Environmental Issues: Urban blight can lead to public health problems, including higher rates of asthma and lead poisoning due to poor housing conditions. Abandoned buildings and lots can also become dumping grounds for hazardous waste.

Strategies to Combat Urban Blight

1. Urban Renewal Projects: Some cities have launched large-scale urban renewal initiatives to revitalize blighted areas. For example, New York City successfully transformed Times Square from a crime-ridden neighborhood in the 1980s to a major tourist attraction today.

2. Community Involvement: Grassroots efforts, such as community gardens, neighborhood clean-ups, and local arts projects, have proven effective in revitalizing neighborhoods. Philadelphia’s “Mural Arts Program” turned abandoned walls into vibrant public art, which helped to reduce blight and foster community pride.

3. Adaptive Reuse of Buildings: Converting old, vacant buildings into new uses can breathe new life into blighted areas. In Pittsburgh, old warehouses have been transformed into trendy lofts, offices, and art spaces, attracting new residents and businesses.

4. Economic Incentives: Offering tax breaks and incentives for businesses and developers to invest in blighted areas can encourage redevelopment. New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina, used tax incentives to attract investors to rebuild the city.

5. Land Banks: Many cities use land banks to acquire, manage, and repurpose vacant properties. This strategy helps to stabilize property values and reduce the negative effects of blight. As of 2021, over 250 land banks operate in the United States, targeting cities like Flint, Michigan, and Buffalo, New York.

Conclusion

Urban blight is a complex problem with deep economic, social, and political roots. However, with targeted strategies like urban renewal, community engagement, and adaptive reuse, cities can transform decaying areas into thriving neighborhoods. The key to reversing urban blight lies in strategic planning, investment, and a commitment to building sustainable, vibrant communities.

As cities continue to grow and evolve, addressing urban blight will remain crucial for ensuring that urban spaces are livable and prosperous for future generations.

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Complexity Theory and Urban Planning

What is Green Urbanism? Holistic Principles to Transform Cities for Sustainability

The 3 Most Successful Examples of Urban Planning in Modern India

PHYSICAL PLANNING THOUGHT: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

An overview of urban morphology and micro-scale analysis

The 3 Most Successful Examples of Urban Planning in Modern India

Urban planning in India has transformed cities into models of growth and sustainability. Let’s explore three success stories!

1. Chandigarh – Designed by the legendary architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s, Chandigarh is India’s first planned city. With a population of over 1.1 million, it boasts a grid layout, wide roads, and extensive green spaces covering 49% of the city area. The city’s zoning system separates residential, commercial, and industrial areas, reducing congestion and pollution.
2. GIFT City, Gujarat – Launched in 2011, GIFT (Gujarat International Finance Tec-City
   ) is India’s first smart city. Spanning over 886 acres, it’s designed to compete with global financial hubs like Singapore and Dubai. It features 100% waste recycling, a district cooling system, and India’s tallest tower at 122 meters. With over 225 companies already set up, it’s driving India's fintech revolution.
3. Navi Mumbai – Built in the 1970s to decongest Mumbai, Navi Mumbai covers 344 sq km and houses 1.2 million people. Known for its efficient public transport and green belts, it’s ranked among India’s top sustainable cities.

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PHYSICAL PLANNING THOUGHT: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

by Gary Pivo, Cliff Ellis, Michael Leaf, and Gerald Magutu

City planning scholars recently have been calling for greater attention by schools of city and regional planning to the intellectual field of physical planning. This articel responds by offering a retrospective of physical planning field and a future research agenda. Both are organized around five perennial questions which, it is argued, have always been at the core of the field. The questions address the forces shape physical development, the evolving urban form, possible and desirable physical futures, the impacts of development, and institutional means for guiding urban growth.

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An overview of urban morphology and micro-scale analysis

 by David Bernard O’Sullivan

This chapter reviews a selection of work in the study of urban form at a micro-scale. My purpose is twofold. First, I am concerned to show that many approaches to urban morphology have tended to separate structure and process, often concentrating on one to the exclusion of the other. The modelling approach which I propose in chapter 5 attempts to address this weakness. Second, as discussed in chapter 2 (see especially figure 3 on page 35), I want to use urban morphology — predominantly at the scales identified by Moudon (1997) in the passage quoted in section 1.1 — as a source of ideas about spatial elements which can be used in the construction of proximal spatial models of cities.
As a result of these twin foci I do not spend time on any of the more broad brush stroke histories of the city (Mumford 1961, for example), nor on those approaches which fit ‘the city’ into much wider perspectives (Castells 1989, Harvey 1978, for example). Also, I am not concerned with models which may be broadly labelled operational land use–transportation models (Torrens 2000, reviews many of these). As a result, most of the work considered here originates in the geography, planning and architecture literature, at the scale of Montello’s (1993) vistal or environmental spaces, rather than at the scale of regional models, although this focus does not mean that the modelling approach developed in the next chapter could not be applied at those larger scales.

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Urban Fractals, Souce:

Batty, M. and Longley, P. (1994) Fractal Cities: A Geometry of Form and Function, Academic Press, San Diego, CA and London

and also 

Chapin, F. S. Jr. and Weiss, S. F. (1962), Factors Influencing Land Development, Chapel Hill, Institute for Research in Social Sience, University of North Carolina

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Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory

by David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis

For several years many of us at Peabody College have participated in the evolution of a theory of community, the first conceptualization of which was presented in a working paper (McMillan, 1976) of the Center for Community Studies. To support the proposed definition, McMillan focused on the literature on group cohesiveness, and we build here on that original definition. This article attempts to describe the dynamics of the sense-ofcommunity force-to identify the various elements in the force and to describe the process by which these elements work together to produce the experience of sense of community.

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Environmental Justice and the Sustainable City

by Graham Haughton

As the debate on sustainable development and environmental justice has gathered momentum, considerable attention has been paid to identify key peinciples. In this paper, I highlight a number of core principles and then move on to examine differing styles of policy approach, which have gained favor among different sources, for moving toward the sustainable city from market-based neo-liberal reformism to deep green ecologically centered approaches. I highlighr four broad categories of approach to sustainable urban development and begin linking those to the core principles of sustainable development.

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Complexity Theory and Urban Planning

by Michael A. McAdams

Urban environments are complex. Urban areas are the environment for multiple activities such as people working in offices, shopping, purchasing services, interacting with friends and family, eating at restaurants, purchasing and constructing structures (homes, banks, factories etc.) and not so benign ones such as crimes involving persons or property. Interacting and influencing this intricate maze of human activities are governmental and non-governmental bodies at all scales (local, regional, national, global). Nevertheless, these social, political and economic activities operate not in a vacuum but within the physical and built environment with its opportunities and constraints. Such is the environment that urban planning must confront and challenge to effectively guide urban development. Within the last few decades, urban planners, urban geographers and others have noted the inadequacy of using existing scientific methods and organizational structures based on concepts tied to logical-positivism such as rationalism, reductionism and comprehensive long-range planning to address the problems and challenges of the urban environment. There have been attempts to revise or modify the planning process with various approaches, but none could have categorized as being even partially effective. The advent of complexity theory as a vehicle to understand and plan urban areas is opening up new avenues of thoughts in both physical and social sciences. Complexity theory, although having roots in physics, mathematics and computer science, has developed a set of metaphors that are presently being used outside of these disciplines in the social sciences. This 'language' of complexity provides the bridge between complex systems modeling and practical applications. Although not a panacea, it is certain that the methods tied to the present practice of urban planning are inadequate to address the evolving urban environment. This essay will introduce complexity theory and the associated metaphors, discuss their relationship in analyzing urban areas and present suggestions of how urban planning might be revised to incorporate complex theory to be more effective.

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THEORIES AND MODELS OF THE PERI-URBAN INTERFACE: A CHANGING CONCEPTUAL LANDSCAPE

by Germán Adell

This paper seeks to find out if these different models of regional development share assumptions, viewpoints or values. Which are the policy implications for each of them? Are they only descriptive models or they can be translated into policy recommendations? In fact while all models seem to share at least one broad assumption concerning the evenness and equilibrium of development through the territory, this assumption needs to be challenged in light of new paradigms such as increased mobility, space-time compression and the multi-spatial context of the everyday household life.
This literature review consists basically in a thorough desk-based research of available material linked to the subject. The more recent literature is examined, basically from the 1990s onwards, unless otherwise demanded by cross linked references and the development of the theoretical discussion. All major scientific journals concerning both urban and rural sectors have been systematically reviewed. The under-representation of a specific topic in the material was interpreted - apart from involuntary errors or omissions - as a lack of interest coming from an editorial bias. In this sense, the relative under-representation of urban related topics in the “rural” literature was noted, while the opposite is not the case.
In section 2 the peri-urban discussion is introduced, historically situating the various concepts that have been coined to deal with the fringes where “city and countryside meet” and reviewing the traditional assumptions concerning the peri-urban concept.
Section 3 examines different regional development paradigms where the rural - urban relationship has been central. They constitute the theoretical background against which new conceptual developments, presented in section 4, are differentiated.
Sections 5 reviews some relevant and recent case studies dealing with the changing nature of the rural - urban interaction. Section 5 concludes by presenting the most extreme theoretical positions that mark nowadays the conceptual landscape, using them as epistemological landmarks to reveal the diversity of a still changing field.

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Great distance between Bangkok and Thailand's second largest city, Nonthaburi

Developing Spatial Urban Planning Guidance for Achieving Sustainable Urban Development

by Habib M. Alshuwaikhat

Sustainable urban planning guides are being developed to direct spatial urban planning both at the local and regional levels towards sustainability. However, due to the multifaceted nature of spatial planning, different guides do focus on different aspects of planning and tend to overlook or lay little emphasis on other aspects. The goal of achieving sustainability through spatial urban planning requires that integrated sustainable planning guidance which will incorporate all aspects should be developed. This paper discusses a general framework of sustainable spatial urban planning. It highlights the need for better urban planning guidance and proposes general guidelines in view of current international practices. These guidelines are very pertinent at this time when frequent calls are made from different international, national and local levels to ensure sustainability in urban development.

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What is Green Urbanism? Holistic Principles to Transform Cities for Sustainability

by Steffen Lehmann

Over the last thirty-five years or so, an international debate on eco-city theory has emerged and has developed as a relevant research field concerning the future of urbanism and the city itself. During that time, a number of architectural schools of thought have been implemented worldwide. One such school is Technical Utopianism (a technological idealism that relied on the quick `techno-fix’, as expressed, for instance, in the work of Archigram).
Other early writing on green urbanism was available from Ebenezer Howard, whose 1902 book was entitled `Garden City of Tomorrow’, and whose political and social agenda has recently made a comeback. Much later, in 1969, Reyner Banham pioneered the idea that technology, human needs and environmental concerns should be considered an integral part of architecture. Probably no historian before him had so systematically explored the impact of environmental engineering and services on the design of buildings. (Howard, 1902; Banham, 1969) Some other early significant writing on green urbanism has come from Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs – although they didn’t call it green urbanism. From `Silent Spring’ (by Rachel Carson, 1962), to Victor Olgyay’s `Design with Climate’ (1963), to Reyner Banham’s `Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment’ (1969), to Ian McHarg’s `Design with Nature’ (1969), to the pivotal publications by authors re-connecting urbanism with the climatic condition (such as Koenigsberger, Drew and Fry, or Szokolay, in publications in the 1970s and 80s), to the remarkable `Brundtland Report’ (Brundtland, 1987); the important contributions from Robert and Brenda Vale (`Green Architecture: Design for an Energyconscious Future’, 1991), and the `Solar City Charter’ (Herzog et al, 1995/2007), the field of sustainable city theories and climate-responsive urbanism has constantly been expanded.
An important contribution came from Guenther Moewes with his book `Weder Huetten noch Palaeste’ (1995), which is a programmatic manifesto for designing and constructing longer-lasting buildings. More recent theories for `Compact Cities’ and `Solar Cities’ (Burton, 1997; Jenks and Burgess, 2000; Lehmann, 2005) encapsulate the visions based on the belief that urban revitalization and the future of the city can only be achieved through `recompacting’ and using clearly formulated sustainable urban design principles. These principles for achieving green urbanism have to be clearly defined and adjusted to an era of rapid urbanization, especially in the Asia-Pacific Region. In the 21st century we are working in an entirely new context, for which we need new types of cities. As noted by Ulrich Beck, we have arrived in `a new era of uncertainty’, where energy, water and food supply are critical. ‘We live in a world of increasingly non-calculable uncertainty that we create with the same speed of its technological developments.’ (Beck, 2000)

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Sir Ebenezer Howard, by Mr Gue

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Ecologist Stuart Cowan reviews The Nature of Order: Unfolding a Sustainable World.

His review of The Nature of Order, was first published in Resurgence, 2004.

THE UNIVERSE IS abundantly filled with living structure at every level of scale. Energy, matter, and information cascade from vast sheets of galaxies through to our own solar system, to the earth, to the oak glistening in the glade, to its microbial symbionts, on to their proteins, and ultimately to the Planck scale at which spacetime becomes discrete.

When we are most alive, we experience the universe in its wholeness. We experience our connection to a thirteen-billion year old unfolding story that links every living cell, every particle, every star. Why then are we surrounded with buildings, landscapes, and artefacts that engender fragmentation?

Christopher Alexander, an architect, builder and mathematician, has spent forty years attempting to discern the living structure inherent in the universe and harvest this structure for use in practical processes that repair damaged places and create harmonious new ones. In his extraordinary four-volume summation of a fruitful life’s work, The Nature of Order, Alexander proposes both a new science and a new approach to buildings and places unified by a profound notion of wholeness as the governing field.

Wholeness is understood as a richly nonlinear field of interactions among salient entities – or centres – with surprising, yet empirically verifiable properties. Centres support larger centres, and in turn are recursively formed from smaller centres. As we know from experience, subtle changes may greatly affect the field of wholeness. The field has a number of postulated mathematical properties, but currently resists even approximate calculation.

            Fortunately, we can access the field of wholeness through personal observation. We need merely ask, “To what degree each of two things we are trying to judge is, or is not, a picture of the self – and by this I mean your and my wholesome self, perhaps even our eternal self”. This mirror of the self test asks us to awaken to our deepest feelings in the presence of a farmhouse, a chair, a painting, and to see whether we are made more or less alive. Remarkably, extensive experiments have demonstrated that subjects cross-culturally will reach extremely high levels of agreement after honest engagement with the task of evaluating wholeness.

            Based on intensive examination of thousand of examples, Alexander posits fifteen fundamental properties that generate life and wholeness from a system of centres. These properties include levels of scale, strong centres, boundaries, alternating repetition, positive space, good shape, local symmetries, deep interlock and ambiguity, contrast, gradients, roughness, echoes, the void, simplicity, inner calm and not-separateness. This list, while provisional, hints at something of profound importance; a comprehensive taxonomy of transformations that generate orderly, larger and larger wholes with living structure.

         

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Manuel Castells - Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials For a Theory of Urban-ism in the Information Age - 2004

PLANNING SUSTAINABLE CITIES GLOBAL REPORT ON HUMAN SETTLEMENTS 2009

Via UN Habitat

United Nations Human Settlements Programme

Planning Sustainable Cities: Global Report on Human Settlements 2009 assesses the effectiveness of urban planning as a tool for dealing with the unprecedented challenges facing 21st-century cities and for enhancing sustainable urbanization. There is now a realization that, in many parts of the world, urban planning systems have changed very little and are often contributors to urban problems rather than functioning as tools for human and environmental improvement. Against this background, the Global Report’s central argument is that, in most parts of the world, current approaches to planning must change and that a new role for urban planning in sustainable urban development has to be found.
The Global Report argues that future urban planning must take place within an understanding of the factors shaping 21st-century cities, including:
• the environmental challenges of climate change and cities’ excessive dependence on fossil fuel-powered cars;
• the demographic challenges of rapid urbanization, rapid growth of small- and medium-sized towns and an expanding youth population in developing nations, and, in developed nations, the challenges of shrinking cities, ageing and the increasing multicultural composition of cities;
• the economic challenges of uncertain future growth and fundamental doubts about market-led approaches that the current global financial crisis have engendered, as well as increasing informality in urban activities;
• increasing socio-spatial challenges, especially social and spatial inequalities, urban sprawl and unplanned periurbanization; and
• the challenges and opportunities of increasing democratization of decision-making as well as increasing awareness of social and economic rights among ordinary people.

An important conclusion of the Global Report is that, even though urban planning has changed relatively little in most countries since its emergence about 100 years ago, a number of countries have adopted some innovative approaches in recent decades. These include strategic spatial planning, use of spatial planning to integrate public-sector functions, new land regularization and management approaches, participatory processes and partnerships at the neighbourhood level, and planning for new and more sustainable spatial forms such as compact cities and new urbanism. However, in many developing countries, older forms of master planning have persisted. Here, the most obvious problem with this approach is that it has failed to accommodate the ways of life of the majority of inhabitants in rapidly growing and largely poor and informal cities, and has often directly contributed to social and spatial marginalization.
There are a number of key messages emerging from the Global Report, all of them contributing towards finding a new role for urban planning in sustainable urban development. One important message is that governments should increasingly take on a more central role in cities and towns in order to lead development initiatives and ensure that basic needs are met. This, to a large extent, is a result of the current global economic crisis, which has exposed the limits of the private sector – in terms of its resilience and future growth as well as the ability of the ‘market’ to solve most urban problems. It is clear that urban planning has an important role to play in assisting governments to meet the urban challenges of the 21st century. As the world becomes numerically more urban, it is important that governments accept urbanization as a positive phenomenon and an effective means for improving access to services, as well as economic and social opportunities. If urban planning is to play a more effective role as a consequence of this policy orientation, countries need to develop overall national urban strategies.
With respect to the reconfiguration of planning systems, the Global Report’s message is that careful attention should be given to identifying opportunities that can be built on, as well as factors that could lead to the subversion and corruption of planning institutions and processes. In particular, urban planning needs to be institutionally located in a way that allows it to play a role in creating urban investment and livelihood opportunities through responsive and collaborative processes as well as coordination of the spatial dimensions of public-sector policies and investment. To ensure that participation is meaningful, socially inclusive and contributes to improving urban planning, a number of minimum conditions need to be satisfied, including: a political system that allows and encourages active citizen participation; a legal basis for local politics and planning that specifies how the outcomes of participatory processes will influence plan preparation and decision-making; and mechanisms for socially marginalized groups to have a voice in both representative politics and participatory planning processes.

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How the Imagery of "Urbanized" Motivates Better Places

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Eco building idea from Alexander Remizov

Location Efficiency is More Important than Home Efficiency for Energy Savings

Interaction of Architecture and Society: City Individuality under changeable informal Effect Conditions

by Jonas JAKAITIS

On the threshold of the 21st century (in the 1990s), public organizations of European and other countries focused their attention on the problems, the solution of which could help improve standards of living in the cities and towns. Theoretical propositions about the citizens’ right to protection from aggression, environmental pollution and aggressive urban environment as well as the rights to shelter, health care, cultural life, mobility, democratic control of authorities and participation in the development of democratic principles have been analyzed in the great number of documents from various perspectives.
The influence of West European countries on developing urban architecture on democratic principles, implying the involvement of society in this process, as well as the transforming social, political and economic conditions in Lithuania led to great changes in economic, legal and social approaches to urban development under market conditions in this country. Local authorities, not properly ensuring the implementation of self-government principles influenced by various factors, including the activity of informal groups and individuals, does not always take the initiative as a planner and developer. In this case, a private subject – society becomes a participant and initiator of developing a concept of urban architecture. A concept of society participation in developing urban architecture embraces not only legal activities, but also includes some informal actions, not provided by law. The problem of involving communities in sustainable development of urban architecture has been much discussed both on national and international scale. A resolution adopted by the Lithuanian Government ‘On approving a list of fields of architecture to be developed in Lithuania’ emphasizes the significant role of architecture as a unique art in the country, implying that every citizen should actively participate in architectural development. According to Bristol Accord (Office…), the agreement adopted on the 6th -7th of December, 2005 at the informal meeting of foreign affairs ministers from 12 EU countries, the key indicators of sustainable community were defined with the emphasis placed on the involvement of society in urban development of the border regions. Many articles and monographs published by world researchers and various specialists on this problem and plans and surveys also confirm the importance of the discussed problem. The problem of informal participation of society in developing urban architecture in Lithuania was sporadically studied by various scientists. Considering the works of the famous world’s urbanists stating the importance of this phenomena in the context of IfE, the following should be mentioned:
· Provisions of the “Central locations” theory of German urban specialist V.Christaler  first half of 20th century, which declared the necessity to regulate informal interaction of urban centres in each other’s respect;
· English thinker E.Howard’s garden city ideas analysing informal interaction of cities and suburbs and possibilities to solve social-employment and rest problems, to coordinate village and city advantages. The Garden Cities and Town Planning Federation founded in 1913 – NGO is still functioning;
· Urbanist L.Mumford’s activities in establishing UK Town and Country Planning Association in the context of the article – the NGO, activities of which were crowned by the adoption of the New Towns Act;
· USA scientist K.Lynch (1918-1989) in his statements highlighted the social- informal effect aspect of the collective opinion of residents about their city, which allows origin of informal planning, to ascertain visual and emotional contents of city form, enables residents of the city to understand the importance of involvement in planning processes. Thus, individual opinions of a number of individuals may create also collective peculiar city image versions;

.....

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Healthy Urban Planning The Concept, Tools, and Application

by Lauri Andress

This paper examines the connections between population health and urban planning to develop a healthy urban planning framework that rests upon five concepts. 1 The report captures the critical thinking, significant theories, and key ideas on each of these concepts.

Social determinants of health

Equity

Sustainable development

Civic deliberation

Health in all policies

What follows next is a description of three assessment tools aimed at highlighting the connections between health, community, and socioeconomic conditions. These tools were developed in an effort to demonstrate the linkages between health and society as expressed in a social determinants of health framework. In this case, each assessment, to varying degrees, explicates the associations between a geographic locale, the population’s health status, and the socioeconomic and planning and design characteristics of that locale.
Eleven key factors based on the interests of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), Center to Eliminate Health Disparities are used to analyze the three tools. The essential elements of each assessment tool are captured in Table 1, which demonstrates the utility of the tools.
Finally, a set of recommendations on how to apply a healthy urban development model to a local, post disaster site in the United States is presented. The report recommends that any plan of action must first originate from an understanding of the locale’s sociopolitical landscape.
In this case, because of a heightened interest, activity, and conflict around post disaster redevelopment (housing and economic development), the primary recommendations are the following:
1. The effort should not select specific development projects to assess at this time.

2. The primary framing of the effort should be centred on enhanced urban design, planning, and development standards to support economic development and tourism, walkability, physical activity of all kinds, and better streetscapes.
3. Goals of improved neighborhoods endowed with affordable, mixed-income housing, enhanced green space, parks, and access to goods and services should be incorporated but remain secondary.
4. The effort should proceed through and in cooperation with the City government.
5. Representatives from the City government and other stakeholders and key decision makers (as recommended by the City government) should be informed about the effort using a one-to-one meeting process. When completed, individuals/organizations from the one-to-one meetings should be merged into a larger group.
6. The primary method to steer the effort should be the assessment tools and subsequent reports. Components taken from all of the tools should be used based on agreement by the larger group.
7. Later reports from the assessments should be accompanied by proposed city resolutions expressing support for healthy urban development principles.
8. Consequent ordinances should be introduced under the advisement of the City and with the support of the larger group.

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STRATEGY FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT GUIDELINES FOR TEHRAN

by Hassanali Laghai

Why do we need urban sustainable development strategy? Are our towns and cities in Iran sustainable now? Have we respected and implemented the international conventions which are approved by us? According to the rate of population growth , and need of social, economical, physical development and evaluation of present statement, this article emphasizes on population needs, growth speed, and management institutions in different dimensions from national to local management and focuses on urban development ,through the researchers that had been done in Tehran university, so at first I am going to define sustainable development concept and background and propose comprehensive strategy aims ,for achieving into sustainable urban development strategies, which strategies can be continued through, appropriated process to action plan process.

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Tehran, photo by arash_rk

more about urban planning in Tehran:

Urban Planning for Tehran, By Using Environmental Modeling and GIS/RS

A GIS-based Traffic Control Strategy Planning at Urban Intersections

AIR QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN TEHRAN

URBAN SPRAWL AND CLIMATIC CHANGES IN TEHRAN

Moses v. Jacobs: Who Lived the Abogo Lifestyle?

via Abogo

The quintessential struggle over what urban planning and planners should do and be is encapsulated by the differing viewpoints of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. The two have come to represent opposing threads in the big urban planning issues of the day, many of which still resonate right now:

• Should cities be planned incrementally and organically or transformed in one enormous, expensive, methodical fell swoop?
• Should the design and purpose of a place be left to outside experts or the community residents who may have never seen a traffic demand model or market study in their lives?
• Should a transportation plan prioritize the needs of those trying to travel through a community or those who live there? Does it prioritize the driver, the transit rider, the cyclist, or the pedestrian?

Robert Moses is recognized for his top-down, large-scale, car-oriented planning as a state and city bureaucrat in New York from the 1920s to the1960s. He built numerous bridges, tunnels, and expressways around New York City. On the other end of the spectrum is Jane Jacobs, whose famous The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a direct critique of Moses’ theories. Jacobs argued that compact, walkable, mixed use neighborhoods are what gave cities life and made them successful economically and socially. Today we view many of her observations and recommendations as the sustainable urban ideal. Neither Moses nor Jacobs made any sort of argument about transportation costs when talking about how cities should work. Transportation costs were largely a non-issue because the price of gas and getting around were cheap and climate change wasn’t on anyone’s radar. Were Moses and Jacobs alive and living in the New York region today, how would the urban form affect their transportation costs?

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Rober Moses Causeway, New York, phto by dougtone

Rober Moses Causeway, New York, phto by dougtone

similar posts about Jane Jacobs:

Jane Jacobs was the seer of the modern city

To walk the path of Jane Jacobs – review of What We See, Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

On Favored Quarters, Off-Center Skyscraper Districts, and Poverty

by Stephen Smith

Following up on my post yesterday skyscrapers in Europe, I’d like to explain why, in detail, central business districts are generally superior to off-center ones like La Défense outside Paris or Washington’s Virginia suburbs. It’s not that I just enjoy the spatial symmetry and organic shape of a centralized city – it’s actually more efficient! Neglect it, and you’re doing a disservice to your poorest citizens, who too often find themselves out of commuting range of many of a city’s jobs.

Mathematically, there is a simple explanation derived from the equation for a circle: area = πr² – that is, the area varies with the square of the radius. Assuming you can travel in a straight line from work to home, then as the urban circle grows, the average distance between any two random points will expand with the square of the radius, since it varies in relation to area. The average distance from any random point and the center, however, will only vary with the radius. All of which is to say: As a city or metropolitan area gets bigger, the distance between any two random points rises faster than the distance between any one random point and the center of the city.

And then obviously a true city is limited by the fact that you cannot travel in a straight line from work to home on a mass transit system that’s already centered around downtown.

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Tokyo from yokohama, photo by Stripy T-Shirt

more about urban form:

Urban Sprawl and Atlanta’s Air Quality Problems

Spatial Planning, Urban Form and Sustainable Transport: An Introduction

New Directions for Urban Economic Models of Land Use Change: Incorporating Spatial Heterogeneity and Transitional Dynamics

Inequality and Urban Shrinkage: A Close Relationship in Latin America

Spatial Planning and Urban Development

Urban transformations and management practice has always been complex, ambiguous and unstable, and therefore difficult to set into fixed and shared concepts. Through the decades, theoretical debate has formed an eclectic set of possible perspectives, without finding, in our opinion, a coherent paradigmatic framework which can adequately guide interpretation and action in urban planning. The hypothesis of this book is that the attempts of founding an autonomous planning theory are inadequate if they do not explore two interconnected fields: architecture and public policies. In this sense, reconsidering urban planning practices assuming the angle of architecture and public policies is a proper choice in order to better understand critical points and possibilities for governing urban and spatial transformations. Planning theory can be considered as a field crowded with issues and questions of great interest, but still undetermined in terms of principles and exemplary experiences. Exploring the architecture/public policy crossway could allow the reframing of planning problems in a more convincing and shared way, overcoming the eclecticism typical of current planning theory.The distinctive contribution of this book is a documented critique of the eclecticism and abstraction of the main international trends of current planning theory. The dialogical relationship with the traditions of architecture and public policy is proposed here in order to critically review planning theory and practice. The outcome is the proposal of a paradigmatic framework that, in the authors' opinion, can adequately guide reflections and actions. A pragmatic and interpretative heritage and the project-orientated approach are the basis of this new spatial planning paradigm.

more urban planning ebooks:

Ebook: Urban Planning in Europe

E-book: Planning and Urban Growth in Nordic Countries

Urban Planning and the British New Right

Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning

To walk the path of Jane Jacobs – review of What We See, Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

By Mathieu Helie

Jane Jacobs died in the spring of 2006. Three years earlier she had published the last book of her illustrious career as a philosopher, Dark Age Ahead, prophesying the fall of North American civilization. Today, this civilization is having a severe stroke due to all the factors that she warned us about. Instead of feeling confident about the outcome, being armed with the knowledge and wisdom of a great philosopher, our societies are plunged into total confusion. We fear what will come next because we have not yet learned our lessons, and not because they have not been written, or not even because we have not read them, but because we won’t acknowledge them.

I was invited to review a recently published collection of essays in honor of Jane Jacobs, “What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs”, gathering articles from a diverse crowd of intellectuals, academics, activists, acquaintances of Jane and honorary disciples. What I saw was that despite many of these people claiming to draw inspiration from Jane and her philosophy, few of them fully embrace what she truly stood for.

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more urban planning book reviews:

The City Beautiful Movement by William H. Wilson

City Comforts – How to Build an Urban Village – Book Review

Book Review: Testimonies of the City. Identity, Community and Change in a Contemporary Urban World

Our cities can evolve from abstraction to insight

 by Lou Lazarus

In an article published today in Wired.com, IBM’s John Tolva poses a fascinating question.  What if we could take all the abstractions of a modern city – the movement of goods, the education, public safety, and utilities that strengthen or weaken it – and turn them into insights?

This is becoming possible thanks new software tools – many of them free and open to the public — that enable city managers and citizens to explore and analyze a city’s data, compare it to other cities, and draw new conclusions that had previously been obscured. One example is City Forward, a new interactive tool from IBM that can be used to gather, compare, analyze, visualize, and discuss statistical trends for cities all over the world.

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more posts about urban theory:

Manuel Castells - Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials For a Theory of Urban-ism in the Information Age - 2004

Anglo-American town planning theory since 1945: three significant developments but no paradigm shifts

Urbane-ing The City: Examining and Refining The Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics