Here is an article I wanted to share with you from the Torontoist over there efforts to become a transit city.

Transit City: the TTC’s plan to build a network of light rail, extending dedicated transit infrastructure to many of Toronto’s neighbourhoods that lack it, thereby increasing residents’ quality of life, reducing our collective environmental footprint, and redressing a major backlog of transit development. Transit Cities: the term applied at a symposium held last week to cities that don’t just have transit but integrate it properly into the urban landscape, making good on the promise that transit expansion seems to hold but on which it doesn’t always deliver. Designing Transit Cities was its name, and bringing planners, academics, advocates, and the public at large up to speed on the opportunities and pitfalls of transit expansion was its goal.

The day-and-a-half-long symposium, co-sponsored by the City of Toronto, the Canadian Urban Institute, the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto, the Toronto Society of Architects, and various transit agencies, brought in experts from around the world to outline the successes and failures they’d seen in other cities’ transit expansions, and extrapolate some lessons for Toronto. Panel discussions dealt with everything from intelligent planning to community advocacy, and the symposium managed to cover a lot more ground than such events often do. (Though, as local transit guru Steve Munro suggested on his blog, this ground was perhaps well-trod, a rediscovery of ideas that have been discussed for decades.)

Though the speakers came from a variety of backgrounds, some themes did emerge quite clearly, providing a consensus view on the relationship between transit planning and urban development.

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Next week, Kevin Klinkenberg will be in Panama City Beach, FL on a design workshop, working on some form-based zoning for the Front Beach area. We’re doing this in concert with PlanningWorks – a local planning firm.

The City of Panama Beach, Florida has retained a team lead by Planning Works, LLC and assisted by 180° Design Studio and White & Smith, LLC to prepare an initial assessment of form-based codes for the City. A form-based code is a land development regulation that is based principally on design, rather use, impact, or other aspects of land development.

Panama City Beach is a diverse community, with development patterns including low density residential neighborhoods, low rise apartments, high rise condominiums, automobile-oriented commercial strips, a pedestrian oriented commercial center, mixed use developments, business parks, tourist entertainment parks and heavy commercial areas. Each of these areas has a unique combination of uses and design characteristics that merit different approaches to the use of form-based design.

How Green is our Valley?
By Jim Romeo– Midwest Contractor

All across America, there is a clear buzz about the need to go green. The construction industry is hopeful that that this provides opportunity to prosper from new construction revitalized by a dearth of LEED projects, which were helped by government policy from a new administration. The construction industry in the Midwest seems quite conscious and hopeful of a new wave of green.

Part of the green growth, however, will hinge on collective thinking as to what constitutes “green.” “There is no doubt that there is incredible market demand for green technologies and green buildings,” says Brian Hendrickson, principal of 180° Urban Design in Kansas City, MO. “This demand will only increase, but those who demand green buildings will also continue to become more educated and savvy as to what is really green and what isn’t. I think the idea of the lone green building standing alone, dissociated from an urban context and accessible only from the interstate is a dead end. Smart consumers already see the fallacy in that idea.”

He adds, “The construction industry consumes just about every industrial resource that there is. There is an inherent responsibility to consume those resources in a more responsible and efficient manner. The next great step in building green will be to look at integrating green construction with sustainable transportation and planning practices. That’s where the real efficiencies are.”
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