Adaptation: A Model for Planners

forthcoming

Adapting to Climate Change: Legal Issues for City Planners

forthcoming

"Impervious surface fees: A model for the Town of Southborough, Massachusetts"

Presented at conferences SNEAPA 2008, and NEARC 2008 with .ppt and Paper

This paper and accompanying GIS poster demonstrates how a municipality can create an effective impervious surface fee structure that planning offices of small towns in Massachusetts with limited resources can adopt.

The main purpose of adopting a fee is to lower the impacts of non-point source pollutants on water resources without constraining a town's fiscal and human resources.

Southborough, Massachusetts was selected as a study area for two primary reasons. The first was the town's proximity to a significant water resource, the Sudbury Reservoir. This reservoir serves as a backup drinking water supply to millions of people in Metro-Boston. The second is an interesting local economic context; Southborough is located in a cluster of several affluent, rapidly growing bedroom communities that serve Metro-Boston. How can Southborough balance water protection and promote growth at the same time?

The project concludes that, while other methodologies to create a fee structure exist, such as changing zoning by-laws, the methods discussed here show that GIS software provides an efficient alternative to political solutions.

"Landscape Urbanism, Fetish?"

Pushing back on Landscape Urbanism, Dr. Jack Ahern's Spring 2008 Seminar

Landscape Urbanism is an emerging field. It attempts to recombine the art of landscape architecture, urban planning, human health and ecosystems with community involvement in the built environment process.

As with any new field, skeptics will raise their eyebrows, ask pointed questions and provide critical feedback that will either kill, secure or enhance the targeted field's place in the world.

Since the 1940s landscape architecture and urban planning have given way to an engineered, infrastructural approach to designing cities. These cities are comprised of buildings with very short life spans, contributing untold amounts of waste into a shrinking and overworked environment.

With the successful rise of environmentalism in the public's' collective consciousness, a question arises for the purveyors of the new field of Landscape Urbanism: Is Landscape Urbanism a viable solution to incorporating ecology into cities for better human and earth health? This paper briefly surveys current trends in this emerging field with a skeptics eye.

Keywords: Landscape architecture, regional planning, commodity, megalopolis, new urbanism, skepticism

"Themes, Principles and Strategies for Urban Sustainability"

In this paper I attempt to define sustainability in the context of urban environments. Because urban areas vary in size, the definition should responsively be scalable as well, in order to retain its initial cause and function. Next, the importance of defining sustainability is discussed with emphasis on the political context.

I work within the frame that Western cities are in a transitional phase, from one era (consumption) to another (conservation). And that sustainability applies to this later phase.

From here I create a sustainability model that is scalable, flexible and easily implemented. The model shows that cities and communities can adopt a set of environmental, social and economic indicators using simple, off-the-shelf techniques like BMPs, LID and adaptive (proactive) policy.

I conclude that achieving any level of sustainability is inevitably linked to a process that involves wide spread public acceptance, political will and a bit of fearlessness.

"Ratatouille" - The city, Paris, as metaphor for hope.

A movie review can have implications on urban planning...

How the city became the romance capital of the world, and the backdrop for hundreds of movies, begins in 1852 when Napoleon III hired Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann to redesign down-town Paris. For centuries hundreds of politicians, planners, architects, engineers schemed and failed at revitalizing a dirty, sinful city. Bourgeois intellectuals envisioned a radical transformation of a crime ridden, medieval Paris into a modern, world-class city that would be beautiful, rational, sanitary and vigorously commercial.

But try as they might, it was only Haussmann, with an infinite purse and full reign to reconfigure as he so chose, who succeeded. His urban planning approach restructured Paris in such a profound way that the end result literally changed the attitudes and every day lives of its inhabitants. Long, straight, and very wide boulevards with couture shops, outdoor cafes and uniform baroque building facades are now the classic model of how the modern city ought to be shaped and built.

The methods employed by Haussmann were deplored and reviled, for he cut wide swaths through old Paris destroying thousands of homes and livelihoods and paving over hundreds of miles of beautiful cobble-stoned streets. The shape and nature of the city was forever altered and endlessly criticized.

Massachusetts American Planning Newsletter (page 11)

published April 2009

"Working Together"

by Michael Cote

If you could design a climate change adaptation plan for your community, what would you include? Would you build stronger bridges and dams or faster stormwater systems? Would you remove structures from floodplains or replant your watersheds? How would you pay for these improvements?...