Hello! I'm trying to make kind of a proof of concept map for turning a local accident hotspot into a roundabout to show to my local city government. I have an idea for WHAT to do but I'm trying to figure out the best way to actually make the new map and I'm having trouble finding any resources. It doesn't have to be as legit as what actual city planners use but if there was a guide for using photoshop or GIMP or some other free/cheap program I'd appreciate it. Having a visual aid will make this more likely to become a reality.

Hey r/urbanplanning,

I recently came across an insightful article on PlaceMakers titled Lost and Found: Fighting Loneliness with Parks and Third Places. It delves into how urban design and public spaces can combat the growing epidemic of loneliness by creating environments that foster connection and community.

The piece explores:

• The critical role of parks, plazas, and "third places" (like coffee shops or libraries) in bridging social divides.
• How design elements, like accessibility and comfort, can encourage casual encounters and deeper social engagement.
• The challenges cities face in funding and maintaining these spaces, along with innovative solutions to ensure inclusivity and long-term viability.

The article also highlights examples of cities successfully integrating these principles, inspiring ideas for planners, designers, and community advocates alike.

How can we ensure public spaces remain welcoming and accessible for everyone? What's your fave third place?

Here’s the link: Lost and Found: Fighting Loneliness with Parks and Third Places

Hey all,

My city has begun is planning a new comp plan after 50(!) years. I’ve been contacting cities of a similar size around the US to get comparable prices that they paid for their RFP’s, but my question is, does anyone know if the APA or another organization has done a literary review on average Comp Plan RFP’s? It seems like a major blind spot, especially to smaller cities. I’ve gotten estimates from $300,000 and heavily in-house to a comp plan that’s $6 million!

We’ve got our estimates for the RFP but I just wanted to pose this.

EDIT: Thanks everyone for the feedback! Looks like I’ll be pushing for something north of $500k. Fingers crossed I can push for foundational support to make up the difference!

If an area is experiencing an abundance of a certain use within the town, let’s say storage units, is it possible to limit future development of that particular use, or would that be considered a taking? Would it be considered a taking if you set a minimum distance from another similar use, let’s say within a mile or another?

Is there some sort of workaround, like a text amendment that changes the permitted uses to only allow it in a more limited zoning district?

Hey all -

Simple question: are planning commissioners allowed, legally, to deny an applicant if they are within code? For example, a developer wants to build a gas station but no one wants any more gas stations. Subjectively, the commission would prefer to deny. Objectively it's within code. Approval seems mandatory.

What are your thoughts here?

To clarify, I'm not talking about what causes a metro area or even a city to attract or lose residents. I'm also not talking about whether people near a city would prefer to be annexed, unless they actually have political power to affect that decision. I mean what considerations determine the limits of how much land a municipal government can and will annex, or even what limits the areas of impact they set (i.e., a "keep-out zone" for other municipalities' annexations). I can think of four things off the top of my head and don't know much about any of them.

1. Legally, a municipality's ability to annex new territory is dictated by state law and also by whether it's surrounded by other municipalities or unincorporated land. What do state laws usually say about this, and is one municipality ever able to annex parts of another in the US? Do residents in the area to be annexed often have any binding say in the decision? What roles do counties play?
2. Economically, a city would want to annex areas where the new tax revenue exceeds the cost of providing services.
3. Practically, a city may not have the ability to expand its services (when might this happen?).
4. Politically, city council members facing competitive elections would want to avoid annexing hostile voters that could vote them out (or conversely, would support annexing supportive voters, even if it doesn't pencil out economically for existing residents). Or, powerful local developers may have the clout to get their developments annexed even if it's a bad deal for current city residents.

Can anyone give any more info on any of these points, or a good book or other reading about them?

Edit: one big reason why a city would want to expand if not impeded is simplifying regional planning over its metro area: reaching a consensus among many distinct municipalities is harder than reaching a consensus within a single municipality. For example, LA county has 88 municipalities, many of which are just enclaves of LA city, and I'm sure that makes plenty of things more difficult there. Or, a city might like to be proactive about implementing its building/zoning/street plan to an area well before it begins to urbanize, instead of having to retrofit areas where undirected suburban growth has already begun. Whatever the reason for wanting to expand--even if just for the vanity of the leaders--I'd like to know more about why it doesn't happen.

I was looking for online courses but I found very few. Not sure if I was looking in the right place. What do you think is the best place to start?

lmk if you guys have suggestions of a better sub to post this in! I just figured urban planners have a good idea of how to set up a city space well, as well as a good understanding of how the average city dweller thinks.

Do you have any suggestions on posters/stickers/media to encourage people not to litter at bus stops? Esp anything you’ve seen work?

Trash always collects at the bus stops around my neighborhood, regardless of whether or not there’s a trash can. It makes me sad and discouraged, and I truly don’t understand how people can be that lazy and apathetic. What can I do that might actually work? That people may pay attention to? We already do neighborhood trash cleanups… maybe advertise those at places where there’s trash?

This monthly recurring post will help concentrate common questions around career and education advice.

Goal:

To reduce the number of posts asking somewhat similar questions about Education or Career advice and to make the previous discussions more readily accessible.

Hi. So I tried doing my research but had no luck, so I thought I might try Reddit to help me with my inquiry.

I was wondering about whether there are alteration cases related to existing buildings around the world. Hypothetically speaking, if I had a building constructed according to previous building regulations but only few years after that, new regulations were approved and enforced on new developments. Basically the newest regulations could’ve given me more benefits in terms of commercial use. But if I were to try benefiting from that, every other parameter should be complied with, such as setbacks, FAR, coverage, parking requirements, etc. Some of them are hard to control, like the building coverage.

So I was wondering if there are guidelines regarding these cases where an owner can retrofit or alter to comply with newer regulations, instead of resorting to demolition and redevelopment.

Then what? What data is there to describe how the untied land gets used afterwards? How much housing gets built in a business district that no longer has parking mandates? How much infill development occurs?

Thanks in advance, -Someone who'd certainly like to see more.

As a longtime urbanist and recent graduate of master's in city planning program, I'm rapidly becoming jaded as to (in the United States) urban planning's ability to make any real, lasting change to a built environment and way of urban life pretty much cemented in by mid-20th century "big plans" with huge, largely negative ramifications for the environment and socioeconomic integration and upward mobility, and a governance and planning structure that has since gone the way of devolution and ever-smaller ambitions. At one point, large portions of cities could be remade, and big plans could be enacted on not just a citywide, but even metropolitan scale, leveraging both public and private investment at many scales (federal funds, state funds, and local funds all working together at large scales). This, of course, often lead to disastrous consequences, as existing racial + socioeconomic inequalities were exacerbated, car-oriented infrastructure was rammed through neighborhoods, and modernist developments combined with declining municipal funding needed for their upkeep created many square miles worth of lifeless urban spaces.

(This is a separate point, and I digress here but wanted to mention it as it feels related) Even before this, however, cities were developed (it seems to me) in a much more cohesive manner--private developers building out 19th-century Chicago, for example, extended the urban fabric neighborhood by neighborhood in a way that acknowledged future development (continued standards of a citywide street grid such as spacing and street naming conventions, when one developer finished building a new development provisions were made to integrate future urban fabric further out). I am not completely familiar with the market conditions of urban development during the Gilded Age through the early 20th century in American cities, but today's developments feel much, much more piecemeal, despite (what appears to me) additional municipal oversight. Even in new developments in existing central cities but particularly in suburban areas, many developments act as discrete "parts of a whole," not connecting to one another and with streets within one particular development not connecting to those of another. The model of late 1800s/early 1900s "streetcar suburbs" planned by a single developer and following a common plan regarding public infrastructure, but with relative freedom as far as individual lots are concerned (which were often built, sold, and owned as separate discrete entities, rather than the entire development being built all at once and then even frequently owned and operated by a private entity) seems entirely gone. Instead, buildings often rim the entirety of these internal streets built as part of a large-lot development into a new neighborhood/subdivision that act as internal circulators to that particular development, thus enclosing an entire plot built on by a developer or group of developers as an "internal space," and making pedestrian and vehicular movement between areas built by discrete private entities difficult and requiring moving out to an arterial corridor, then back into another private entity. One need only look at culs-de-sac of "new urbanist" townhomes in cities like Houston, Texas, or pockets of "drive-to urbanism" in suburban Washington, DC with only a few connections to pedestrian-hostile arterials with no building frontage facing them (new development near Vienna-Fairfax/GMU metro station in Fairfax County, Virginia is a particularly egregious example) to see what I am talking about. Even rebuilt portions of inner-cities such as Lincoln Yards in Chicago don't feel like "parts of a whole" in the same way that older portions of the city were. Often, these streets are even privately owned and maintained in addition to being constructed! I probably should be separating this into a few questions but these are some thoughts I've been ruminating on for a while now and that feel interconnected.

It feels like today, city planners are completely at the mercy of ever-shrinking available finances for municipal projects (at the federal, state, and local scale) and political ambitions completely shaped by the desires of (often very valid, but sometimes also parochial and downright anti-visionary) a small subset of well-connected constituents, with the rest of the voting public either ambivalent, uninformed, or misinformed of the implications of planning decisions. In practice, this combination makes it feel like little can be done to change our sorry state of affairs given to us by that last gasp of large-scale, long-term, visionary planning that actually galvanized lots of tangential changes to the built environment--the public now expects to have a high degree of say in planning decisions (again, often for good reason, I am not romanticizing the conditions that gave Robert Moses carte blanche), but this often means issues of metropolitan scale, such as housing shortages or changing transportation paradigms, are always playing second fiddle to local priorities, such as a group of NIMBYs opposing potential losses in parking infrastructure in high-opportunity areas for housing or improved transit.

Related to this point, I've noticed many municipalities I've studied have comprehensive plans (often state-mandated), including often an existing and desired land use map, though this does not necessarily lead to anything legally-binding until later updates to a city's zoning code/ordinance (given that the vast majority of the country operates under Euclidean zoning). This seems to frequently implicate what are effectively two controversial, drawn-out fights over land use, one with the passage of an initial comprehensive plan, and then again when attempting to give the plan's key objectives and goals legal teeth. Are there any efforts to, or examples where, places have merged the two, such that a comprehensive plan can be given more legal teeth and includes updates to a city's zoning code along with its passage, avoiding the lengthy process needed otherwise to bring about some of these changes? And am I correct in my understanding of the broader trends guiding privately-led expansion of urban form in the 19th/early 20th centuries versus today's? If so, what sorts of policies and incentives could be changed to incentivize developers to build more cohesively, and how could the myriad of plans we have today (corridor studies, neighborhood plans, transportation plans, comprehensive plans, etc. etc.) have more impact, better guide both public and private investment, work better with one another, and act at a more regional scale?

I live in a very isolated, very small town in the Western US. I'm very interested in urban planning as a subject, and some of the famous works are applicable to what we see here, but do any of y'all have a recommended reading list that would focus on smart planning for rural communities? Economic development, tax policies, revitalization plans, that kind of thing.

I currently work as a Transportation Planner in south Florida for a city government. I am the Project Manager (PM) for 9 transportation projects throughout the city, and the only person in the department that reviews building development applications citywide (20-40 plans/studies in-progress depending on the time of year).

I would like to know if the number of projects I PM is typical, above, or below the average for a government planner. I am the only PM on these projects and singlehandedly responsible for taking them from NTP through construction. I also do the invoicing for all of my projects and the development applications. It feels like a lot of responsibility for an individual, and strikes me as atypical. Am I correct in that sentiment? I’ve been in this position for approximately a year and a half and it’s my first professional planning position after graduating, so I don’t have a strong frame of reference.

Notes: the projects vary in size, from a single raised crosswalk to neighborhood-wide traffic calming projects. My department has 2 other PM’s (total of 3), who have roughly the same number of projects, but don’t review any development applications. All the projects are currently active and moving forward, none are on hold.

In everyone's experiences, what is the basis/frequently cited reasons from suburbs and small towns for banning overnight parking on public streets? (or is it simple inertia/they don't know any better?)

I've been trying to work on a parking study for my local community to better manage parking and increase redevelopment potential, and we currently waste (IMO) so much on-street parking space. Having recently moved from a larger city where on street parking was ubiquitous, I've always found these restrictions in smaller towns to be bizarre.

Crafting a zoning ordinance for a landlocked built out city differs significantly from that of a greenfield city.. What specific elements must be addressed in each case?

I recently visited NYC and it was extremely cold. I found myself taking the subway even if I only wanted to travel a short distance, and that got me thinking, why not just put little walkways next to the tracks, obviously putting a fence/wall to stop people from falling.

Hey everyone. We were chatting with my grandpa the other day and he was explaining how towns without rivers can't really develop as they should. Right now I can't remember the specific points he made but I am hoping you can recommend some books in regards to the importance of a river in building a town.

Rising sea levels and extreme weather events could displace hundreds of millions of people by 2050. Cities like Jakarta and Miami are sinking while safer cities face an influx of climate migrants overwhelming their resources

What’s your solution to this pressing problem?

I wasn't quite sure how to phrase the question but let me try explain the thought (and forgive me if it's a silly question):

Are there any cities that have broad zoning that allows you to build a certain percentage more residential density than the local average?

An example being, let's say if the "average density" within a quarter mile is that a minimum lot has 5 housing units. Developers could be allowed by right to build 20% over that, so a 6 unit building next? If that area has an average of 10 units a lot, they can build a 12 unit building?

https://imgur.com/a/1zEx2oT

This is what I mean. I've noticed this style of neighborhood has become huge, and it feels almost like its creating a negative perception of urbanism in many cities because of how unplanned and incohesive it is. Huge stretches of basically empty space in between apartments means the areas are often only barely walkable.

Compare it to a typical walkable urban neighborhood like this and it is just... really kinda awful in comparison.