More 2040 planning stuff.

April 19th, 2008

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning is coming up with a plan for how our region should look in the year 2040. They have a lot of interactive stuff going on:

*In case you missed my post the other day, be sure to click here and take the survey that allows you to voice your opinion on our how region should evolve! Anyone living in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, McHenry, Lake, or Will Counties should take it.

*The bicycle planning strategy paper is online. Click here to read it. Registered readers can leave comments answering questions such as, “Do you think that encouraging bicycling in your community would increase the use of transit? What facilities or programs would be needed to accomplish this?”

*Click here to read stories people have written about their communities, or to submit one of your own. This is a great way to share with others why you love where you live, or how you ended up in this place.

*They have a blog! Yes! If you care about the future of Chicagoland, grab the RSS feed and start reading and commenting like crazy! It’s another way to get your voice heard.

*We missed out on the Northeastern Illinois photo contest! Click here to see the winners. Out of 19 winning photos, 3 were from Aurora, 2 from Schaumburg, and 1 from Naperville. Elgin was asleep in this contest! Oh well. When they start the 2060 planning, we’ll blow everyone away!

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Suburban Living in the House!

January 17th, 2008

Two things:

1) Check out the December/January issue of Dwell! The theme is suburbs, and some of the articles are still available online. They acknowledge the downsides of suburbia, without uniformly slamming it without basis. The following quote shows how balanced Dwell was in handling the suburbs, which was probably difficult because there is a huge anti-suburban bias out there in designers (and as I’ve mentioned before, urban planners).

But the suburbs–and their inhabitants–are not only ripe for resistance to conformity, they also have rich social and cultural potential. Demographic studies reveal that suburbia is diversifying; no longer the land of white flight and middle-class nuclear families, its shape and character is changing. (p. 134)

2) This one is for the grad students! (And for a brief second, made me a little sad that I am no longer one.) Global Suburbs–an interdisciplinary grad student conference put on by the University of Michigan. March 7-8, 2008.

This conference has five broad themes: Suburban politics and the history of suburbs, Sustainable development and environmentalism, Suburban life, Suburban form, and Rethinking suburbs. The following quote sums up the purpose pretty well.

Suburbanization is no longer solely the province of developed Western countries. Peripheral metropolitan expansion is now a global phenomenon and must be considered in new ways, be they within a metropolitan framework, independently of central cities, or with reference to rural surroundings. This conference seeks to examine global suburban development broadly to understand not only the past and present character of suburbia, but also with the hopes of understanding and guiding future development.

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