Rancid wrote:
Houston is god awful in terms of city design. I actually like the vibe of the city (believe it or not, there's lots of varied culture/diversity due to immigration, universities, and tech presence), but fuck man, they need a redesign. Same goes for Dallas.
Austin, might have a chance given they recently passed a transit expansion prop that includes additional light rail lines. They are also looking at burying I-35 in a tunnel and putting like an 8 mile long park at surface level.
I just started a book titled Walkable Cities. It's really good, and explains what makes cities work for the people that live in them. I need to do a thread about it soon. This is from a review of the book:
"Throughout my urban design career, I grappled with the same situation daily: how to inform developers and contractors, retail merchants and corporate CEOs, mayors and councilmembers–folks whose authority and decisions have tremendous impact on city form–about good urban design? Instead of sketching plans for revitalizing floundering neighborhoods and creating friendly, inviting people places that could bolster our quality of life, the bulk of my days were spent explaining to policymakers and doers why their ideas for how cities should be are, in fact, deleterious. Deleterious to future retail investment, property values, public safety, human comfort, even climate change.
As much as I felt it necessary to introduce these planning luminaries to all the mayors, developers and builders, design review board members, planning commissioners, Public Works officials, and the Department of Transportation engineers I routinely interacted with, dropping a 40-pound stack of books onto their desks and saying, “read these, then let’s talk,” just wasn’t realistic. Still, if these policymakers and doers could get a crash course on urban planning and design, the urban projects and changes that ultimately get approved and funded would be exponentially better than they are today.
But what if the most salient points from all those planning volumes—and dozens more—were synthesized into one trim, accessible, easily perusable book? Could it be achieved? That would be quite the ambitious endeavor, one that is too daunting to me, even though I wish I could have tried.
Luckily, I don’t have to, because Jeff Speck did us all a favor with his latest book Walkable City Rules. I’ve worked with Jeff many times and have relied on his expertise for years. Few in the field of city planning are as learned and practiced as he, and those who are lack Speck’s talent in teaching.
Walkable City Rules is a comprehensive yet concise volume, thoughtfully laid out so that the numerous issues city planners and urban designers regularly face are each listed on an eminently graspable two-page spread. What makes Speck’s achievement even more impressive are the scads of images and illustrations he includes, and the simple, easy to remember fundamental steps or “rules,” as he calls them, of sound planning and design. He then expounds on each rule with pith and clarity."
https://meetingoftheminds.org/a-book-review-of-jeff-specks-walkable-city-rules-32844