Madame Butterfly at the Michigan Opera
Review of a performance currently playing at the Detroit Opera.
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Musings from Up North: Are Planners Pragmatic Dreamers? Or Just Jaded Bureaucrats?
Michigan has a ton of professional talent. It’s also got a lot of planners who are stuck in the passenger seat in a vehicle driving 85mph in the left lane, headed toward Sprawl City. Can we fix the worst politics of the profession and still keep our jobs? Or, is it simply incumbent upon us to figure out better, more sustainable solutions wherever we can?
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Water: New Orleans’ Next Environmental Catastrophe.
Hardly a week goes by these days without some sort of disastrous news about climate change, whether domestic or abroad,
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Better Cities Film Festival and YIMBY in Detroit
YIMBY enthusiasts from Columbus, North Carolina, California, Flint, and beyond converged on Detroit yesterday evening to see a new film featuring M. Nolan Gray, Research Director of California YIMBY.
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Planning Conference Day 2: Downtown Traverse, Renewable Energy
The second day of the annual conference of the Michigan Association of Planning involved a great tour, a lot of learning, and some serious head-scratching about how little attention is being paid to topics of decarbonization and climate change.
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Day 1 of the Michigan Planning Conference
A trip to Traverse City is the cherry on top of a year filled with exciting developments in planning world.
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Making Environmental and Climate Justice Visible: POCACITO Returns!
I am looking forward to again working with the inimitable Max Gruenig to help put together a conference at the
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Midjourney Parameters: Style & Chaos In Speculative Urbanism
Imagining cities and their infrastructure using artificial intelligence, and playing around with some of the weirder parameters in Midjourney to see what we can squeeze out of the generative AI platform.
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Is Bus Electrification Economical or Environmental? Possibly Both.
City buses have historically been powered by dirty diesel engines. Upgrading to CNG improves emissions and reduces smog, but doesn’t improve efficiency. Electrification, on the other hand, could drastically improve efficiency, drastically reduce emissions, and reduce operating costs to boot. There is a higher capital cost up front, which can potentially be amortized over a longer lifespan.
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To Sprawl, Or Not To Sprawl: LaSalle, Ontario Mulls Development Plan
If we can get past the fanciful belief that all growth is good growth, we can critically examine the likes of really bad municipal planning in our southern neighbor of Canada.
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