The Guardian: 

“Water sensitive design: integrating water with urban planning

For too long we have been designing water out of our cities when we should have been designing it in

Sue Illman. 19 April 2013

In March this year, the Mayor of London and RoDMA announced a tender to create the UK’s largest floating village in London’s Royal Docks, on an area one and a half times the size of Green Park. Planners in Norwich, meanwhile, will be scrutinising plans submitted earlier this year for a rain square and flood park that aims to create 670 homes and new public spaces on a flood-prone site at the juncture of the Wensum and Yare rivers.

As long as we want to keep developing in low-lying areas, particularly around our tidal rivers and coasts, then creating whole settlements that rise and fall as the water ebbs and flows is a perfectly legitimate solution. The Dutch – the ultimate early adopters when it comes to water – already boast examples such as Amsterdam’s pioneering Ijburg community. But for the majority of people living in urban centres, floating villages aren’t the future. In fact, they often obscure what we really need to be focusing on when we think about the relationship between our cities and water.”

Photo: The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. A water feature in the heart of a city will enhance the micro-climate and reduce heat island effect. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

“Cities (Of All Sizes) Lead the State in Population Growth

July 18th, 2012 by Tim Evans

The eight urban centers identified by the State Plan accounted for only 1.1 percent of the state’s total increase in population between 2000 and 2008, but accounted for 11.4 percent of the total statewide population increase from 2008 to 2011.

The story is similar but more dramatic for the 30 cities identified by the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey as “distressed” in their 2006 report Cities in Transition.  As a group, the distressed cities lost population between 2000 and 2008, just as they had lost population for four decades between 1950 and 1990 before managing a modest gain in the 1990s. But between 2008 and 2011, the 30 distressed cities together posted a 2.6 percent population increase, outstripping the statewide rate (1.8 percent).

The pattern is also visible in the group of municipalities that were at least 95 percent built out (that is, that have developed at least 95 percent of all of their developable land (pdf)) as of 2007 – a diverse group of big cities, smaller towns, and older suburbs. These places as a group decreased in population by 1.1 percent between 2000 and 2008 (while the state grew by 3.0 percent) but grew faster than the state between 2008 and 2011.

A Sudden Reversal of Post-World-War-II Trends

In June, New Jersey Future took a look at new 2011 county population estimates and found a dramatic reversal of the population growth patterns of the past half-century, with more heavily urbanized counties actually growing faster than counties on the suburban fringe in the wake of the housing market collapse of 2008. This month, new municipal population estimates offer an opportunity to see whether the same phenomenon is playing out at a more local level.

The Census Bureau and the Associated Press have already noted the turnaround in the municipal data from the national perspective, with cities growing faster than their surroundings for the first time in decades. Is the same thing happening in New Jersey? In a word, yes.

Measured any of several ways, the pattern is clear: Between 2008 and 2011, older, more urbanized, more built-out municipalities generally grew faster than less-developed suburban, exurban, and rural municipalities. Consider the eight “urban centers” defined by the State Plan – Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, Trenton, Camden, New Brunswick, and Atlantic City. As a group, these cities had lost population for four decades, through 1990, and then posted a very small gain (+1.0 percent) in the 1990s (vs. 8.6 percent growth statewide). They continued to grow anemically between 2000 and 2008, increasing by 0.3 percent, compared to a 3.0 percent increase (also fairly anemic) for the state as a whole.

But between 2008 and 2011, these urban centers nearly matched the statewide growth rate, growing by 1.7 percent vs. a statewide rate of 1.8 percent. These big cities had not come close to matching the statewide growth rate since before 1930. They managed this feat by gaining, on average, 17 times as many new residents annually from 2008 to 2011 as they had between 2000 and 2008. In other words, the urban centers did not simply hold steady after the recession – they actually started gaining people at a much faster rate.

Just as the Census Bureau found, the “urban” rebound in New Jersey extends beyond the biggest and most identifiable cities to include built-up, densely populated places of all sizes. If we look at all 188 municipalities in New Jersey that were at least 95 percent built out as of 2007 – a mixed bag of cities big and small, older “urban” suburbs, and stand-alone small towns like Freehold, Red Bank, Hightstown, Princeton, Flemington, Riverton, or Penns Grove – we see the same loss of prominence since World War II: In 1940, these municipalities together contained two-thirds (66.4 percent) of the state’s total population, but by the time of the 2010 Census accounted for only 38.3 percent of the state total. Since 1950, these built-out municipalities have grown at a much slower rate than the state as a whole, including having actually lost population in the 1970s (-7.0 percent) and 1980s (-2.5 percent). They collectively lost population between 2000 and 2008, as well.

From 2008 to 2011, however, these 188 municipalities together grew by 2.0 percent, besting the statewide growth rate of 1.8 percent. They accounted for 42.2 percent of the total statewide population increase between 2008 and 2011. (See chart below.)”

Via: New Jersey Future

Photo: Red Bank, one of New Jersey’s rapidly growing small cities. Wikipedia

” Is Growth a Prerequisite for Long-Term Community Health and Prosperity?

By David Morley, AICP
APA’s Planning Advisory Service Coordinator

For most planners the obvious answer to the title question is probably no. But if this is the case, why is it so hard to articulate a realistic and compelling vision for community health and prosperity for a city with a declining population?

The answer, in part, is that the dominant planning paradigm in the United States has always been growth oriented. In other words, communities typically make plans to accommodate or manage demand for new development. Moreover, local planning programs frequently depend primarily on private development for plan implementation. If that development never happens, the community’s vision will not come to fruition.

This doesn’t mean the dominant planning paradigm fails to acknowledge the potential for a decline in demand. On the contrary, many local planning programs focus great attention on neighborhoods suffering from disinvestment and decline. However, the proposed solution for struggling communities almost invariably involves public investment to spur catalytic private development, with the ultimate goal of reigniting demand. This approach is perhaps best typified by the massive slum clearance initiatives of the urban renewal era or the arms race over state-of-the-art downtown sports stadiums in the decades that followed.

The fundamental problem with the classic, growth-oriented planning paradigm is that it simply doesn’t work for the hundreds, if not thousands, of cities in the U.S. who’ve suffered decades of depopulation and disinvestment due to sprawl, deindustrialization, or Sun Belt migration.

Yes, I’m talking about ruin-porn pinups like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, but I’m also talking about smaller cities like Saginaw, Michigan, or Dayton, Ohio, that receive less attention but are nevertheless facing the same challenges.

As authors Joseph Schilling and Alan Mallach, FAICP, explain in the new PAS report titled Cities in Transition (PAS 568), growth-oriented planning hasn’t just failed post-industrial shrinking cities; it isn’t working for many inner-ring suburbs like Euclid, Ohio, or Orange, New Jersey, either. These aging suburbs have inherited many of the problems associated with their central cities; however, they frequently lack assets like regional employment centers or cultural institutions that remain bright spots for many traditional urban centers.

Perhaps more surprisingly, growth-oriented planning may have run its course both in smaller cities that have undergone rapid demographic shifts due to in-migration from other countries and in a number of Sun Belt cities that can no longer pin their economic hopes on new home construction.”

Via: APA Sustaining Places

Image: A new family tree of planning. Freely adapted from Kaiser and Godschalk 1995.