American Planning Association

Julie Burros sees arts and culture not only as an end in itself but also as a way planners can solve intractable problems. Throughout her career, she's helped governments leverage experimental, artist-designed projects: there was taiko drumming with seniors through a dangerous Boston intersection and outfitting a City of Boston FleetHub vehicle with comments from a public meeting. “Artists can really think of things that aren’t in the typical planner’s toolbox and help push planners to be more innovative ...” —Julie Burros, principal cultural planner, Metris Arts Consulting The principal cultural planner at Metris Arts Consulting speaks with People Behind the Plans host Courtney Kashima, AICP, about all things cultural planning, and they use Julie's "Cultural Planning Manifesto" as a jumping-off point for their conversation. She covers the breadth of what goes into a cultural plan, including arts education, support for individual artists, and health of the economy and job creation. The document discusses th

By his estimation, Donald Shoup, FAICP, thinks about parking more than anybody else. That seems plausible, as he's been a longtime advocate for progressive parking policy. In fact, his ideas have spread so widely that not only does he have fans, but they even have a nickname for themselves: "Shoupistas." Don is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, author of the seminal High Cost of Free Parking, and editor of the recent Parking and the City. He chats with host Courtney Kashima, AICP, about how he got into the transportation subfield and how, throughout his career, he has tried to further equitable policies and correct market and government failures when it comes to parking. He describes his basic thesis from The High Cost of Free Parking, which is that cities should (1) get rid of all minimum parking requirements, (2) charge demand-based prices for on-street parking, and (3) spend the revenue to pay for public services in the metered neighborhood. He and Courtney dis

The idea of increasing density in a neighborhood is frequently an off-putting concept for residents, but Dan Parolek has a solution: the "missing middle." He coined the term in 2010 to identify a range of housing types that provide more dwelling units than a single-family home but fewer than a midrise apartment building. These missing middle housing types—duplexes, fourplexes, cottage courts, and more—increase density while still keeping with the scale and character of a neighborhood. His firm, Opticos Design, helps communities implement form-based coding to allow for these structures. Dan shares the firm's ideas and work with host Courtney Kashima, AICP, including a project in South Bend, Indiana, that tackles the issue of one neighborhood's 500 vacant lots and how to build on them. He stresses the need for a foundation of physical design within planning—without turning planners into designers. Courtney and Dan also explore his career path: He started as an architect but quickly realized he wanted to earn a

During NPC19 in San Francisco, host Courtney Kashima, AICP, sat down with John Rahaim, the city and county's planning director. On the table during their conversation are issues the city's grappling with now, from the housing crisis and homelessness to design review and short-term rentals. John divulges the route he took to his current position — he grew up in Detroit, got plugged in to planning in Pittsburgh, and eventually made a move to the West Coast. The two unpack the phenomenon of highly visible planning leaders, the growing pains San Francisco experienced in dealing with Airbnb, and the importance of the Citywide LGBTQ+ Cultural Heritage Strategy. Through concrete examples of actions the department has taken in its work, John underscores the need for planners to experiment with the programs and policies they develop.

How livable is your community? The AARP Livability Index sets out to tell residents just that, based on ratings in several categories: housing, neighborhood, transportation, environment, health, engagement, and opportunity. First launched in 2015, it was comprehensively updated in 2018. As senior strategic policy advisor with AARP Public Policy Institute’s Livable Communities team, Jana Lynott, AICP, was responsible for its development. She and host Courtney Kashima, AICP, talk about how the index is being used as a tool, but they also delve in to other areas of Jana's work, such as mobility as a service (MaaS), or universal mobility as a service. Most of the focus in transportation planning has been on how we move around cars, but universal mobility as a service looks at how we can best move around people. The two also discuss the language we use to talk about aging and why planners need to think about how the built environment affects people of all abilities.

The City of Vancouver, British Columbia, has a lot to brag about. City manager Sadhu Johnston knows that many of its successes are due to smart, collaborative planning, such as the work the city did to get car trips to the current rate of 45 percent of all trips, down from 90 percent in the 1970s. There’s the Greenest City 2020 Action Plan, which Sadhu helped implement when he started in Vancouver; the plan seeks to set Vancouver apart as a global leader in sustainability efforts. It aims to reduce carbon emissions, add green jobs, and reverse urban tree canopy loss, among many other items. But the city is also grappling with serious issues, such as the housing and opioid crises. Sadhu tells host Courtney Kashima, AICP, that the current average home price in Vancouver stands at $1.5 million. But the city council is taking action. Among the ground-breaking solutions they've implemented to stem the tide of rising housing costs are building modular housing — which take only three months to erect — and implement

Pete Parkinson’s planning career has spanned not only decades but also various California counties. As a result, he’s familiar with a wide range of hazards. In the fourth episode of the APA Podcast series Resilience Roundtable, he and host Rich Roths, AICP, discuss many of them, including earthquakes, floods, landslides, and wildfires. Pete unfortunately has a very personal experience dealing with the latter, as he and his family lost their home in October 2017 when multiple fires tore through Sonoma County, as well as Lake, Napa, Mendocino, and Solano counties. His story focuses on the Tubbs Fire, which began in Calistoga but spread into Santa Rosa, even jumping Highway 101 in the process. It destroyed the Coffey Park neighborhood and ultimately the Santa Rosa mobile home park where Pete's mother-in-law lived. (The Tubbs Fire is now the second-most destructive fire in California history after the November 2018 Camp Fire, which caused 85 deaths and destroyed 18,804 structures in Butte County.) Pete is now wor

Trevor Dick, AICP, hates dry planning events. That means whenever he's involved in a National Planning Conference session — like the always popular Fast, Funny, and Passionate series — or an APA Illinois Chapter conference event, he makes things fun by using some ... unexpected tactics. Trevor and host Courtney Kashima, AICP, bring the same kind of lively spirit to this episode of People Behind the Plans. Not only does Trevor divulge some of his off-the-wall presentation antics, he also reveals his favorite planning references in pop culture and regales Courtney with stories of public meetings gone awry. The two switch gears to discuss the exciting developments underway in Aurora, Illinois, where Trevor is Director of Development Strategy and Facilitation. Currently one of the city's big projects is revitalizing the Fox Valley Mall, which sits squarely within the Route 59 commercial corridor, the second biggest retail hub in the state after Chicago's Michigan Avenue. Trevor also talks about the city's plan t

In the third episode of the APA Podcast series Resilience Roundtable, host Rich Roths, AICP, talks with community planner Jack Heide, AICP CFM, and Lieutenant Emily Ussery, PhD, about the impact of Hurricanes Irma and Maria on the US Virgin Islands. The two discuss their unique reasons for working in the region, how combining their expertise led to a more comprehensive recovery effort, and the lessons they took away from their first disaster response and recovery experience. Emily is an epidemiologist with the Physical Activity and Health Branch of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She is also a lieutenant with the US Public Health Service. Jack works as a planner for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Region II.

The Great Lakes hold 20 percent of the world's supply of surface freshwater. When urban planner Josina Morita moved from California, where a mentality of scarcity around water dominates, to Chicago, where the opposite is true, it got her thinking: How can we be good stewards of the Great Lakes, one of our most precious natural resources? How can we keep ourselves accountable to the rest of the country and the world? Josina now serves as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD), which manages stormwater and sewer water for Cook County, Illinois. But the organization also sees themselves as an environmental agency, and they pilot exciting new green technologies at many of their plants. Josina describes several of them in the episode and the promising ways they're advancing the industry, saying, "The last thing anybody thinks about is drinking their own sewer water, but the technology is there, and water is becoming its own renewable resource." She and Courtney also d

During her upbringing in Detroit, Nina Idemudia, AICP, thought a lot about how the built environment influenced her life. She went on to discover planning during her studies at the University of Michigan, and she knew it would be the framework she'd use to instill lasting change in the world. Currently Nina works as a city planning associate with the City of Los Angeles Planning Department, and she serves as the Young Planners Group coordinator for the APA California Chapter. Nina shares her passion for community engagement with listeners, talking about the sometimes surprising roadblocks that prevent residents from participating in the planning process and the simple ways planners can address these problems. Throughout the entirety of this lively conversation, she underscores how dire it is that planners make equity the bedrock of everything they do — and why it's OK to ask for help in this area.

In the second episode of the APA Podcast series Resilience Roundtable, Kim Mickelson, AICP, joins host Rich Roths, AICP, to discuss Hurricane Harvey from her perspective as an attorney from the City of Houston Planning Department. The storm hit during her first week on the job, and it compelled city officials to approve a new hazard-mitigation action plan in March 2018. Kim talks about how having their third 500-year — or greater — storm in 18 months made them take a second look at their floodplain regulations, including elevation requirements for new construction, and their infrastructure design standards. She reviews the more challenging, Houston-specific aspects of the cleanup process and how she immediately thought to engage the services of APA’s Community Planning Assistance Team once the storm had passed.

In the new APA Podcast series, Resilience Roundtable, host Rich Roths, AICP, talks with planners and allied professionals who make resilience their mission, even in the face of devastating natural hazards. Rich is a senior hazard planner for Burton Planning Service of Columbus, Ohio. Previously he worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), where he was in charge of coordinating all mitigation planning activities for the six states in Region V. Rich is also a member of APA's Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. The first episode features John Henneberger, an expert on low-income housing issues, a 2014 MacArthur Fellow, and the codirector of Texas Housers, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable disaster recovery policy and practices. John describes his affordable housing and community development background and how, when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita descended on the Gulf Coast in 2005, he became quickly aware of the exaggerated impact on low-income neighborhoods of color.

What is mobility? It’s simply the ability to get somewhere, says Mark de la Vergne, chief of mobility innovation for the Mayor’s Office in Detroit. But when it manifests in the real world, this essential facet inevitably presents challenges for all types of cities, from New York to Austin to Seattle. In Detroit’s case, those challenges have been built up over years of policy decisions, but Mark’s job is to alleviate pain points by bringing in new technologies and services. In the last year, the city has embarked on a series of innovative pilot projects revolving around transportation solutions, such as bringing more car-share vehicles to Detroit's neighborhoods so residents living beyond the city's core have alternatives to car ownership. His big-vision goals include improving existing and adding new connected technologies to the city's infrastructure — not to drum up hype but to actually address safety and operational issues. Mark names empathy as a crucial aspect of his work, because knowing what kinds of f

Resilience, civic infrastructure, participatory design — these topics and more play important roles in the work of Taryn Sabia. Taryn is the director of the Florida Center for Community Design and Research at the University of South Florida's School of Architecture and Community Design, where she's also a research associate professor. In a wide-ranging conversation with host Courtney Kashima, AICP, she talks about why planners must encourage the development of a civic infrastructure in their communities — and how they can do that. Taryn discusses the Mayors' Institute on City Design, which she hosted in 2014 and 2017 and gives city officials the opportunity to work with planners, architects, and designers on tough development challenges in their cities. In reflecting on the interdisciplinary nature of her work, she underscores the need for allied professions to come together on resiliency issues — such as building erosion due to saltwater inundation — as many Florida communities grapple with these realities o

New Orleans’s City Park claims some impressive titles: At 1,300 acres, it’s the largest regional park in Louisiana, and it ranks as the most visited park in the state at nearly 15 million visits per year. But that wasn’t the case 13 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005, and devastated the city — including that well-loved civic space. For this special episode of People Behind the Plans, recorded in New Orleans at the National Planning Conference earlier this year, Courtney hears from Bob Becker, FAICP, CEO of City Park and an adjunct professor at the University of New Orleans. During the first half of the episode, Courtney and Bob look back on the effect of Hurricane Katrina on the park — every building damaged, 2,000 trees destroyed, and 90 percent of its funding gone overnight. Just five months before the storm hit, the organization finished devising a new master plan for the space, and Bob stresses how important that document was for charting a course forward during the recovery effort.

In this episode, Jennifer and Kelley pick Lisa Nisenson’s brain to find out why the founder of the startup Greater Places and advisor to Alta Planning + Design thinks scenario planning is crucial to designing the autonomous future. Nisenson explains what scenario planning actually is, how it became an essential part of a planner’s toolbox, and how it really works in the context of automation. She mentions notable people working in the field and the tools they’re developing (but she also argues for putting the tools away so as to not limit our thinking). Throughout the conversation, Nisenson makes the case for integrating this framework into planning for the autonomous future.

Kate Hartley laughs when talking about what could have been if she had chased a career in legal history, the academic path she started out on while at the University of California, Berkeley. But after taking a couple urban planning classes on a whim, she never looked back. Nowadays, Kate focuses on all things housing as the director of the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) in San Francisco. She and Courtney discuss how the Affordable Housing Bonus Program leverages incentives to create affordable housing and why it's so difficult to deliver units for middle-income households in the city. Kate praises the Mission Action Plan 2020, which focuses on decelerating the rate of eviction and displacement in the famed neighborhood. She talks about the challenges inherent in her work but also projects from other cities that inspire her, such as Vancouver's investment in modular housing for homeless households.

Courtney welcomes to the podcast Greg Lindsay, who visited Chicago in March for the 2018 National Shared Mobility Summit, and the two grapple with how developments in technology are radically changing cities and affecting the work planners do across the country. As a journalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker, Greg thinks constantly about cities, and he argues that we've chosen to make living in the dense urban core a luxury good. Greg is also a senior fellow at NewCities and the director of strategy of its offshoot LA CoMotion — an annual urban mobility festival in the Arts District of Los Angeles — as well as the coauthor of the book Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, which Courtney and Greg discuss. The phenomenon of co-working and co-living spaces, tactical urbanism, and the equity implications of certain technologies also make their way into this dynamic conversation.

Jennifer and Kelley sit down with Rebecca Hunter of Crown Castle and John Estrada of eTrans Systems to break down exactly how infrastructure relates to autonomous vehicles. Rebecca explains why connectivity requires a wireless and wired network, how densification of infrastructure will affect traffic safety, and why the comprehensive plan should address these issues. John delves in to the various technologies being used in the field, like LiDAR (which stands for "Light, Detection, And Ranging”) and haptic systems, and which cities around the U.S. are seeing some of these tools in action.