PPS’s work on the new Campus Martius in Downtown Detroit is recognized as an architectural highlight of 2004.

Campus Martius Park in Detroit is named one of the great successes of this year for the city. The picture looks marvelous - despite it being a very chilly November grand opening. I can’t wait to see what the park will do when the weather warms up just a little.

This toolkit is a perfect example of how pro-sprawl groups have been able to take smart growth anti-sprawl language and use it to great effect. Someone who understands the facts and situation can immediately see the small illogical connections the toolkit makes. But the vast majority of people are only beginning to learn about these issues, and would be hard pressed to read this material critically.

How can we break out of the war of words, and move more towards a battle of substance?

Line Magazine publishes collection of articles analyzing parking architecture, design and policy.

for example:

Myth 2: It’s difficult to find parking in the neighborhood. We need to build more.

Myth 9: Fewer parking spaces would be fine, if only we had decent transit.

Radio Shack spent $400,000 setting up an IdeaLab office before building a $200 million office complex. They’ve moved in their own employees to test the space out. They considered it “insurance” on their capital investment.

The experiments PPS promotes are obviously far less costly, but this real-world private sector example could come in handy when persuading people.

[Not sure if this link to the WSJ article will stay up, so I’ll see if I can find another link

A terrific article about maintaining order through chaos on our streets. Goes to show that overly designed streets under-perform. And how could anyone go wrong with featuring Ian Lockwood??

PPS visited Seattle to help the community develop a vision for how to revitalize the park.
Fred Kent’s interview with the Seattle Post Intelligencer.