Planning Site of the Day

Foreclosure Crisis (http://www.cleveland.com/foreclosure/) is a series of articles from the Cleveland Plain Dealer that documents how the recent credit crisis has affected Northeast Ohio; a region among the hardest hit in the country by foreclosures. The site also includes an index of other foreclosure-related stories from the Plain Dealer.

When paired with vintage images of the 19th and 20th centuries, Arizona photographers Allen Dutton and Paul Scharbach's modern-day images reveal the changes that have shaped the state's landscape during the past 100-plus years. They searched the state to locate the precise spots from which to rephotograph the scenes captured by their predecessors, endeavoring to achieve the same angles, perspectives, and lighting as in the early photographs.

Driving Detroit (http://media.freep.com/drivingdetroit/stories.html) is a series of articles from the Detroit Free Press that documents a four-month odyssey through all 2,700 miles (4,350 kilometers) of Detroit's over 2,100 streets. The idea of this unusual roadtrip was to get a unique view of Detroit; a short-term, street-level survey of the city's 138 square miles (357 square kilometers), and a snapshot of the city many insist is coming back.

Early in the 20th century, staggeringly high turnover in industrial jobs provoked studies and surveys. Lack of quality housing in industrial areas emerged as a primary reason for the costly labor force turnover. Industrialist Clayton Mark commissioned famed Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw to create housing that addressed the needs and desires of his steel workers. Shaw designed Marktown (http://www.marktown.org), a complete village. An intact English Garden City sandwiched between giant steel mills and refineries, the 1917 planned community retains all 218 of the original structures. A unique and unexpected place, Marktown’s European-patterned streets are so narrow that cars park on the sidewalk and people walk in the roadway.

(No, this isn't a Rickroll.) 'It's a Wonderful City' was produced for the Beverly Hills, California Planning Department by Richard Gale. The short film is a parody of Frank Capra's classic 'It's a Wonderful Life,' which illustrates the importance of a City's planning department. George, the Jimmy Stewart character spirals into despair when faced with the City's bureaucracy, and wishes the Planning Department never existed. Guardian Angel Clarance helps him get his wish, and George learns an important lesson when his hometown is transformed into an urban nightmare.

From Cyburbian SGB: A major new series examining on-the-ground impacts of land policy begins airing today on National Public Radio's acclaimed afternoon news program All Things Considered.

The series, called Shifting Ground, was produced by David Baron, an award-winning author and journalist who has worked in public radio for more than 20 years, previously as science and environment correspondent for NPR, and science editor for the Public Radio International-BBC program "The World."

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy supported Baron's work, and the series was acquired and edited by NPR. After the first installment airing Thursday, February 28 on All Things Considered, the reports will air as an occasional series in the weeks and months ahead. They will be archived and available on the website www.shifting-ground.com.

No, today's Site of the Day has nothing to do with big box stores. Decades before ground was broken on Celebration, Walt Disney had plans for a futuristic experimental city he called EPCOT. As built, today's EPCOT is quite different than the "Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow" Disney first had in mind. Waltopia (http://www.waltopia.com) is a site that showcases Disney's original plans for EPCOT, a city "that would incorporate the best ideas of industry, government, and academia worldwide".

Planners Network UK (http://www.pnuk.org.uk) is an organization seeking to establish a network to support critical thinking about the current state of planning in the UK, appealing to a broad range of practitioners, academics and activists interested in rearticulating the progressive purpose of planning. The goals of PNUK are quite similar to Planners Network in North America.

Design Matters (long URL) is a catalog of well-designed affordable housing projects located throughout the United States, compiled by the City Design Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The catalog is intended to show that affordable housing doesn't have to be plain or utilitarian, and that quality design can be affordable.

The Big Box Evaluator (http://www.bigboxevaluator.org) is an on-line tool, just released by the Orton Family Foundation, designed to be an unbiased information resource for citizens and government officials who want to know more about “big box” retail stores and their potential positive and negative impacts on the local community. This tool allows users to analyze how big box stores may affect a community’s economics, environment and community character, and lets users learn basic facts, test assumptions, and explore interactive models.

Great Places in America (http://www.planning.org/greatplaces/) is a new designation program of the American Planning Association, which honoring places of exemplary character, quality, and planning. The program recognizes "10 Great Streets" and "10 Great Neighborhoods", and starting in 2008, public spaces. Designated neighborhoods and streets are defined by several characteristics, including good design, functionality, sustainability, and community involvement.

Trulia Hindsight (http://hindsight.trulia.com) is an animated map of homes in the United States from the Web 2.0 real estate site Trulia. The animations use the year the properties were built to show the growth of streets, neighborhoods and cities over time.. A slider control lets you see when the majority of development occurred, pause on a specific time frame or focus on only homes built before or after specific years. Very, very cool. There's some other neat tools on Trulia, such as real estate price heat maps.

The creative city movement and recognition of the creative class is not just limited to the United States. The Creative City Network of Canada (http://www.creativecity.ca) is an organization of people employed by municipalities across Canada working on arts, culture and heritage policy, planning, development and support, with the intent of connecting people in order to be more effective in promoting cultural development of their communities.

Planning News Vote (http://www.planningnewsvote.com/) is a new Digg-like service where planning-related news stories and Web sites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.

Sapling (http://www.sapling.info) is a UK-based site that includes, at the time this was written, 1,100 annotated and reviewed links to architecture, planning and landscape-related websites throughout the world.