Content about Technology

For nearly two centuries, New York City has led the way in its commitment to providing parks and green space for all residents. From the great historic Central and Prospect Parks, to the revitalized Bronx River Greenway to the catalytic High Line Park, the city’s innovative approaches to park development and partnerships can be adapted by all great cities. This coming July, city park planners, designers and visionaries, will have a chance to experience New York City’s parks like never before at the International Urban Parks Conference! Presented by City Parks Alliance, the event development committee for this year’s Greater & Greener conference promises a highly interactive program to include mobile workshops, a volunteer day, weekend tours, and receptions in great parks. 

New York City is now one year in with their Road Map for the Digital City, the city’s plan to make New York the world’s leading digital city. Are they on to something big? Were their first year ambitions realistic? The process is definitely underway, but more challenges exist.

This week a broad cross-section of America’s (and the world’s) best urban planners, designers, thinkers and doers will be gathering in West Palm Beach for the 20th annual Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU20). Even if you were unable to attend this event, you’ll have the chance to participate by following the CNU 20 buzz (Twitter hashtag #cnu20) of attendees as they work to craft hands-on solutions that will vitalize our neighborhoods, cities and towns.

Not one of my more informative posts, this one, more a cry for help.
I’ve been approached by a couple of councillors to develop a website for them, and I’m interested to know what sort of features would be required for such a site to be considered best of breed.
For example:

• Blog style layout
• Events/meeting listings
• Local maps
• Easy methods of contact
• Feedback through comments, etc

None of these seem particularly exciting to me! Anyone got anything really good that ought to be included – or great examples of Councillor websites?
Possibly related posts:

• Connected Generation 2010
• Reconnecting public accountability
• What I’ve been reading
• Why senior managers need to lead online
• What I’ve been reading

Check out live streaming of CNU 20's - Looking Forward: New Urbanism and the New World. As the Congress for New Urbanism enters its third decade, economic, political, and environmental conditions pose serious challenges for the built and natural environment, as well as New Urbanist practice. Three of CNU's Founders will open this session with lectures addressing these challenges. Andres Duany will present the 21st century crises that call for New Urbanists to adapt, including slow development, the public process, suburban retrofit, agricultural urbanism, and the theology of metrics. Dan Solomon will discuss the tensions between new urbanism's roots in the nuanced complexity of the city and the reductive codifying of New Urbanist practice.

January 24th was an important day for residents in New Orleans. That Tuesday morning, the Regional Transit Authority commissioners agreed to release their transit data to the public. Software developers can now develop applications for residents based on schedule, route and real-time GPS data. With the right technology, riding public transit will be more predictable and less stressful for tens of thousands of people every day. New Orleans residents deserve credit for making it happen.

Recently, I posted an article on the Living Labs Global blog, Report on Mobility, which prompted someone to comment on the distinction between open data and actual information.  Raw data are valuable, but the information synthesized from the data is golden.  My experiences this summer continue to highlight the need not only for better data, but also for better information.

Whatever your role in spatial planning the Planning Convention is this year’s most important planning event! The brand new one day format brings together big picture plenaries and special interests sessions to ensure you focus your specific professional needs. Leading edge speakers will tackle some of the most grappling issues including, the new planning agenda in England, cities in the UK, national infrastructure planning and Royal Town Planning Institute's (RTPI) new “Map for England”. This event will change your perspective, refresh your knowledge, extend your contacts and equip you with the tools you need to make it work in 2012.

A couple of weeks ago, I was able to attend the 2012 Where Conference, held in San Fransisco, California, and I am pleased to say that this year’s event surpassed all of my expectations. For those of you not familiar with this conference, the annual event features the latest and greatest in location-based social applications, mapping technology, and innovative GIS related public engagement best practices. While many of the presentations at this year’s Where Conference focused on leveraging location-based social media apps installed on our smart phones and tablets, it was the presentations about creating compelling stories about place and space that caught my attention as they relate specifically to public involvement, which can provide planners with some very useful resources in citizen engagement. Overall, I would say that “doing GIS” is getting easier.

When you approach the polls this November to choose the members of Congress you’d like to see elected or re-elected, you will likely have put in some time prior to the election studying up on how your candidates compare to your views. It’s worth noting that there are now websites created just for that reason, such as VoteSmart.org’s “VoteEasy” platform. But it may not have crossed your mind that elected representatives and their political allies in the state legislatures will have pre-selected their voters by creating partisan electoral districts through the manipulation of maps.

Whether you’re new to a city or a long time resident, you almost certainly have knowledge and perspectives you can share with and learn from your neighbors. If cities had one spot where they could collect and capture the spirit of a thriving area, they might just increase collaboration and knowledge dissemination across an entire region.

We wanted to be sure that all our readers are aware of this awesome opportunity to get a free interactive community outreach web site from Urban Interactive Studios (UIS). In conjunction with the upcoming APA annual conference, UIS is once again giving away a free Engaging Plans website to one planning project whose community is looking for a cost-effective way to use the Web to facilitate communication with the public throughout their projects. Engaging Plans enables planners to actively engage with community members by combining a variety of online and mobile tools, as well as social media techniques.