American Planning Association

In a two-part episode, Bill Siembieda, AICP, PhD, talks with Butte County, California, planning staff about the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire — one of the deadliest and costliest wildfires in the state's history, with 85 casualties and more than 50,000 people evacuated from their homes. Part II of these conversations features Tim Snellings, director of development services for Butte County. Tim...

In a two-part episode, Bill Siembieda, AICP, PhD, talks with Butte County, California, planning staff about the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire — one of the deadliest and costliest wildfires in the state's history, with 85 casualties and more than 50,000 people evacuated from their homes. Part I of these conversations features Dan Breedon, AICP, principal planner for Butte County. Dan describes ho...

Certain concepts in the planning sphere can be hard to make tangible for residents, but property taxes is not one of them. Kelwin Harris knows this reality well. As the director of outreach and engagement for the Office of the Cook County Assessor — which is responsible for valuing 1.8 million properties for tax purposes in and around Chicago — he and his team have been eagerly getting out the wor...

What do you do when you’re an urban planner who loves comics? If you’re Todd Vanadilok, AICP, you create your own planning-themed comic series. The small-business owner launched an online comic this spring that explores issues of social justice through a planning lens. His central characters — Emie, an egret, and Ollie, an ox — come from his firm’s name, Egret+Ox Planning. The two animals spoke to...

How well do the people in your area know their neighbors? Enessa Janes, AICP, PhD, considers it one of the most important questions for communities to ask when preparing for a disaster. The community resilience coordinator for the City of Arvada, Colorado, explains that during large events, police officers and fire departments may not be able to get to residents quickly. Knowing those who live nea...

In 2017, San Francisco designated six blocks of the Tenderloin neighborhood as the Compton’s Transgender Cultural District. In the first episode of APA’s podcast series No Small Stories, host Lindsay Nieman and producer Kelly Wilson visit the area to learn about how it’s fighting gentrification and displacement, encouraging the city to rethink its approach to historical preservation, and creating...

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 rea...

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...

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...

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 i...

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, AI...

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...

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...

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 th...

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 les...

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 cou...

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 sh...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 th...

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...

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...

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...