by John W. Olson | Sep 12, 2012 | Comprehensive Planning and Codes, Events, Town Planning, Urban Planning and Design, Urbanism
Better Block projects have been popping up nation-wide, and on Sept 21-22 Colorado Springs will join the movement. By identifying underutilized urban neighborhoods and streets, Better Block projects have a history of transforming places into active destinations...
by John W. Olson | Aug 5, 2012 | Comprehensive Planning and Codes, Streetscapes, Town Planning, Urban Planning and Design, Urbanism
As urban planners, landscape architects, architects, and urbanists, we see places a little differently than most. My wife and I both enjoy going to great urban places, but of course we each have different reasons. For her, it is dependent upon the actual mix of stores...
by John W. Olson | Jul 1, 2012 | Comprehensive Planning and Codes
The devastation of the recent wildfires still occurring in and around Colorado Springs have weighed heavily on my mind this past week. Several homes have been destroyed, human casualties have occurred and thousands of people have been displaced. However, the...
by John W. Olson | Jun 17, 2012 | Comprehensive Planning and Codes, Town Planning, Urban Planning and Design
Today is Father’s Day, so this post will be brief. After spending some time with the girls this morning at the park, we went to see “The Lorax” at the theater. It was a fantastic movie, I highly recommend it. The point of this post though was a line...
by John W. Olson | May 20, 2012 | Comprehensive Planning and Codes, Town Planning, Urbanism
A topic very close to my personal and professional interests is the idea of walkability. This phrase is used often, perhaps too often? But what does walkability really mean? Is it something that we can really define? Probably not. Present party included, geographers,...
by John W. Olson | May 3, 2012 | Comprehensive Planning and Codes, Town Planning, Urban Renewal, Urbanism
Retrofitting Suburbia is an interesting discussion that has been widely discussed in the architecture and planning groups for the past decade. This has been the era that we have been able to see, too often, the failures of our development patterns since World War II....