Strong Towns or Controlled Towns?
Background Research On The Small Towns Organization which appears to be another version of Agenda 21. Strong Towns’ work here is being sponsored by Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board (IRRRB) and Blandin Foundation. Have any of you been to St. Cloud in the recent past? You too can be the new resettlement community in Northern Minnesota... Read through the UN-HABITAT Adopts First-Ever Resolution on Public Spaces at the bottom of this page. Perhaps the agenda is not quite as forthright as portrayed by this advocate. Have a good idea of what you may be getting into people before jumping off the deep end... It is about control and not yours.
______
Strong Towns to come to Range towns
A nonprofit that advocates for a model of development that allows cities, towns and neighborhoods to grow financially strong and resilient will be on the Iron Range this week.
http://www.hibbingmn.com/news/local/strong-towns-to-come-to-range-towns/article_f620003e-1a35-11e6-beb9-a32dce4219e1.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=user-share
________
My trip to the White House
November 19, 2015
by Charles Marohn
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/11/18/my-trip-to-the-white-house
Besides the White House and related cabinet agencies, the main organizations putting together the meeting were Project for Public Spaces (PPS) and the National Main Street. I'm familiar with both and have respect for the work each is doing. Fred Kent of PPS has been promoting this kind of approach for a long time. In fact, way back when it was a crazy idea, which makes him quite a visionary.
For those of you not familiar with the term "placemaking" I'll offer my own definition. Placemaking is a focus on building a place for people to be in instead of a place for people to drive their cars through. The term did not exist a century ago because it would simply have been called "urban design". Today, after two generations of disassembling our cities to accommodate increased auto mobility on the misguided theory that doing so was the key to our prosperity, we actually need the art of placemaking to reconstruct what actually works.
_________
Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is the central hub of the global Placemaking movement, connecting people to ideas, expertise, and partners who share a passion for creating vital places.
UN-HABITAT Adopts First-Ever Resolution on Public Spaces
Resolution on Sustainable Urban Development through Access to Quality Urban Public Spaces
The resolution includes the following seven invitations and requests:
1. Invites Governments to formulate and implement sustainable urban development policies that promote socially just and environmentally balanced uses of urban public space in conditions of urban security and gender equity that foster urban resilience;
2. Invites Governments and local authorities to facilitate the use of public spaces of cities such as streets, parks and markets to foster social, cultural, economic and environmental convergences so that all citizens have access to public spaces in a socially just landscape and within resilient environmental conditions;
3. Invites national Governments and development partners and encourages local authorities to consider:
(a) Implementing urban environmental planning, regulation and management that promotes equilibrium between urban development and protection of natural, historic, architectural, cultural and artistic heritage, that impedes segregation and territorial exclusion, that prioritizes social production of public space and that encourages the social and creative economic function of cities and property: for that purpose, cities should adopt measures that foster integration and equity with quality urban public spaces that respect environmentally friendly processes;
(b) Integrating the theme of urban safety for all citizens, especially for women, girls and other vulnerable groups, as an attribute of the public space, taking into account gender and age considerations in the laws regulating the use of public space;
4. Requests the Executive Director through the medium-term strategic and institutional plan to advance the agenda on place-making and public spaces in a specific way that will consolidate local and international approaches to creating inclusive cities, enhance the knowledge of partners of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme and local authorities of place-making, public spaces and the quality of urban life and facilitate and implement exchange, cooperation and research between partners working in this field;
5. Also requests the Executive Director, in collaboration with Habitat Agenda partners, to develop a policy approach on the role that place-making can play in meeting the challenges of our rapidly urbanizing world, to disseminate that policy and its results widely and to develop a plan for ensuring its application internationally;
6. Further requests the Executive Director to assist in coordinating partners of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in disseminating knowledge to existing sustainable urban development processes at all governmental levels;
7. Requests the Executive Director to report to the Governing Council on operating paragraphs calling for action by the Executive Director, at its twenty-fourth session, on progress made in the implementation of the present resolution.
http://www.pps.org/blog/un-habitat-adopts-first-ever-resolution-on-public-spaces/