A warm welcome to the class of 2011

Recently I coordinated with the department to send out information about BruinPlanners.com to the incoming 2011 class. Not so easy to send out a tutorial about the site from China, where all access to blogs is pretty heavily restricted (then how am I posting... see below). Anyway, the incoming students seem pretty intrigued by the idea of BruinPlanners and several are getting in touch with requests to join. As far as I can tell, there's a good reason to be thrilled; I haven't found any other top-tier Urban Planning program in America with a similar student-published resource. So to our alums who just left, our returning class of 2010, and the new class of 2011, welcome to BruinPlanners. Hopefully all of this can be at least a tad bit useful.

As I get new requests from people to join, I'll go ahead and approve them, but I've also suggested to people that they ask any of the current authors for access, as we all have equal administrator privileges. So if you see a new name on here from someone you don't recognize, leave them a comment, and welcome them to UCLA and BruinPlanners!

I am posting this thanks to Mail2Blogger (I think that's what its called) which allows you to write your entire post from email, then click 'send' and have it automatically posted. Times when this is most helpful:

• When stuck behind "The Great Firewall of China" and you can't access Blogger.com
• When someone emails you something really cool, and you instinctively hit the FOWARD button, only to realize that it might be better communicated via a blog post. Just remember this little piece of wisdom that some girl said to me once: Emails come and go, but blog posts are forever!
• When you are in one of those hyper-productive Outlook / Gmail / Yahoo / Hotmail, etc modes, and you don't want to go to another site in your browser for fear of the lengthy, but pleasant, distraction that it will cause.

Instructions on how to set up Mail2Blogger (along with a full guide I made on every aspect of BruinPlanners.com) is available from this Google Doc: BruinPlanners.com Guide

And since I think every post is best when there are some visuals attached, here's a recent video I made of some time visiting some villages, exhibits, and developments in southern China. Make sure to check out the end, where you can see how they exhibit local long-range plans in each city. Oh, and the soundtrack is the Chinese National Anthem, so don't forget to salute the flag.


Jiangxi Work Trip from Jeremy Cogan on Vimeo.

Lawsuit Ruling Puts Housing Plan in Question

Victory by Geoff Palmer Could Deal Precedent-Setting Blow to Villaraigosa’s Mixed-Income Ordinance

Harvesting Clean Energy Along the Road

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/harvesting-clean-energy-along-the-road/

Gotta love JT

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?entry_id=44340

Parking costs make it to Huffington Post

Professor Shoup gets mention in this search to define Cityism. (click here) (via @APA_Planning on Twitter).

Keep Daylighting Strong

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/07/16/science/1194841417596/in-seoul-an-ancient-stream-restored.html

Santa Monica's Green Street

Last week Santa Monica unveiled it's first "green" street on Bicknell at Neilson. I was there to take pictures and kill some office time.

This first picture shows their most valuable installment, permeable pavement. This really does what it says and there are tanks buried underneath which catch the water and let it slowly percolate into the soil. I'm not sure why the tanks are necessary...but they did say that with more money they could have put in a system where the collected water could be redirected for purple pipe irrigation.

This next picture shows two aspects of the green street. The first one is the pipe in the lower left corner. This is a view port into the holding tanks and is the access point for measuring the water level. The second is the curb cut that allows water runoff to easily get to the vegetation (all of which is climate appropriate and done by Tree People). It's hard to tell from this picture, but the vegetation is slightly below grade compared to the street. This allows the water to easily enter the plantings.

Here's a demonstration of the permeable pavement. You can easily see how the runoff on the blacktop is much greater.

The hose pictured above had been running for several minutes at this point. This is about 100 feet down stream from the hose. As you can see, there is just a tiny trickle of water. Normally there would be much more, but the permeable pavement has absorbed it.

Here's a video of Santa Monica makin it rain!

CA Road to Recovery

I don't know if anyone is going to this tomorrow, but I will be attending the Transportation Infrastructure session from 2:15 to 3:30 and the Energy session from 3:45 to 5:00.

Anyone who is heading out there please let me know! It is $25 dollars to register and the event is from 9AM - 5PM @ Anaheim Convention Center.

http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=185156

Promise and Peril in South LA.

Pueblo Del Rio public housing complex.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-southla-pueblos14-2009jul14,0,2422714.story?page=2&track=rss

First Year Video

So the video is posted. Ninety nine percent of the pics are from us. Click here.

PAB is LEED Silver

This is news to me, our Public Affairs Building is certified LEED Silver.

http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/building-s-green-makeover-wins-94602.aspx

GreenSource

Greensource