Ian McBlog

Looking for something new to read? The UPenn Ian McHarg Center shares ideas and news through a blog that it calls Ian McBlog. It captures current thinking from a variety of voices and may well push readers in some new directions. Take a look.

10 most read Dirt posts of 2022

 ASLA's The Dirt reviewed 2022 and listed their 10 most read posts of last year. The list includes an impressive variety of landscape architecture and planning stories. Personally, I really like the look at Yosemite's influence on Olmsted. But there is something there for sports fans and a reflection on Superstorm Sandy for those of us in New Jersey and New York. 

 

Starting the spring with a planning post on housing

StrongTowns.org has a post that really works for the start of a new semester of planning.

Written by Nolan Gray, the post explains how Lexington (the best little city in America) could address its affordable housing shortage without compromising the city's famous urban growth boundary. So for a first day lesson, it already integrates the UGB and an important social and economic issue.

The article goes on to talk about mixed use, setbacks, parking, and little zoning tweaks that could make a big difference. For a first day conversation, it is a useful piece because it shows how planning often uses indirect levers to manipulate a problem. It also serves as a reminder that there is a lot to learn from informal sources, like non-profit blogs. Plus, Lexington is a great city that you should read about more often.

Hurricane Joaquin

With Hurricane Joaquin targeting the Chesapeake and Washington DC, I highly recommend keeping an eye on a blog that I have long enjoyed, the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang. They often have a nice mix of forecasts (raw material and general public info) and science that makes it worth the trip, even if they are a few hours away.

Random National Park Service Links

Katmai NP in the NY Times

Appalachian Trail Forums on WhiteBlaze.Net

Inside Big Bend (SLYT)

TripAdvisor on Pictured Rocks NL

MyYosemite Blog (which just posted pictures of a completely dry Yosemite Falls)

Badlands NP on Flickr

Tiny National Park lands

Welcome back!

Where has summer gone? If you had been on the department's Facebook page you would have seen my answer (hint: Spain).

As part of getting connected for the new school year, you can see glimpses of what we are doing on either the department's Facebook page or my own, on Twitter or on this very blog.

Clickbait

Just a note for regular readers. It turns out that UNESCO World Heritage stories are great clickbait. The posting on July 13 got more than double the visits of our other recent posts. Go figure. I will counter it with a detailed post on data handling sometime soon.

The best of planning blogging?

PlaNetizen just posted its 5 most popular postings of the last three months. It represents some really good ideas.

Popular photo

Someone recently took a photo of New Brunswick from an airplane on a flight path for landing at Newark.The Star-Ledger reports that the photo has gone viral:

"The photo is now the sixth-most popular post of all time on Reddit’s New Jersey page, according to Kastner.
Number five is a politically incorrect map of New Jersey, he said."

I think it says something about  aerial photographs, that this simple (but sharp, crisp and well framed) passenger photo has had such an impact.

Cool design in Thailand

Land8Lounge has great galleries of photography of landscape architecture. As a general rule I encourage readers to head over there when looking to stimulate the eyes. Today I am singling out a specific gallery set for Pause Court and Lawn Hill in Thailand.

Happy New Year predictions

James Howard Kunstler has a full post on the coming year including predictions like:

• "The Dow will hit 4000"
• "California, Illinois, and New Jersey beg the broke federal government for bailouts."

Urban Times has a list of impressive city-building megaprojects to watch for in the new year.

GIS Cafe has geospatial predictions for the next year, none are surprising but that doesn't make them less interesting.

Inhabit got green design predictions from notables like Bill McKibben and Jean Lin.

Directions Magazine has its editors' predictions as well: "Crowdfunding will come to geospatial in 2013" and "SoLoMo (Social Local Mobile)".

According to an NYC architect, design trends could include community gardens, designing with Nature, and getting rid of the lawn.

For Vancouver, housing and transportation will be hot in 2013. (Watch them! Vancouver is usually about a decade ahead of many American cities)

Green Team blog

The Metropolis Green Team has a great blog post from RU LA alum Zeina Zahalan. She critiques instant landscapes and talks about alternative approaches.

(I'd like to think that the absurd amount of writing that the climate change studio required was part of what propelled her into high visibility writing. But talent and hard work are probably more to blame.)

Rob Hewitt has posted an impressive analysis of social media for ASLA and related sites. As he (and the amazing graphics) explains, ASLA has a dense network that is very interconnected internally. As he points out, the graphs that were created allow "one can see just how different the various professional organizations and news sites are in terms of their numbers, their dispersal, how intensely they communicate, and their national and global reach." And you can clearly see a difference between ASLA, APA, and ArchRecord.

Social media in government

Government Technology reports on a recent survey that looks at how government users are using different social media.  While it is mostly just a small infographic, it gives you a glimpse into how things might change in the next year or two.

Lecture: The Death and Life of Great American Landscapes

Alan Brake: The Death and Life of Great American Landscapes
4:00 pm _ CDL 110

Allen, who is the Midwest editor and landscape design correspondent for The Architects Newspaper, has written that among the design disciplines, it is widely argued that landscape architecture is ascendant, and that its practitioners are claiming new professional territory from architects and urban planners. Landscape architects now frequently lead competition teams for masterplans, public space improvements, streetscapes, environmental remediation projects, parks, and community development projects. The rising concern about sustainability and, in the face of a slowed global economy, the waning of the so-called architecture of spectacle, have also bolstered the role of landscape architects, whose skills fuse placemaking and aesthetics with practical ecological needs like stormwater management and reducing urban air pollution. As a discipline, however, landscape architecture is poorly understood by the public. It receives little coverage in general interest publications, and, in the US, only one professional journal serves its practitioners. This lecture will argue for the role of critical writing in embedding landscape-based practice in the cultural, civic, and ecological future of cities, and for continuing to expand the intellectual and professional territory of landscape architects.

The fall in review

A quick check of visitors statistics show that from September 1st to December 1st one of my old blogs got much of the site's traffic. A post called Hiking Manhattan, Part 1 from 2008 was suddenly very popular. In October it accounted for a quarter of all of the traffic on the blog.  When I looked it over, I saw that it was just photos from from that year's hike tip-to-tip of Manhattan. But I was puzzled how search engines and visitors might get so excited since it has very little text.  At least I was puzzled until I saw two of the photos.  Can you spot them?

Here is a graph of traffic for Sept, Oct, Nov showing the sudden popularity and then unpopularity of this entry.  The absolute highest peak was October 14th when it got over 400 hits.

It's Crucian that you see this

Sarah Nitchman is blogging her work in St Croix. It looks like an absolutely great experience.

What's a good H for someone like me?

I have no idea.  But Google Scholar Citations makes it easier to find out.  They've added a feature called Google Scholar Citations that allows scholars to create their own scholar citations page that includes an H-index, which is a citation index that measures a mix of productivity and popularity in citations.  It also includes other index scores and a timeline of when they were cited.  I wouldn't want it used in my promotion evaluations, but it is fun to play around with. 

Cool class: Blogging and Podcasting for the Environment

Not many classes have a YouTube video to advertise their work. Here is one that does.


ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION CLINIC:
BLOGGING AND PODCASTING FOR THE ENVIRONMENT 11:374:493
9:15-12:15 Thursdays. Blake 131.

Want to make videos? Enhance your resume?

The goal of the environmental communication clinic is to give students problem-solving skills and hands-on experience to help them in the job market.


Working in groups, students in the Spring 2012 class will develop audio and video podcasts to promote environmentally responsible behavior on campus. To do so, students will first determine their communication goals (Increase recycling at RU football games? Reduce bottled water use in the student centers? Reduce carbon footprint of the dorms? Or? Next, they will identify appropriate target audiences (dorm residents, SEBs faculty, football fans, etc.) After conducting research and developing concepts for narratives, students will learn how to use equipment and begin production.

Cool map tricks

No sooner do I mention the ESRI Mapping Center blog in class than they go and post a great explanation on how to create an embossed polygon map.