'Where Are They Now?' features the words and wisdom of previous Agora staff as a thank you for their contribution to the journal. Without them - their leadership and their commitment - Agora would not be where it is today. In preparation for Preview Weekend Friday, March 28th, we invited them to share their story with Agora and with prospective students. We asked: What was most memorable about your experience with Agora? How did your role with Agora influence your career as a planner? If you could make one recommendation to the journal what would it be?
'Where Are They Now?' features the words and wisdom of previous Agora staff as a thank you for their contribution to the journal. Without them - their leadership and their commitment - Agora would not be where it is today. In preparation for Preview Weekend Friday, March 28th, we invited them to share their story with Agora and with prospective students. We asked: What was most memorable about your experience with Agora? How did your role with Agora influence your career as a planner? If you could make one recommendation to the journal what would it be?
'Where Are They Now?' features the words and wisdom of previous Agora staff as a thank you for their contribution to the journal. Without them - their leadership and their commitment - Agora would not be where it is today. In preparation for Preview Weekend Friday, March 28th, we invited them to share their story with Agora and with prospective students. We asked: What was most memorable about your experience with Agora? How did your role with Agora influence your career as a planner? If you could make one recommendation to the journal what would it be?
'Where Are They Now?' features the words and wisdom of previous Agora staff as a thank you for their contribution to the journal. Without them - their leadership and their commitment - Agora would not be where it is today. In preparation for Preview Weekend Friday, March 28th, we invited them to share their story with Agora and with prospective students. We asked: What was most memorable about your experience with Agora? How did your role with Agora influence your career as a planner? If you could make one recommendation to the journal what would it be?
Through examining personal narratives, our new series explores the diverse backgrounds and aspirations of our peers. We are inspired by the concept of making planning personal and the capacity of passion to motivate action and meaningful public policy. Lucina Navarro shares her background and motivations for becoming and urban planner in the latest Agora blog post.
How do planners reconcile abstract theory with complex practical challenges? Jake Gottfried gives a summary and analysis of John Forester's recent talk on planners as mediators and problem solvers in the latest Agora blog post.
Do we live with an imperative to map? At the Taubman College’s Winter 2014 Emerging Voices lecture, Bjørn Sletto discussed the implications of not mapping and what we lose when we do not map. Danielle Rivera gives her thoughts on Sletto's work in the latest Agora Blog post.
About a week ago, Buzzfeed’s “What City Should You Actually Live In?” rapidly made the social media rounds. Since then, we have seen a number of other “What ___ Should you Actually__?” appear, but, as urban planning students, my peers and I were particularly drawn to this intriguing test.
Do we live in a post-racial society? The existence of this question, and its inclusion in the title of Taubman College’s Symposium, suggests that a “post-racial” America is not a completely far-fetched notion. However, as the symposium panelists asserted the new dialogue on race in America might not be post-racial. In fact, what may be passing as post-racial might really be race blindness, or the blindness of difference.
How does the Southeast Michigan Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) compare to other RTPs and more importantly, how does it work to shape our region's future? ... If we really want to transform our region into an innovative, competitive, equitable and sustainable region, and if the Metro Detroit area is truly experiencing the “rebirth” that both residents and national media outlets claim, shouldn’t our regional transportation plan follow suit? More importantly, if we can’t demand transformative Change from our urban and regional planners, where else will we find it?
In anticipation of the “Planning in a ‘Post-Racial’ Society (?): New Directions and Challenges,” Agora hosted a salon on Thursday, October 31 at the Trotter Multicultural center, where presenters discussed their work and art related to planning, race, and space...
For a lecture billed as “political” and named “New Realism”, I would have expected the lecturer to deal more directly with things like “politics” and “reality”. Perhaps it is my inexperience with the architect’s lexicon, but I found these two elements missing from the work she presented...
Sounds like Dundas West is the place to be right now. I have it on good authority from the Toronto Planning Department’s design division, and they would know, right? Even Toronto isn’t immune to the ethnic village turned hipster hot-spot pattern of development we’ve been seeing all over the states, but at least it seems they’ve got their priorities set up to deal with the hot commodity that such neighborhoods can become....
June Manning Thomas, Centennial Professor at Taubman College, is interviewed by Alexandria Stankovich, editor-in-chief of Agora.
During the Expanded Horizons trip to Toronto, I visited the Don Mills neighborhood. Don Mills was one of the first master planned communities in North America, making it a worthy destination...
On a two-masted sailboat, the yacht of our sponsors _______ and ________, we are traveling west under power from a marina in the Pendik district, thirty kilometers from the Bosphorus on the Anatolian coast of the Sea of Marmara.
Sometime in the last year, the Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator became a very popular website among my urbanistically-inclined friends. For the uninitiated, the website, at the press of a button, generates a three-word imperative...
Graffiti covered brick buildings aren’t usually teeming with native plants, wetlands, and wildlife, unless they are long abandoned artifacts of the past, decaying from neglect. Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto, however, is a compelling example of how industrial and biological environments can coexist in ways other than abandonment...
Sitting on the bus approaching Toronto, I kept asking myself one question: how are there so many cranes? Seemingly every few city blocks had another construction site guarded by an imposing crane stretching hundreds of feet into the sky...
If you have spent much time in downtown Ann Arbor, you have probably come across Liberty Street Robot Supply and Repair. If you haven't given in to your curiosity and gone inside to find out what in the world a robot themed store is doing in town, you probably don't realize what goes on behind the playful facade, robot pieces, and wind-up toys.
