Tracy Mullins, our in-house tourism expert has once again participated in National Geographic Travelers panel of experts to produce the Historic Places Rated Study. 280 tourism experts worldwide were asked to rate and make comments on 115 Historic Places worldwide. The results are found in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of National Geographic Traveler Magazine. Tracy has been part of National Geographic's expert panel since 2004, rating and commenting on 115 places rated (2004), National Parks Worldwide (2005), World Heritage Sites Worldwide (2006) and Island Ecosystems (2007).

URBAN DESIGN - Transition Towns

Oil is running out and the climate is changing. How this impacts cities will largely be determined by how the urban design practitioners react.

Today, as the world struggles with escalating energy demand and wildly fluctuating prices, increasing temperatures and a changing natural environment, new questions and challenges confront the field of urban design. One of the reactions has been the Transition Towns movement, which attempts to equip communities for the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil. This movement currently has member communities in a number of countries worldwide, including the City of Orlando in Florida.

Designing urban places in an era of climate change will require major ideological and technological shifts. The challenges are immense. We've all heard that more than half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, a figure that will rise to three-quarters by 2050. That's almost 7 billion of the future world's 9 billion people living in urban areas. Many in the urbanist camp will herald this demographic shift, as cities are often seen as the most sustainable places to live. But they're going to have to get a lot more sustainable if they want to be able to maintain anything similar to the quality of life they've been able to muster over the last 100, 50, or even 10 years. Cities are not going anywhere, but without some major paradigm shifts, they're going to continue to guzzle resources and sprawl out their ecological footprints until they can no longer sustain the billions who are going to inhabit them.

The transition concept emerged from a class exercise conducted by Masters Students in Ireland , an “Energy Decent Action Plan.” This looked at across-the-board creative adaptations in the realms of energy production, health, education, economy and agriculture as a “Road Map” to a sustainable future for a town or city.

The main aim of a Transition Town project is to raise awareness of sustainable living and building local resilience in the near future. Communities are encouraged to seek out methods of reducing energy usage as well as increasing their own self reliance through the use of solar and wind power or locally produced Biofuel or foods. Initiates include creating community gardens to grow local food; business waste exchange, which seeks to match the waste of one industry with another industry that uses this waste; and even simply repairing old items rather than throwing them away. Central to the Transition Town movement is the idea that life without oil could in fact be far more enjoyable and fulfilling than the present. This requires a shift in the dominant cultures world view to accept the post-cheap oil era is an opportunity for a better life rather than a threat.

Hopefully, the land professionals will not cling to the past like a market developer's landscape architect to turfgrass and will accept the change in circumstances, much the way that professional Landscape Architects have adapted their designs to xeroscape Florida Friendly Lawns, appropriate plants in appropriate places.

Planners are going to have to be architects are going to have to be urban designers. To properly address the problems that envelop these distinct fields, practitioners will need to break free from their silos and forge a better understanding of the interrelatedness of these fields. A building is a building, but it is also part of a neighborhood and part of a city and part of an ecosystem. Pulling out to take a holistic view of the building's place on the block, in the city, in the world will provide context for urban designers to think about the impact of their work at each of those scales. None can be ignored.

The fusion of these fields should reflect the global nature of the issue. Climate and natural resources are shared around the world. Addressing climate change at the city-level is great, but if the city next door does nothing, it's harder to achieve those goals. Because the problems are shared, the solutions and the paths to those solutions should also be shared.

Urban design must evolve to address climate issues, and soon. This evolution should start with education, where students need to hear up front that unless they understand how their work integrates into the grander urban system, they could be contributing to the environmental problems they've grown up opposing. This perspective should then reveal itself in the work of practitioners to develop a built environment that actively and outspokenly combats the wastefulness and gluttony that has characterized our urban development for decades. And maybe most importantly, this evolution and the paradigm shifts behind it must be clearly communicated to the intended beneficiary: the public. The biggest challenge has always been convincing people to change their lifestyles, but by being better communicators of the direct impacts of today's problems – and by making focused efforts to solve them – the public will surely buy in.

LAND USE

Master Planning

We have witnessed considerable change in developments in the past few years; the popularity, and sale ability of mixed-use buildings and mixed-use developments have flourished in both downtown redevelopments and Greenfield developments.

When planning for development, it is important to keep in mind that creating an effective master plan is critical to the bottom line. Planning for future development benefits everyone involved, from local government and developers to business owners and residents.

Understanding that you cannot manage what you cannot measure, the design phase must include economic modeling, creating indicators. Indicators or metrics are the objective criteria for measuring a successful project, identifying key programs and design parameters and using the indicators to measure and understanding the ramifications of each decision along the way.

The Master Planning process is valuable because it provides a key strategy for implementing best practices for all the desired uses on site within the context of the neighborhood. A master plan is an important asset for integrating housing, retail and office space, together with safe and convenient parking within the context of a realistic economic model. Identifying and “Right Sizing” each program component early in the planning process sets your project on a path to success.

In the past, build it and they will come was a development common philosophy that was not always successful. The common practices of development dictated that housing was set to one side of a project, with work destinations, and entertainment, retail and eating establishments set into separate locations. This separation of all uses increased commuting times, costs and inefficiency, as people had to drive to many separate destinations to get day to day chores of life accomplished. Currently, well designed and master planned mixed use developments which adopt the principles of “Smart Growth”, Sustainability and unified parking services create a vibrant destination for visitors, as well as resident of the City and the surrounding areas

Creating a master plan for any development, large or small, can add significant value to the project and the surrounding neighborhood. Whether the goal is to develop an entire town site, rejuvenate a downtown, or give a new lease on life to an urban corridor; taking the vital first step and creating a master plan can drive the proposed project to successful completion.