Stephen Fesler
Stephen is an urban planner with a passion for promoting sustainable, livable, and diverse cities. He advocates for smart policies, regulations, and implementation programs that enhance urban environments by committing to quality design, accommodating growth, providing a diversity of housing choices, and adequately providing public services. Stephen primarily writes about land use and transportation issues.
Last summer, the national pharmacy chain CVS decided to enter the Seattle market, building new stores in Lower Queen Anne, Wallingford, and West Seattle. This turned out to be surprisingly controversial; many residents felt that CVS's cookie-cutter suburban designs had no place in their dense and growing urban neighbourhoods....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8zZdLw7cs
Bicycle Culture by Design from TEDx Talks on YouTube.
Mikael Colville-Andersen of Copenhagenize Design Co. gives us a brief history of our streets and suggests how we can design more functional streets for livable cities.
Specific. Delightful. Peculiar. That is the future of the waterfront, according to lead project designer James Corner. Updated waterfront redevelopment plans were unveiled last Wednesday to a packed house at Fischer Pavilion. The format for the evening was a mix of open house, presentation, and Q&A.
During the presentation, the...
Fellow transit nerds, behold a new and brilliantly addicting web-based* game just for you. Mini Metro, inspired by the London Underground and New York City Subway networks, gives you the power to manage your own subway. At first glance, the game may not appear deeply sophisticated, but it is quite dynamic. Players...
Look around a residential neighbourhood in a typical American city, and you will see an ocean of single-family detached homes. There is a myth that it has always been this way. In reality, many cities have historically allowed a diverse mix of buildings and uses in residential neighbourhoods: duplexes,...
Bertha may be dead in the water, but the Seattle Waterfront is moving full steam ahead. Construction work on the Elliott Bay Seawall is already taking place near Bertha's tunnel area. It's a delicate task when working within just feet of open sea and the walls of a tunnel. With...
Great cities have active pedestrian-oriented retail areas, and Seattle has many. Could we use more? I think so, and Seattle Department of Planning and Development (DPD) does, too. DPD is evaluating a major expansion of the city’s Pedestrian Retail Area zones, the biggest such expansion in the city’s history.
The Pedestrian...
Seattle is in the midst of its update to the city’s comprehensive plan, dubbed “Seattle 2035“. Washington State’s Growth Management Act requires that cities and counties across the state update their comprehensive plans every 10 years to adequately plan for a 20-year horizon. The current update cycle has many...
