Help your ideas go beyond the conference room and become recurring themes that your team discuss — Market Your Urban Ideas Planning happens in a series of meetings. How you approach these meetings can make or break your idea. To be persuasive you need to think about how to market your ideas. One of my favorite ways is with “rhyming pitches.” If you have a catchphrase that rhymes or has that…

40 more sentences on how our built environment is planned and built — I’ve been reading more than writing lately. Here is my second edition of 40 patterns of development. You can find the 1st edition here. Suburbanites walk perpendicular. Urbanites walk parallel. An enclosed block strategy is better than a tower strategy. It’s hard to convince people that mixed uses, varied income…

Episode 19: Patterns of Development podcast show notes — Don’t have time to read? Check out the podcast where I discuss the best of what I learned about urban planning, architecture, and real estate development, in less than 10 minutes. Montreal Case Study With the addition of duplexes and triplexs as infill development, moving parking off the street front, and converting it…

Episode 20: Patterns of Development podcast show notes — Don’t have time to read? Check out the podcast where I discuss the best of what I learned about urban planning, architecture, and real estate development, in less than 10 minutes. Old School I was talking to an architect the other day, and he and I were talking about the patterns of…

A summary of the future of transportation in urban life from ITDP — I stumbled across this pdf called, “Our Cities Ourselves — The Future Of Transportation In Urban Life.” It’s a 23-page document. There’s a couple of gems here. Specifically their 8 principles for how we can remake our cities livability. Develop Neighborhoods That Promote Walking Shorten street crossings Crossing five-lane highways are daunting. We’ve all done it, and we…

Use the 3 hurdles framework from Scott Galloway to pressure test your ideas, presentations, and projects — Everyone has hurdles they need to jump. Daily, weekly, monthly, and annually. We have projects and goals that we’d like to accomplish. We need to accomplish. Before you even get to the meeting, you need to validate your thinking. As you’re developing an idea or project, recognize that the work…

Episode 19: Patterns of Development podcast show notes — Don’t have time to read? Check out the podcast where I discuss the best of what I learned about urban planning, architecture, and real estate development, in less than 10 minutes. Tiny Forests Solve Big Problem? An article in Nat Geo, “Why ‘tiny forests’ are popping up in big cities” by Elizabeth Hewitt discusses how…

How to elevate your business, your side hustle, or your personal financial thinking with one tool — The value of your company used to be a factor of your price minus the cost to produce. If you make a big margin, then you’re probably more profitable and you’ve created a valuable business. That’s not true anymore. …

Something old, something new, and a curveball — When we’re planning or evaluating a neighborhood, what makes it “good?” Good of course is subjective and usually measured with qualitative data. Trees! Fewer cars? People! Space? White picket fences! Sidewalks? What if we wanted to try to get just a little more quantitative? I’ve got 3 formulas I like…