After years of working on trying to resolve gerrymandering, the Supreme Court recently decided it would not hear the main case. They stated that it was a political question and too complicated to come up with a standard. I won’t cover the history here, there are plenty of other good references on that if you […]
Author: Louis Burns, PhD
Dr. Burns is the president of Urban Prosperity. He completed graduate work in real estate, GIS, urban design, and gaming at the University of Texas at Dallas. He was formerly both a commercial and residential Realtor, a freelance marketer, a tiny house builder, a math teacher, and an Airborne Army Medic.
How to Improve Walkability
Walkability usually refers to how urban and how likely people are to walk in an area. There are many definitions and metrics for walkability. Urban scientists often measure block size or distance between intersections. One of the more highly rated mainstream sources on walkability is Jeff Speck with his book Walkable City and more recently, […]
Should We Save Your City? Minimum Viable Urbanism
Many cities around the world are experiencing migration from smaller rural towns to larger cities. That’s not new. What makes a town or a city enough of a city to focus our efforts on? What predicts the difference between a strong town, a quaint tourist destination, or a blighted or even ghost town? In entrepreneur […]
Paradigms for the Built Environment
In addition to the various perspective of professions related to the built environment, there are macro-level perspectives I want to further discuss. They are a long time scale, user experience, network science, ecology, and spiral dynamics. Many people do not realize that the suburban development pattern is a recent post-WWII invention. Beyond our building patterns, […]
Professional Perspectives on the Built Environment
During my research, I proposed using a social game as part of the public participation process. The hypothesis was that a mobile game would be a more interactive experience than sticking dots on a board. What I found was that to do that, I would need a model of how the built environment works. That’s […]
Urban Prosperity Network 101
The three guiding principles of Urban Prosperity Network.
Inherent Urban Fragility: Zoning and Software Paradigms
What do zoning and software have in common? What does either contribute to city fragility? They both create outcomes based on codes. While software lends itself to rapid iteration, testing, and debugging, zoning often produces unintended consequences literally set in stone. While the parallels are far from perfect, it’s instructive to compare the two. Many […]
How to Calculate and Visualize Value per Acre in Your City
One of the more important factors affecting long-term community resiliency is whether the city can afford to provide the services residents expect. Chuck Marone of Strong Towns always says if you lose money on each transaction, you don’t make up for it on volume. One of the easiest ways to get a big picture view […]