Category: Current Events
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Touring Poundbury
Last month, I attended the 2023 International Making Cities Livable conference as a speaker and presented a paper titled “Public Understanding and Adoption of Ecological Placemaking Principles through Simulation and Gaming.” The conference was hosted in Dorchester and Poundbury in the UK. The subject of the conference was more generalized urban ecology but was specifically…
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Rezoning for Student Housing near UT Dallas
The image above is an image from UT Dallas’ Master Plan. The subject parcel of this post is specifically designated “Potential Future Acquisition”. Yesterday was a City Planning Commission meeting to consider whether a landowner will be able to build off-campus student housing nearby UT Dallas. Normally it sounds boring and fairly straightforward. Not this…
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A Letter to the Texas Redistricting Committee
I apologize that I haven’t posted anything in about a year because, you know, pandemic. I’ll catch up on what I’ve been doing later but I wanted to drop a note that I’m back at it. I got an email from Fair Vote today encouraging us to write our state legislators and ask them to…
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More Building Models and Maps
I’ve gone through a couple more iterations of building types and now the maps. I’ve also started working on the next version of the mechanics and rules. One of the central challenges of the game is to integrate community well-being with economic development. That’s essentially internalizing an externality. In other words, recognizing a systemic value…
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Can Your City Afford Another Drive-Through?
Recently in Richardson, the city voted to approve a zoning change to allow for three new drive-throughs on a parcel that contains a failed mall. Drive-throughs are fairly ubiquitous in that area but the council had still voted to continue the motion until the developer took more time to engage with the community and come…
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Gerrymandering in Richardson
In my previous article, I discussed gerrymandering in general and how to resolve it. In this article, we’ll take a look at how gerrymandering sometimes works in cities. We’ll take Richardson, Texas as an example because that’s where our organization is located. At some point in the past, Richardson switched from the worst possible voting…
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Resolving Gerrymandering
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…