The NYT has a progress report out today on the World Trade Center.

With the naked eye, you can make out the fuzz of construction lights at the World Trade Center.

I walked through the site about a month ago, and was impressed by 1 WTC.  I think the real mark of progress will come when the new tower can be readily seen rising up above the surrounding buildings from vantage points in New Jersey and Brooklyn.  That will be the moment when lower Manhattan once again begins to have a distinctive spire in its otherwise boxy and consistent skyline.  It should be soon: You can make out the fuzz of construction lights on the scaffolding now, at twilight, from Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange Township, New Jersey.  (A distance of 13.4 miles.)

So Planetizen, the US-News-of-planning-schools, has published its 2012 rankings of 105 graduate programs in the US and Canada.  Has anyone (ever) bought the full report?  I’m kind of interested in what criteria they examine, and how these are weighed.  Here’s how they stacked up their list of top grad schools for 2012:

In the nearly six years since the US Court decided Kelo v. New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), New Jersey has tightened its judicial standards quite a bit for eminent domain takings (See: Gallenthin v. Paulsboro, 924 A.2d 447 [N.J. 2007]), while New York’s courts seems to be going in another direction.

Score one for federalism, I guess.

A note from the CNU on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and development financing of the buildings that make legal towns.

Georgetown Apple Store. Source: ULI

Interesting piece from the PCJ, via the Urban Land Institute, that highlights the powers that local boards may have over the design of buildings subject to their approval.  The storefront (photo, left) looks nice.  But I do wonder whether an Edison or a Yonkers would really have the same ability to leverage concessions that a Georgetown or a Cambridge would have.

This caught my attention, mostly because I don’t know very much about affordable housing policies in the UK.  The Guardian provides some insight, through its article on housing benefit cuts, into the vast differences that exist between types and degrees of governmental involvement in the urban housing economies of America and Britain.  Although, when you consider the amount of revenue that the US public sector loses annually by maintaining the mortgage interest deduction, the American system may actually be more generous.  As long as you aren’t actually, you know, poor.

Graphic: New York Times.

Looks like a prototype for a colony on Mars.  Actually, it’s just the latest massive building project in the United Arab Emirates.

One idea behind this project is a goal of developing several related strands of thought that could inform and enrich the drafting process for local land use codes.  Since I’m at Rutgers, I’ll focus primarily on approaches that could work within the legal framework of New Jersey.  And since Euclidian zoning is a national phenomenon (curse? blessing?), what works in New Jersey could likely be considered in other American states.  So, yes, I’m working under the rubric of Euclid, and– in my own state– the equitable doctrine of the Mount Laurel cases.   But the aesthetic theories that are presented here build on a number of influences that are entirely unrelated to any American legal doctrine, and include some which have been directly abrogated by the generic boilerplate that has been enacted pursuant to the post-1926 Euclidian zoning model.

The planning approaches of Victorian America and England, and those that have been recovered from Classical world, are currently two my strongest interests.  I find the organic urbanism of the Greco-Roman world engrossing, as well as the detailed architecture and simple layouts of US and British towns that were built in the later 19th century.  And, interestingly, the building stock of the two distant periods, as well as their street plans, have some striking similarities.  But I don’t want to get too caught up here in a web of theoretical pretensions.  And I’m not an architect, so I won’t act as if I am.  What I’m really looking to do is distill is a practical assortment of the basic physical, aesthetic, and socioeconomic building blocks of cohesive, attractive, and viable neighborhoods, and the ways that their key elements can be memorialized in land use codes to encourage future development.

About a decade ago, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto captured the informality of land use practices in developing countries in his book, The Mystery of Capital.  The popularity of de Soto’s writings has made it almost a cliché to point out that people in developing countries carve out many of their land uses beyond the formal boundaries of the law.  In light of that, or maybe in spite of the oversimplification of de Soto’s premise, it’s interesting to read the Times‘s coverage of Egypt’s response to the crowding and sprawl of Cairo with a policy of large-scale, government-sponsored urban planning, which is actually reminiscent of some of the socialist practices in Latin America and Eastern Europe during the second half of the 20th century.  Is Egypt’s policy an anachronism, or could its success herald a return to the sorts of grand-scale, government-sponsored development policies of the past?