The city welcomed St Patricks Day on Thursday by dyeing the canal green and holding festivities around town. Judging from my scenes out of my window, the revelers started early and kept going late into the night. I’m sure the fact it fell on a Thursday and featured beautiful spring weather helped the turnout. I …
My interests in cities led me to enroll in Ball State University’s Master of Urban Design (MUD) program at their Indianapolis Center (CAP:IC). Urban design focuses on the public areas of our cities, including parks, plazas, transportation, and zoning/land use policy. The MUD program and CAP:IC are part of an effort to bring new ideas …
This Valentine’s Day season the internet world will be flooded with stories like “The top 10 cities for single people to find love” or “The best cities for a romantic getaway.” These stories are all based on the same premise – that finding a great match and maintaining a strong relationship is much easier in …
Sometimes it’s nice to sit back and let someone else do the thinking. TED videos are about “ideas worth spreading”, and you can see them all for free at this link. If anyone has some downtime and wants some food for thought, I recommend the following TED talks that are all relevant to urbanism: Jaime …
The people who run our cities … think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit, which makes their opinion worthless. The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. -Banksy, Wall …
Natural places have a role to play in our neighborhoods. The best urban sites share space with nature so well that you can not tell when the bricks stop and the trees begin. Whether it is a chestnut tree in a courtyard or an old street lined with elms, nature has to be present or …
Here at Urban Indy we wanted to give our reactions to the big IndyConnect unveiling and let our readers do the same. An in-depth review of the plan from Urban Indy will be coming later, but here is a collection of our responses after the initial press release. The plan is online at IndyConnect.org and …
The Efroymson Conservation Center is one of the best new buildings in Indianapolis. It has several innovative features that make it a great fit for The Nature Conservancy. I encourage everyone to go explore it and see what it can teach us about conservation in the urban age. It’s hard to explain why this building …
The city of Indianapolis uses a comprehensive plan and zoning ordinances as their main tool of city planning (see current zoning codes; or see Indy’s zoning synopsis). The purpose of our zoning code is to resolve conflicts between land uses by separating them (Euclidean style). Obviously, there are some land uses that don’t fit well …
