MUP Links and Resources

A Web of Information

For more information about urban planning, consider these online resources:

  • American Planning Association - The American Planning Association is a non-profit public interest and research organization representing 30,000 practicing planners, officials, and citizens involved with urban and rural planning issues.
  • Congress for New Urbanism - the Congress for the New Urbanism has advocated for the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions. Initially dubbed "neo-traditional planning," the New Urbanism is best known for projects built in new growth areas such as Seaside (Walton County, Florida, 1981; Duany and Plater-Zyberk Town Planners).
  • Cyburbia.org - Internet Resources for the Built Environment.
  • Interactive Guide to the World's Columbian Exposition
  • Lincoln Institute of Land Policy - a nonprofit and tax-exempt educational institution established in 1974. Its mission as a school is to study and teach about land policy, including land economics and land taxation. A major portion of the Institute's support comes from the Lincoln Foundation, established in 1947 by Cleveland industrialist John C. Lincoln. He drew inspiration from the ideas of Henry George, the nineteenth-century American political economist, social philosopher and author of the book, Progress and Poverty.
  • Project for Public Spaces - PPS is a non-profit organization that for 25 years has successfully carried out its mission statement to build communities by creating the special places that build community life. Using our own participatory approach, we help communities grow their public spaces into vital community places, with programs, uses and people- friendly settings that highlight local assets, spur rejuvenation, and serve common needs.
  • Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse - The Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse mission is to make the tools, techniques, and strategies developed to manage growth, accessible to citizens, grassroots organizations, environmentalists, public officials, planners, architects, the media and business leaders. At the Clearinghouse we identify, collect, compile, and disseminate information on the best land use practices, for those listed above.
  • United States Census Bureau - population statistics and Tiger Maps
  • Urban Land Institute - The mission of the Urban Land Institute is to provide leadership in the responsible use of land to enhance the total environment.
  • APA New York Metro Chapter - The New York Metro Chapter addresses planning issues that concern the physical, social, and economic environment in the metropolitan region encompassing New York City, Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk Counties) and the Hudson Valley (Rockland, Westchester, Putnam, Orange, Duchess, Ulster and Sullivan Counties). The Chapter represents some 800 practicing planners and other people involved in the planning and design of the region's communities.
  • Big Onion Walking Tours - an excellent way to see New York from a reputable organization. Directed by Seth Kamil, a doctoral candidate in American Urban & Ethnic History at Columbia University. All guides hold advanced degrees in American History from Columbia or New York Universities and are licensed by the City of New York.
  • Municipal Art Society of New York - a private, non-profit membership organization that aggressively champions excellence in urban design and planning and the preservation of the best of New York's past
  • New York City Department of City Planning - a wealth of information including the complete zoning text and maps and the proposed Uniform Bulk Program.
  • New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) - The New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, (NYMTC, or the COUNCIL) is the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the New York Region. The Council is the collaborative forum where regional transportation issues are analyzed, discussed, and decided. The region is made up of Nassau, Putnam, Suffolk, Rockland, and Westchester counties, and the City of New York. NYMTC's members are chief local elected officials and heads of transportation and environmental agencies that are responsible for establishing and implementing transportation plans, projects, and programs.
  • New York State GIS Clearinghouse - Downloadable maps in .gif,.tiff, and MapInfo formats by quadrant for all of New York State. See Raster Imagery.
  • The New York State Roads Page - devoted to the roads of (mostly upstate) New York, and lists all Interstate, U S and other limited access highways, plus includes information about the New York State road system in general.
  • The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - joint authority whose mission is to identify and meet the critical transportation infrastructure needs of the bistate region's businesses, residents, and visitors.
  • Regional Plan Association - Since 1923, RPA has worked to improve the quality of life in the 31-county New York, New Jersey, Connecticut metropolitan area by creating long-term comprehensive plans and promoting their implementation across political boundaries. On the basis of rigorous professional study, the Association recommends policy initiatives and physical and human infrastructure investments and involves the public in considering and shaping its future.
  • Gotham Gazette - coverage of NYC public policy including land use issues.
  • Best Places - This second Forbes look at America's regional economies has more surprises in its top ranks than we expected, given the nation's mature boom. A majority of our top 15 metropolitan areas are new to that select list this year. That reflects two things: First, that we're focused on dynamism--that is, the degree of change rather than simply the base level of activity (that's a help to smaller metros, which don't have a lot of ballast). Second, that America's rising economic tide incorporates waves and undertows. Any year's measure catches some sectors--and therefore some places--waxing and some waning. Repeaters like Austin and Atlanta are therefore all the more notable.
  • Sierra Club Report - Sprawl Costs Us All: How Your Taxes Fuel Suburban Sprawl - The report demonstrates that suburban sprawl is not only hurting the environment, it is draining our pocketbooks and raising our taxes. The report breaks the subsidies that encourage sprawl into several broad categories and offers analysis, examples and figures from across the United States.
  • Suburban Beauty: Why Sprawl Works by Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard - The fight against "sprawl" has become a rallying point for a movement with intellectual heft and cultural influence.
  • Towards a New Urbanism - The authors of Suburban Nation tell Gore and Bush to listen up -- the antidote to sprawl is good old-fashioned town planning.
  • The Uses of Sprawl by Christopher Caldwell for Atlantic Unbound - In Suburban Nation, the founders of the New Urbanism movement point to how Democrats can reap the benefits of the sprawl they helped to create.
  • Planning Communities for the 21st Century. - An American Planning Association(APA) report that shows that planning statute reform appears to be at an unprecedented level with 1,000 bills introduced in 1999 alone and 200 of those proposals being enacted. The report includes detailed state profiles for six states -- Maryland, Oregon, Washington, New Jersey, Tennessee and Rhode Island -- that are finding solutions to growth-management issues. This is a BIG file!
  • The Top Ten Influences on the American Metropolis of the Past 50 Years - from the Fannie Mae Foundation. The single most important message of the list of past influences is the overwhelming impact of the federal government on the American metropolis, especially through policies that intentionally or unintentionally promoted suburbanization and sprawl. 
  • At Work in the Fields of the Mouse - Cultural critic and NYU Professor of American Studies Andrew Ross spent a year living in Celebration, U.S.A., a neo-traditional community owned by the Walt Disney Corporation and built according to some of the planning principles of New Urbanism. In Atlantic Monthly Unbound, Mark Dery talks with Ross about Disney, New Urbanism, and his experience "in the belly of the mouse."
  • Between Burb and Burg - a profile of Andres Duany.
  • Well Connected - Understand how people use space and you can cut crime, construct buildings that foster creativity and regenerate urban wastelands. Mick Hamer investigates a theory that promises to take the guesswork out of design. (Article - New Scientist Magazine)
  • Earth in the Balance by JANE HOLTZ KAY - Anonymous is a landscape architect. Not for these placemakers the recognition given to their peers in building. Planners may stand side by side with mayors boasting of some grand projet. Architects may admire "designed by" signatures on their structures. But those who fashion rolling greenswards, transform wasted landscapes into common ground or turn sordid waterfronts into shared edges are unsung, if not unknown.
  • Growing the Inner City? Harlem's experience with the "third way" antipoverty approachBy Tamar Jacoby and Fred Siegel - President Clinton's well-scripted "New Markets" tour didn't include a stop in Harlem, but it should have. Barnstorming across the country last month, posing in shirtsleeves on an Appalachian farm, in the Mississippi Delta, and in the Watts section of Los Angeles, Clinton hoped to sell the nation on a new, "third way" poverty program: a package of federal tax credits and loan guarantees intended to stimulate private investment in neglected neighborhoods. His proposals, which will soon go to Congress, reflect a new consensus that the answer to poverty is capitalism--not government handouts but private business.