What sources do I read for urban planning issues, research and articles?

The New York Times is a great place to begin one’s search for urban planning articles. The Times doesn’t exactly categorize their articles as such, so a search for them must involve a specific city’s name. Architecture will be a topic appearing more often than “urban planning.” It’s great, though, that architecture is often closely related to urban planning, or at the least, urban design.

Other large newspapers around the world (like San Francisco Chronicle, Guardian and Observer and Times in London) serve as venues for authors of urban planning articles. India is a notable place because the amount of growth and wealth in that country is expanding rapidly – this makes for a lot of writable experiences and observations. Out of all the large newspapers, the NYT is by far the best. U.S. cities that have a history of good urban planning (namely Portland and Seattle) have excellent representation of the profession in their mainstream media.

On the web, Planetizen has done the hard work of filtering the thousands of articles from mainstream media and picking out those of interest to the urban planning members of the website. I like the thrice-weekly email updates of new news articles the site editors have selected.

My last source is Streetsblog. This is quite strictly a New York City-only blog but it’s updated more quickly than the local mainstream media about events and happenings that are even closer to home – for example, what’s happening in your own block.

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