The goal of Georgia Tech's Earth Day Celebration is to focus attention on the environment and increase people's awareness of the world around them.

Slowing the recovery of home prices is resistance from would-be first-time homebuyers, who are renting and/or finding it difficult to get a home loan. The mismatch of demand and supply for homes keeps home prices low.

The Port of Savannah needs hundreds of millions of dollars to deepen its harbor and take advantage of the Panama Canal expansion. That expansion is expected to double its capacity and accommodate ships carrying three times as much cargo. . . .Georgia needs another way to permanently deepen harbors. One solution is public-private partnerships, which deliver needed infrastructure including ports, raise new sources of capital for modernization, shift risks away from taxpayers and onto investors, and encourage innovation. Column by Baruch Feigenbaum, a Georgia Tech graduate of the School of City and Regional Planning who is the transportation policy adviser for the Reason Foundation.

Georgia Tech students along with faculty advisor Richard Dagenhart met with the Moreland Community last Saturday to envision the town's future. Special attention was given to reworking the town green, a walkable downtown system of connected sidewalks, and a landscaping and signage plan to help draw attention to the town as a special place. Georgia Tech students working on the project include Daniel Braswell, Nick Coffee, Susannah Lee, Chris Maddox, Canon Manley, Marius Mueller, Stephen Stuttman, Kenny Thompson and Logan Tuura.

Professor Etienne comments "...you can imagine the combination of neglected housing, abandoned housing, and then this crime issue all put together. This is a recipe for disaster." While these symptoms are often targeted for assistance, Etienne sees access to jobs as the central piece to improving neighborhoods.

Professor Dunham Jones discusses vital demographic shifts, different redevelopment strategies and some of the more impressive retrofitting projects going on in the U.S. in this interview with Next American City.

Zeke Morris spends his days roaming the south side of Chicago managing foreclosures. As an agent working with real-estate owned (REO) properties, his job is to match these vacant houses with buyers. In some of his neighborhoods, investors are swooping in to nab the properties, renovating them to quickly turn them around or holding them tight in the hope of a market improvement. But in other neighborhoods, like Englewood and Bronzeville - areas brimming with foreclosed homes - they just aren't. “It's tough to get an investor to go there,” Morris says . . .  "In Atlanta and Cleveland," explains Dan Immergluck, an urban planning professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, "just bringing these investors in may exacerbate blight."

Blueprints projects bring college students and professional expertise to Georgia towns -- producing documents and plans that can be used to improve communities. Senoia was the site of a Blueprints project in 1998. Richard Dagenhart, Associate Professor of Architecture and of City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology, brought seven students to the century old mill building for a field trip on Saturday afternoon. The group has already visited Newnan and Senoia.

In December 1999, Ryan Gravel submitted his architectural master’s thesis conceiving the 22-mile BeltLine to his Georgia Tech advisory board. In the summer of 2001, two of Ryan’s associates urged him to take the bound volume that had been sitting on his bookshelf and ship it to Atlanta city government officials. City Councilwoman (later president) Cathy Woolard took up its cause, gathering the support of Mayor Shirley Franklin, who helped set up a tax-allocation district to fund the BeltLine’s development... “My moment was in 2003, when I realized we might actually build the BeltLine,” says Gravel.

It all started more than two decades ago on the campus of Atlanta's Georgia Tech. The Mad Housers build temporary structures [that] are insulated, can be locked and provide a sense of home and security. View the segment at the following link:
http://mms.tveyes.com/Transcript.asp?StationID=120&DateTime=1%2F21%2F201...

The gridlock in the nation is getting help. The US DOT has designated Georgia Tech as one of ten university centers in the country to help the massive traffic issues facing all of US. By designating Georgia Tech as one of the ten transportation center, will it be the headquarters from universities around the SE to put their collective expertise together in helping solve transportation issues. View the segment at the following link:
http://mms.tveyes.com/Transcript.asp?StationID=DateTime=1%2F20%2F2012+12...

Funded by the federal and state Departments of Transportation, Georgia Tech will study the state's transportation infrastructure with opportunity to focus on anything from logistics software to economic development, as shared by Catherine Ross, Director of Tech's Center for Quality  Growth and Regional Management.

"From our skyline to Atlantic Station to the Beltline, Atlanta would be a very different place without Georgia Tech. A new project is being proposed by Mike Messner, a 1976 Civil Engineering graduate who grew up in Atlanta and still cares deeply about our city. In Mike’s mind there is far too much non-productive real estate and not enough green space in Atlanta.Thus, in 2009, Mike and his wife, Jenny — through their family foundation: the Speedwell Foundation — created and funded a program to bring more green space to urban areas. They call it “Red Fields to Green Fields.” Column by Val Peterson, First Lady of Georgia Tech.

The dilapidated Dandi bridge near Gandhi Ashram may have failed to draw the attention of authorities so far. But the historical glory associated with the bridge- from where Mahatma Gandhi started his Dandi march -has struck a chord with a team from Georgia Institute of Technology. The team is in the city for a joint studio with Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (Cept) University students. The joint studio exercise between Georgia Institute of Technology and Cept that started on Monday is a platform for exchange of ideas and learning from each other. Around 11 students each from both the institutes will be working on two studies for a fortnight in Ahmedabad. The joint study was organised by Prof Madhu Bharti and Prof Utpal Sharma of Cept.

Should people be taken to services, or should services be taken to people?
One of the issues to come out of the Enterprise Innovation Institute's study of Coweta County is whether efforts should be made to bring people from outlying areas to Newnan or services -- or to take those services to the farflung needy. Jason Chernock of EI2, a division of the Georgia Institute of Technology, gave a report on the study -- sponsored by a coalition of organizations -- on Thursday at Central Educational Center. As part of the study process, local businessmen James and Gary Welden took a group of sponsor representatives and EI2 staff on a tour "to really show the geographical diversity of the county," Chernock said.
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"The concept for the revitalized quarry is a mixed-use development with guided tours showcasing the history and nature of the site, and a network of walking and bicycling paths connecting proposed parks. The ideas include residential developments overlooking the quarry, community gardens, dog parks and an inn."

"[Mayor Bucky] Johnson seemed most sanguine about [political] constraints: while the list is not perfect, the process was as legitimate and transparent as he and his collaborators could make it, and the resulting list provides funds for a wide range of very useful projects. [Tom] Weyandt, for his part, was more emphatic about the imperfections of the process and the results - he actually used the phrase "the art of the possible" - but seemed to accept that this is the best that can be done under the circumstances; one has to start somewhere. [Colleen] Kiernan was bluntly dismissive of the process and of the project list, questioning the legitimacy of the whole enterprise, and suggesting a more radical approach: raising gasoline taxes while removing the constitutional restriction on the use of the revenue, allowing for a more comprehensive approach to transportation planning, and possibly for a more radical reconfiguration of the built environment."

Georgia Tech's College of Architecture and the Consulate General of France this weekend will host "Outer City/Inner Suburb: The Physical, Social and Cultural Fabric Beyond the Center," a symposium of discussions, presentations, and films that will compare the suburbs (or "banlieues") of France and Atlanta. Remember the media frenzy over French race riots in 2005? The social conditions of France's diverse and oftentimes disadvantaged suburban communities have made them infamous for civil unrest, and will be the focus of this weekend-long scholarly soiree. Additional attention will be paid to civil issues facing Atlanta's own suburbs.

The Atlanta BeltLine is a $2.8 billion tax allocation project providing a network of public works, multi-trails, and transit along a 22-mile railroad corridor circling downtown and connecting 45 neighborhoods. It is also a $2.8 billion project that will result in many serious financial problems for the City of Atlanta and its taxpayers in the midst of an economic recession. The city’s own feasibility study prepared by a committee chaired by the highly-respected Dr. Catherine Ross, Director of the Center for Quality Growth & Regional Development, Georgia Tech, covers ridership, costs, and technical considerations of the BeltLine.

Professor Dan Immergluck states his support for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program as a strategy to allocate federal money to local authorities to address the growing vacancy problem. Without the involvement of the government, “we’ll see entire neighborhoods left to rot,” he said. “Some of this is a form of governmental reparation. We have to be responsible for the damage we let happen.”

According to a new study published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, property sales on foreclosed homes don’t lead to solutions to problems stemming from vacancy because often the buyers are also investors looking to resell the property… “A lot of them are being sold to an investor and staying vacant,” says Dan Immergluck, an urban planning professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of the study. “You have the same problem as before.”