Author Archives: Jocelyn Hittle

Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Sustainability, Equity, Transparency

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: January 12, 2012

2012 could be the end of the world as we know it. Or not. Either way, some things definitely will be ending–for example, funding for the Sustainable Communities Initiative program hasn’t been renewed for 2013.  Despite the end of funding this year, or perhaps because of it, I’ll point again this year (as I did [...]

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Award Winning Home Town Planning

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: September 12, 2011

Since I’m currently spending some time in my home town of Fort Collins, CO, I wanted to belatedly point out that our work on Plan Fort Collins has wrapped up, and the new City Plan was adopted late last year. Plan Fort Collins was also recognized by the Colorado Chapter of the American Planning Association [...]

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Meet our Sustainable Solutions Intern: Matt Weinstein

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: August 4, 2011

Meet Matt Weinstein, PlaceMatters’ Sustainable Solutions Intern.  Matt comes to PlaceMatters from MIT, where he’s a Masters student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, focusing his work on Community and Economic Development.  Before coming to planning school, Matt spent seven years working in campaigns and government, including serving as the Obama campaign’s North [...]

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Communicating Hot Data

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: July 11, 2011

At PlaceMatters we are always looking for ways to better communicate information relevant to helping stakeholders make informed sustainability and planning decisions.  For example, our recent Cape Cod Interagency Transportation, Land Use, and Climate Change Pilot Project used CommunityViz and our DIY touch-tables to let participants place future jobs and housing on a map, and [...]

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Is Equity the Uber-Indicator?

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: July 5, 2011

PlaceMatters has always focused on making decision-making as inclusive as possible.  We’ve recently been focusing in particular on equitable public engagement, and are about to undertake some more focused research within our Sustainable Solutions Group projects on best practices in equitable engagement and how technology impacts the engagement of typically underserved populations. Consequently, I’ve had [...]

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PlaceMatters’ Projects Win APA Colorado Awards

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: June 14, 2011

In 2009, PlaceMatters worked with the planning firm Civil Resources on two projects to create two comprehensive plans, one for Lyons, Colorado and one for Woodland Park, Colorado.  Both projects were recently awarded 2011 APA Colorado Merit Awards.  Woodland Park’s Comprehensive Plan process won in the Category of Community Engagement, and the Lyons Comprehensive Plan [...]

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Calling All Nerds

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: May 20, 2011

I’m sure many of you regularly check in at TED.com to watch one of the hundreds of videotaped talks given by everyone from Bill Gates to J.J. Abrams (one of my favorites) to Lennart Green (I defy you to be anything but amazed by this guy’s card trickery). I recently watched Sal Khan’s talk on [...]

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International Making Cities Livable Provides Conference Presentations via “eConference”

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: March 23, 2011

An FYI Post: The International Making Cities Livable Conference was held in Charleston, SC in October of 2010 and focused on Planning Healthy and Child-Friendly Communities.  Conference organizers are making the presentations from their set of presenters (including some pretty big names in planning and urban design) available as an “eConference.” You have to register [...]

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Data Smorgasbord: IBM’s City Forward

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: March 22, 2011

I’ve recently blogged a couple of times about scientists measuring attributes of cities and some of the interesting correlations and predictions that can come out of those measurements.  Jacob Smith recently alerted me to IBM’s launch of City Forward, an online tool that contains large amounts of information about 55 cities–including traffic patterns, health metrics, [...]

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