A Black Lives Matter march against police brutality in Minneapolis back in 2014. Image by Fibonacci Blue licensed under Creative Commons.

Urban planners call for a planning organization to support defunding of police. A new report lays out a plan to rethink safety and speed on urban streets. San Franciso tries modular apartment buildings.

Urban planners link design and racial justice outcomes: More than 650 urban planners signed a letter to the American Planning Association, the largest US planning organization, urging them to support defunding the police. Planners lay out the case for how some planning decisions led to the “preconditions for over-policing of communities of color and disinvestment in community health and safety.” (Brentin Mock | CityLab)

Rethinking safety and speed on urban streets: A new National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) report called City Limits lays out guidelines for practitioners to set safe speed limits in urban settings. NACTO includes best practices from around the United States in addition to a three method approach as an alternative to the current dangerous practice of percentile based speed limit setting. (NACTO)

The potential for modular apartment buildings is in view: A new building process that uses union labor to construct apartments in a warehouse ahead of final assembly will be tested this September in San Francisco. The 145 unit apartment building is a test to see if a new modular approach to building housing in an expensive market will reduce construction costs and cut completion times by months. (Adele Peters | Fast Company)

A NIMBY win north of Dallas could set Texas planning back years: After losing a long legal battle to NIMBY activists, the City of Plano will repeal the progressive Plano Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan and replace it with an old master plan from 1986, literally setting the city back a generation. The plan aimed to reverse the damages of suburban sprawl by promoting more sustainable development patterns, and its defeat could possibly reshape planning in all of North Texas. (Peter Simek | D Magazine)

Trump administration wants Census to stop collecting a month early: The Trump administration has decided to end the 2020 Decennial Census four weeks early with 60 million households still uncounted, forcing the Census Bureau to count the hardest-to-reach residents in just six weeks. (Michael Wines and Richard Fausset | New York Times)

An urban planning trick to get more bikable cities: A 2003 law allows the City of Barcelona to plan for new bike infrastructure every six years. So when the coronavirus pandemic hit, the city decided to take advantage of empty streets by painting lanes already in the current six year plan. Other cities like Rome, Paris, and Lisbon, have made similar improvements. (Laura Millan Lombrana | Bloomberg)

Vanya Srivastava contributed to these summaries.

Quote of the Week

“When you add it all up, despite the startling and massive drop off we’ve seen in on-road vehicle traffic in recent months, the pandemic is not going to lead to a substantial decrease in GHG emissions over the long term in California or the nation at large.”

University of California Riverside Professor Hoyu Chong discussing findings that question whether the pandemic will lead to emissions reductions.

This week on the podcast, we’re joined by Dr. Georges Benjamin, director of the American Public Health Association.