GOOD Design Bay Area: Challenge #6 from SPUR on Vimeo. In the spring of 2004, I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, and about half way toward a master's degree in architecture. I'd already been having doubts about the program, and my future as an architect, when I didn't get my first pick for a class and ended up in a blobitecture studio…

Plans for Treasure Island are moving forward to the Planning Commission in March. SPUR is a big supporter of this plan, which will create 8,000 units of housing, 30 percent of which will be affordable, and 450,000 square feet of retail space; rehabilitate historic structures; create 300 acres of open space; and add new ferry service. We especially like the way in which the proposed…

Beginning this month, Californians will have a new option for auto insurance. It’s called Pay As You Drive (PAYD), and it could save money and reduce our impact on the environment at the same time. Traditional auto insurance policies charge customers in a lump sum and do not price risk according to driving volume. There have been attempts by insurance companies to incorporate driving volume…

At our open house and workshop on January 15th, we presented a series of presentation boards as well as a range of different ways to provide feedback, from questionnaires to collages. After transcribing all of the public comments, the project team created an overview of public input, posted below along with a detailed record of all comments. In the coming months, the…

Click to enlarge A “word cloud” or “weighted list” is a way of portraying the text in a document so that the higher the incidence of a word or term, the larger its font will be. After SPUR interns Sarah Favrot & Javier del Castillo spent a great deal of time and effort transcribing the many responses and comments of the January 15th…

The next several weeks in Washington promise to offer extremely important insights into the future of public transportation spending in this country. Watershed moments are ahead for most every item on the SPUR agenda. Here’s a quick primer of why and of what’s at stake for advocates of smart growth: In October 2010, we anticipated that infrastructure spending would anchor the legislative agenda for…

The Public Policy Institute of California has just released a new series of reports assessing how prepared California is to implement Senate Bill 375, a state mandate to reduce driving through better land use planning. One report focuses on the connection between transit and jobs. The other focuses on the tools planners can use to reduce driving and the willingness of local officials to…

San Francisco might be the cultural center of the region, but in the technology sector the city has generally played second fiddle to the Silicon Valley. That began to change during the dot-com boom and then again more recently, a new generation of startups is setting up in neighborhoods like SoMa and Potrero Hill. (SPUR discussed the trend in its “year in urbanism…

New Exhibit at the SPUR Urban Center Gallery! Opening: Tuesday, February 15th, 6:00 p.m. On view at the SPUR Urban Center Gallery, 654 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 (through March 8th). Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 6-8 pmSPUR Urban Center654 Mission Street, San FranciscoAdmission: Free for members, $5 non-members About the ExhibitSPUR is leading an interagency master planning process for Ocean…

When I entered Stamen’s offices in the Mission district of San Francisco, I saw four people gathered around a computer screen. What were they doing? Nothing less than “mapping the world,” not as it appears in flat dimension, but how it reveals itself. And they weren’t joking. Stamen, a data visualization firm, has always kept the concept of “place” central to many of their…

At our open house and workshop on January 15th, we presented a series of presentation boards and invited your feedback. Below you can download the original boards, and high-resolution images of the boards annotated with your comments.Image + character Download the original board (PDF) Download board with comments (JPG)Uses + activities + program Download the original board (PDF) Download board with comments (JPG)…

When it comes to global sporting events, almost as intense as the competition between star athletes is the competition between cities to play host. That’s because hosting a major international sporting event presents a unique opportunity for a city to redefine its development goals, stimulate investment and boost tourism. Just last month it was decided that San Francisco would host the 34th America’s Cup…

Update: our POPOS guide is now available as an iPhone app, too! A year and a half ago SPUR revealed some of San Francisco's best kept secrets: a rich network of privately owned public open spaces (POPOS) scattered throughout the city's downtown urban area. These are great spots around downtown to eat lunch, hold an informal meeting, or simply soak up some nature…

The December 21, 2010 announcement that San Francisco's polluting Potrero Power Plant would shut down by the end of the year was as much a cause for celebration as it was a reason to recount the twists and turns that it took to finally shutter the city's last fossil fuel-burning commercial power plant. For many years, the preferred method of closing Potrero was to build…

Our new governor is proposing to eliminate redevelopment in California. Yesterday, SPUR's executive director, Gabriel Metcalf, weighed in on the debate with an opinion piece in the Chronicle, arguing that we should reform, rather than eliminate, redevelopment.