TulsaNow land use presentations online

The slide shows presented by TulsaNow at Wednesday night's city council candidate forum are now available on the TulsaNow website here. There are two presentations.

The first is entitled "We Can Do Better", and it was presented by Duane Cuthbertson. It is laden with pictures which are more eloquent than the words, but I'll give you some of the words to give you enough of the flavor so you'll want to look at the presentation in all its glory.

It begins by leading the audience through a mental exercise:

I’d like to start with a little exercise. I’d like to ask everyone in the audience to imagine that you have two weeks to spend in any city in the world (cities, not beaches). You have no family or work obligations, and money is no object. Now imagine yourself in that city . . . . Think about your surroundings . . . .

... the question we confront, and which those we elect to office will confront, is whether Tulsa will be more like the cities we admire and enjoy, or more like the cities we do our best to avoid.

The presentation goes on to look at Tulsa as it is today, showing examples of good urban form and bad urban form, and then showing how we can take the kind of places we have now, places that don't work well, and make them better by adding elements of good urban design.

The second slide show, presented by Jamie Jamieson, reviewed TulsaNow's mission and core values, set out the importance of land use planning and the drawbacks of zoning as a means of land use planning, and alternative approaches to planning. The presentation concluded with a list of principles, strategies, and actions TulsaNow is encouraging the new City Council to adopt for its 2004-2006 term. I won't spoil the presentation by listing them here; you need to see them in context.

Go and read them, and when you're done, have a browse through the resources on the site and visit some of the research links. You'll begin to get a sense of what TulsaNow hopes for our city's future, and the lessons we can learn from the experiences of other cities.