Ivy Vann | Town Planning and Urban Design
Ivy Vann is a planner and designer with many years of experience in planning and urban design. She is available for charrettes, planning projects, code review, master planning, and comprehensive planning
About
Towns everywhere struggle to maintain their identities in the face of either too much growth or not enough of the right kind of growth. How do we grow while keeping the things we love? No town has enough money to do all the things that need to be done and there is no doubt that… Continue reading About
Small Town Planner Papers
I was dusting in my upstairs hall this past weekend, using a damp cloth to clean the plexiglass covering my model neighborhood. Yes, I own a 4-foot by 8-foot topographically accurate model of a neighborhood I thought I was going to build once upon a time. It has 52 houses of all kinds the size… Continue reading Small Town Planner Papers
New Hampshire is graying. What is going on and is there anything we can do about it? As a town planner I would have to turn in my tracing paper and colored markers if I didn’t believe that the built environment had an effect on who lives where and why. We know that, in general,… Continue reading
I love maps. I’ve always loved maps. I love how they lay the whole world out so you can see how things fit together and how natural features push human constructions into shape. Maps are amazing tools, particularly if you draw them yourself. When I was teaching school I used maps all… Continue reading
When I was a child I lived in a small town in central Florida and we had brick streets. I loved those streets: I would ride my bicycle out of my way to ride down a brick street. They were so different from asphalt, so interesting, so beautiful. I also loved the streets where the… Continue reading
How I Became an Urbanist
In the early 1980s when I was a newspaper reporter for the Milford Cabinet (oldest continuously published weekly paper in the US) I watched a number of small towns in southern New Hampshire kill themselves. That’s not what they thought they were doing, but that was the effect. The real estate market was hot, people… Continue reading How I Became an Urbanist
Ivy is such a warm host. Everyone feels welcome and free to ask any question.
Annie Card, photographer
Ivy knows how to get people to come to a meeting and participate and have fun. I don’t know how she does it, but people come to her events.
Ed Juengst, selectman, Peterborough NH
Ivy Vann Town Planning 