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It looks like you’ve landed in The Right Place, the personal blog of Brenda Case Scheer, an architect, planner, urban designer and researcher. “The Right Place” comes from a quote of Brigham Young‘s when he arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. Sick, and having traveled for many miles over incredibly difficult terrain, Young, then Prophet of the Mormons, looked over the valley and declared, “this is the right place”. Thus, the valley was illegally usurped and a flood of white people came to settle it. But whoa…
In this blog I talk about Salt Lake City and its founding in history, but also about other cities and the comparison of different cities. As a Salt Lake City Planning Commissioner, I’m constantly reminded of the importance of urban design in making a great city, one that will last for hundreds and hundreds of years.
I have also been a professor and dean of the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah. For many years I have studied urban form, especially in its historical context. More importantly, I’ve traveled extensively and lived in many different places, observing the operation and success stories of cities: what works, what is a wrong turn? Please follow me on Twitter or Instagram to stay in touch.
The Destiny of Salt Lake City: the Region
Today I gave a talk to the Wasatch Front Regional Council about my research into the history of the plan of Salt Lake City. My particular contribution to this story is to look at how the physical plan has changed over time. Salt Lake has a very unique origin story — how the pioneers settled…
The Plat of Zion and the Wide Streets of Salt Lake City
In my last post, I disputed the common myth that the streets in Salt Lake are wide so that an oxen team can turn around. But why are they so wide? To answer that question we have to return to the time of the founding of the Mormon church. When Joseph Smith founded his church,…
Why are Salt Lake City’s streets so wide?
Even the most casual visitor to Salt Lake City will notice that the streets here are very wide. How wide? Wide enough to turn a team of oxen around? Or maybe not. It’s been a story for a long time – Salt Lake’s wide streets are the result of a demand by its founder, Brigham…
