I have always loved those great Cities of the Future from the thirties even to the present; they always present some bucolic vision that is never quite achieved. Canon set up a vision at the CES show to showcase their high def cameras; Unpluggd said “Think Playmobil meets TV studio diorama.”
Popularity: 69% [?]
Living in Las Vegas appeals more to men than women. Affluent adults are twice as likely as poorer folks to want to live in Boston. Young people like big cities such as New York and Los Angeles. More Americans would rather live in a place with more McDonald’s than one with more Starbucks.
Popularity: 12% [?]
The international border between the United States and Mexico at the San Diego-Tijuana checkpoint is the most trafficked in the world. Approximately 60 million people cross annually, moving untold amounts of goods and services back and forth. Zooming into the particularities of this volatile territory, traveling back and forth between these two border cities, we can expose landscapes of contradiction where conditions of difference and sameness collide and overlap.
Popularity: 33% [?]
So much has been said and written about contemporary China. A fifth of humanity lives within its boundaries, the country is undergoing extraordinarily fast mutations, its cities dwarf whatever idea Europeans might have of a metropolis and its economy is increasingly linked to ours. Yet, i doubt there are many people out there who could honestly pretend they understand or ‘know’ the ‘Middle Kingdom.’ In fact, the splendor and history of imperial China is probably clearer in most minds than the country as it is nowadays.
Popularity: 16% [?]
The sound of traffic, the smell of exhaust, the sight of strip malls, gas stations and fast-food chains; your senses tell you that you’re standing at the busy intersection of a city suburb. But as you look out at the concrete scatter and toxic sprawl, what you might not so readily see is that you’re also standing at a metaphorical crossroads – where one road leads to more of the same, and the other toward the opportunity to transform the space around you.
Popularity: 13% [?]
“99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym,” Wright says. “Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards… [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field.”
Popularity: 16% [?]
The most unsafe cities in California, in terms of traffic fatalities, are the newest ones — those developed primarily since 1950. The cities with the fewest fatalities, by contrast, are those with significant portions built before 1950.
The newer cities tend to have more “dendritic” networks — branching, tree-like organizations that include many cul-de-sacs, limiting the movement of traffic through residential areas. They also don’t have as many intersections. The pre-1950 cities, on the other hand, tend to be more grid-like, giving motorists many more routes to choose from.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Beware the friend who suddenly takes up crochet. She (or he) may be a yarn bomber.
Working under code names such as Incogknito and the Microfiber Militia, a global network of “craftivists” is stitching makeshift sweaters, oversized tea cozies and giant pompoms around public property. Street poles, trees, bike racks, bridges - nothing is safe in target cities such as London, Paris, Chicago and Stockholm.
The craftivists’ manifesto, according to Vancouver knitters Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, is “world yarn domination.”
Popularity: 17% [?]
Most city maps tend to obfuscate the reality of geography, instead showing us a diagram of political boundaries, representations of streets, and the occasional prominent geographical feature. A cursory perusal of maps of southeast Chicago and northwest Indiana will reveal a disproportionate amount of space that is neither latticed with streets nor defined by geographical features such as bodies of water, the bodies of water themselves seemingly grotesquely disfigured by this undefined interstitial space. A satellite view of these areas can start to answer some questions or lead one to conclusions about what is happening (privately owned industry?), but this still leaves much to be revealed. In an attempt to better understand this region, I began exploring by bicycle, which generally allows more access than a vehicle, and which eventually led me to stumble upon the neighborhood of Marktown.
More…
Popularity: 24% [?]
Although it’s certainly not a new idea to combine landscaping with public transportation, we love the sight of these European trams gliding along on beds of grass. From Barcelona to the Czech Republic, Frankfurt, St-Etienne and Strasbourg, these public transit greenways are showing the potential of incorporating landscaping into good urban design.
Popularity: 20% [?]