Archive for February, 2009
February 28, 2009 · Filed under Advertising, Great Streets, Information Design, Pedestrians, Play, Urban Actions, Visualization
How do you go about designing informatic systems so they don’t undermine the wonderful things about cities? How do you design cities so they can incorporate networked informatics to greatest advantage? How, especially, do you accomplish these things when the disciplinary communities involved barely speak the same language? And how do you keep everyone’s eyes on the prize, which is the ordinary human being asked to make sense of these new propositions? These are the questions The City Is Here For You To Use sets out to address.
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Popularity: 50% [?]
February 28, 2009 · Filed under Density, Diversity, Families, Happiness, Housing, Suburbs
Ever since there have been suburbs there have been harsh critiques of suburbs — a common one being that they are suffocating places where people live lives of quiet desperation.
Well, most suburbanites apparently never got that memo.
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Popularity: 32% [?]
February 28, 2009 · Filed under Planning, Traffic, Transit, Urban Design
New York City made a major public commitment to Bus Rapid Transit in 2006 when, after years of discussion, the MTA and DOT put forward plans for pilot routes in each of the five boroughs. In the meantime, the city’s BRT agenda has encountered a few setbacks in Albany and made a partial breakthrough on Fordham Road, with a service that incorporates some nifty bus improvements, but not enough to merit the BRT designation.
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Popularity: 26% [?]
February 28, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Families, Housing, Multi-Level Urbanism, Zoning
Popularity: 36% [?]
February 28, 2009 · Filed under Density, Multi-Level Urbanism, Urban Agriculture
The way skeptics see it, Dickson Despommier has a lot of explaining to do: He’s got big plans for the future of farming. By 2050, the planet will have to feed three billion additional mouths, and traditional farms, which threaten food security by deforestation, the use of fossil fuels and ecosystem destruction, will not be able to hack it. Dr. Despommier, an environmental health scientist at Columbia University, believes the answer lies in the vertical farm, a glass-walled structure that can be designed as tall as a typical skyscraper, and can be located inside city bounds or around city limits.
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Popularity: 24% [?]
February 27, 2009 · Filed under Pedestrians, Traffic, Urban Design
The city plans to close several blocks of Broadway to vehicle traffic through Times Square and Herald Square, an experiment that would turn swaths of the Great White Way into pedestrian malls and continue Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s effort to reduce traffic congestion in Midtown.
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Popularity: 24% [?]
February 27, 2009 · Filed under Crime, Planning, Social Justice
Nationwide, an estimated two-thirds of the people who leave prison are rearrested within three years. A disproportionate number of them come from a few urban neighborhoods in big cities. Many states spend more than $1 million a year to incarcerate the residents of single blocks or small neighborhoods.
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Popularity: 22% [?]
February 26, 2009 · Filed under Real Estate, Shrinking Cities, Suburbs
California, like any gorgeously endowed person, has a natural inclination toward self-absorption. It has always been a place of unsurpassed splendor; it has inspired and attracted writers, artists, dreamers, savants and philosophers. That’s especially true of the Bay Area—ground zero for California narcissism and arguably the most attractive urban expanse on the continent; Neil Morgan in 1960 described San Francisco as “the narcissus of the West,” a place whose fundamental asset was first its own beauty, followed by its own culture of self-regard.
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Popularity: 21% [?]
February 25, 2009 · Filed under Cities from Scratch, EcoCities
What will the city of the future look like? If MAD architects have anything to say about it, urban centres will no longer resemble the concrete jungles of the industrial revolution. MAD and their design friends have come together to create a conceptual model of the Huaxi city centre of Guiyang, China, that brings nature into every consideration when building with the most modern technologies of the 21st century.
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Popularity: 29% [?]
February 25, 2009 · Filed under EcoCities, Events
An upcoming conference entitled Ecological Urbanism: Alternative and Sustainable Cities of the Future will take place at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 3-5, 2009. The conference will bring together design practitioners and theorists, economists, engineers, environmental scientists, politicians and public health specialists, with the goal of reaching a more robust understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
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