Archive for April, 2009
April 22, 2009 · Filed under Creative Cities, Investment, Revitalization
Last month, artists Michael Di Liberto and Sunia Boneham moved into a two-story, three-bedroom house in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood, where about 220 homes out of 5,000 sit vacant and boarded up. They lined their walls with Ms. Boneham’s large, neon-hued canvases, turned a spare bedroom into a graphic-design studio and made the attic a rehearsal space for their band, Arte Povera.
The couple used to live in New York, but they were drawn to Cleveland by cheap rent and the creative possibilities of a city in transition. “It seemed real alive and cool,” said Mr. Di Liberto.
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Popularity: 28% [?]
April 22, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Economics, Real Estate
An entire counterfactual history of New York could be written simply from the stories of buildings that never got built. Even in flush times, ambitious projects are hard to incubate; they struggle to maturity against a tide of red tape, cost overruns, warring egos, and community sensitivities. In difficult times, when the market goes suddenly from strong to weak, the survival rate drops with the Dow. Plans are left out in the cold.
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Popularity: 20% [?]
April 19, 2009 · Filed under Nature, Pedestrians
When we walk we stop killing. We take our place in nature and restore our humanity.
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Popularity: 20% [?]
April 14, 2009 · Filed under Garden Cities, Nature, Urban Agriculture
So you’ve picked up a compact composting kit and are ready to start recycling your food scraps into nutrient-rich compost – the next step is to start a garden! For those with budding green thumbs, urban gardening can be an intimidating prospect. To clarify a sometimes-mysterious process, we’ve put together a very brief how-to guide on starting a flourishing container garden replete with herbs, veggies, and flowers.
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Popularity: 31% [?]
April 14, 2009 · Filed under Density, EcoCities, Infrastructure, Investment, Landscape, Nature, Planning, Urban Design
Cities are starting to see the thousands of miles of alleyways that line the backside of homes and buildings in a new light. Rather than dismissing them as dark, dank and often dangerous spots used mainly for trash pickup and garage access, they’re treating them as valuable real estate that can help the environment and improve city life.
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Popularity: 36% [?]
April 14, 2009 · Filed under Cities from Scratch, EcoCities, Nature, Visualization
The smell display is what I like best. It’s part of a terrific new exhibition called “Ecological Urbanism,” now at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. An artist named Sissel Tolaas gathered air samples from 200 neighborhoods in Mexico City and bottled each of these in a tiny glass bottle. She then asked 2,000 people to sniff and record their responses. Those responses, which are carefully labeled on the bottles, are as delicately discriminatory as those of a wine connoisseur.
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Popularity: 29% [?]
April 14, 2009 · Filed under Climate Change, EcoCities, Planning, Urban Design
A green building, energy efficient light bulb or Prius car are all important. But each by itself won’t lead us to sustainability. We need to start by looking at, and often questioning, the basic assumptions of urban settlements. Sustainable urbanism combines principles and standards of smart growth, new urbanism and the green building movement to create compact, walkable and transit-served settlements with energy- and water-efficient buildings and infrastructure.
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Popularity: 35% [?]
April 14, 2009 · Filed under Creative Cities, Social Networks, Visualization
Apologies to residents of the Lower East Side; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and other hipster-centric neighborhoods. You are not as cool as you think, at least according to a new study that seeks to measure what it calls “the geography of buzz.”
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Popularity: 23% [?]
April 14, 2009 · Filed under Planning, Urban Design
A plan drafted by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning to redevelop a site within the Denver Design District (DDD) has been selected as the winning scheme in the seventh annual ULI (Urban Land Institute) Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition. The team’s entry was chosen by the competition jury over plans submitted by other finalist teams from Columbia University, Kansas State University, and the University of Miami.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
April 13, 2009 · Filed under Food Deserts, Health, Pedestrians, Retail
Want to lose weight? Move closer to a grocery store.
A new study from the University of British Columbia shows people who live within a kilometre of a grocery store are half as likely to be overweight, compared to those living in neighbourhoods without grocery stores.
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Popularity: 29% [?]
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