You come across them more and more in new housing districts: high-voltage parks. These remarkable, elongated strips of parkland, with high-voltage masts as their central features, often slice right through neighbourhoods. Leiden, Almere, Rotterdam and Dordrecht already boast such strips of land, while another fifty are planned around the country over the coming years. But how pleasant is it in a park beneath ominously crackling wires?
Popularity: 28% [?]
On Westerdokseiland a new high-density urban district has been added to the centre of Amsterdam. Sardines crammed into a tin or attractive housing in the heart of the city?
Popularity: 39% [?]
Pastures, forests, suburbs, cities, farms, and so on, all affect the skies in very particular spatial ways. Deforestation, for instance, has “substantially altered cloud patterns” in the Amazon; specifically, we read that “patches of trees behave as ‘green oceans’ while cleared pastures act like ‘continents’,” generating a new marbling of the local atmosphere.
Popularity: 28% [?]
When New York City announced a plan to shut down parts of Times Square to traffic, New Yorkers’ reactions ranged from bemusement to mild hysteria.Despite reassurances from the Transportation Department that the changes would create a greener, more pedestrian-friendly city, some critics of the plan worried that it would sap the square of its chaotic energy. Others, apparently nostalgic for the seediness of the 1970s version of the square, denounced it as another step in New York’s transformation from the world’s greatest metropolis to a generic tourist trap.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Designed by artist and architect Nils Norman, this fantasy map traces the Piccadilly line’s route through an alternate London whose landmarks consist of utopian eco-fantasies (mushroom farms and geothermal energy platforms) alongside various post-war avant-garde architects’ unrealized projects for the city.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Here’s what Paris did right in setting up a city bike share program: versatile, sexy bikes and enough of them (1 for every 200 residents). The Vélib bike-share program is about to hit its 2-year anniversary and it is going strong, with more than 20,000 bikes (used for an estimated 26 million trips each year) and almost 1,500 stations. The program has even been extended into the Parisian suburbs. Compare that to Gothenburg’s GreenStreet bike share system, with less than 60 bikes scattered across the city, a program which no one seems to know about, much less use. But wait - as with many things, there’s an upside and a downside to Vélib’s success as well as Greenstreet’s slow start.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Just last summer, oil was surging toward $150 a barrel and gas prices were hitting $4 a gallon. The recession brought those prices crashing down, and today it may seem like high oil prices are one of the few economic problems that we don’t have to worry about.
But Canadian economist Jeff Rubin says what we saw last summer was a glimpse of our future.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Much has been written about how suburbs have taken people away from the city and that now suburbanites need to return back to where they came. But in reality most suburbs of large cities have grown not from the migration of local city-dwellers but from migration from small towns and the countryside.
It is true that suburban areas have been growing strongly, while core cities have tended to grow much more slowly or even to decline. The predominance of suburban growth is not just an American phenomenon, but is fairly universal in the high income world).
Popularity: 28% [?]
An urbanism is much more than building. In an urbanism, a city’s builders (and their tested designs and engineering solutions) and the city’s users (and their culture of urban living and commerce) are organized together into a single community that creates, governs, and renews a productive unit of the city–their neighbourhood, their district, or their commercial corridor. This approach contrasts markedly with the way most urban development is done today. Today’s industrial approach to city building separates the builder (and most aspects of ‘product’ design) from the end consumer. This permits standardized, scaled construction, but it does not produce an efficient, productive, or resilient city. Urbanism serves a particular purpose. It aligns the economic or social strategies of different interests located in a particular urban place and translates those strategies into an efficient built system, much as a carefully engineered manufacturing complex gives life and legs to a company’s business model.
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Popularity: 25% [?]
If the world is so flat, then why are cities growing so quickly, especially in the third world?
One might have thought that striking declines in the costs of shipping goods and communicating knowledge across space would have led to a great dispersal of population. After all, it is at least technically possible to telecommute over great distances. Yet the share of the world living in urbanized areas increased from 40.9 percent in 1985 to more than 50 percent today.
Popularity: 23% [?]