“The bicycle is the means of transport used most often in Amsterdam,” reports Bike Europe. “Between 2005 and 2007 people in the city used their bikes on average 0.87 times a day, compared to 0.84 for their cars. This is the first time that bicycle use exceeds car use.”
Popularity: 29% [?]
As America’s metropolitan areas meld into “megaregions”, officials and policymakers will need to figure out how to deal with their shared and growing infrastructure problems. Consider the ball rolling.
Popularity: 14% [?]
In ‘You are the City’, the 22 diagram drawings are split into four operational categories: Cosmological Ground; Leglisative Agencies; Currents, Flows and Forces; Nodes, Loops and Connections.
By combining different sheets, and adding layers, a huge range of different compositions can be created - a handmade decon version of SimCity. It invites the user to make new urban connections and realities, as different spatial arrangements and possibilities reveal themselves. In these digital days it’s quite refreshing to play with something so low-tech and tactile. The slick sophistication of digital interfaces often make it easier to gloss over them, here the simple act of shuffling clear plastic sheets and seeing the resultant overlays makes for a contemplative pleasure.
Popularity: 45% [?]
A while ago, I heard an American scientist address an audience in Oxford, England, about his work on the climate crisis. He was precise, unemotional, rigorous, and impersonal: all strengths of a scientist.
The next day, talking informally to a small group, he pulled out of his wallet a much-loved photo of his thirteen-year-old son. He spoke as carefully as he had before, but this time his voice was sad, worried, and fatherly. His son, he said, had become so frightened about climate change that he was debilitated, depressed, and disturbed. Some might have suggested therapy, Prozac, or baseball for the child. But in this group one voice said gently, “What about the Transition Initiative?”
Popularity: 28% [?]
First, they took away the cops parked at key intersections and replaced them with with mounted, overhead cameras. This idea didn’t start in my city, Seattle, but when it turned out to be a revenue-generator, even if it reduced safety, City Hall took to it with a vengeance.
Popularity: 48% [?]
Every tree is a living archive, its rings a record of rainfall, temperature, atmosphere, fire, volcanic eruption, and even solar activity. These arboreal archives together reach back in time over centuries, sometimes millennia. We can even map human history through them—and onto them—tracing famines, plagues, and the passing of our own lives.
Popularity: 19% [?]
As the population rises, underused and empty spaces are going to fill in. How well the transition works depends on shifts in demographics and infrastructure, as well as architecture. A studio of UCLA architecture students were asked to plot that transition. But before they could be architects, they had to be planners.
Popularity: 41% [?]
Eco-towns are dead. Architects, planners and developers alike are asking: who killed them?
Gordon Brown wanted to unveil plans for 10 carbon-neutral communities that would deliver up to 200,000 new homes on cheap government-owned land in the greenbelt by 2020. The idea was that the eco-towns would be so enthusiastically received that they could simply be parachuted into existing local authority development plans and fast-tracked through the system so that building could get started as quickly as possible. Developers flocked to get involved in what they saw as a great commercial opportunity – all in the name of being green.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Green space is out, high-rises are in as ‘garden’ community razed to sow prosperity.
Popularity: 32% [?]
Studies have shown that hospital patients make a speedier recovery when they have a exposure to living vegetation, like trees and flowers. And certainly great metropoli are made even more liveable by their extensive parks and gardens. Now it seems that plants can also deter burglars. Sort of.
Popularity: 24% [?]