British Ministers are considering making motorists legally responsible for accidents involving cyclists or pedestrians, even if they are not at fault. Government advisers are pushing for changes in the civil law that will make the most powerful vehicle involved in a collision automatically liable for insurance and compensation purposes.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) was recently awarded the contract to create a stunning new Central Business District in Beijing. The project will integrate into the existing downtown urban district and will improve transportation infrastructure while introducing energy-efficient buildings green public space. The plan also provides a framework for new sustainable growth that would result in eliminating 215,000 tons of CO2 per year, which is the equivalent of planting 14 million adult trees.
Popularity: 28% [?]
“Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change,” published earlier this year, argues that cities need to plan their future development considering their ”resiliency” to changes in climate and the availability of fossil fuels. Authors Peter Newman (Curtin University, Australia), Timothy Beatley (University of Virginia), and Heather Boyer (Harvard University) predict that in the next couple years, energy demand will outmatch oil supplies worldwide, resulting in a situation exceeding the challenges of the OPEC oil embargo in the early 1970’s.
Popularity: 22% [?]
John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included and not Toronto, why Meroe (an ancient Nubian city) is included and not Melbourne. It’s a dull question, and Norwich answers it dully, by pointing to the “in history” part of the book’s title. The better answer would have been that there’s not a shred of romance in Toronto and Melbourne.
Popularity: 37% [?]
When we talk about transportation, we tend to talk about things in motion. What is often left unremarked upon, in conversations about crowded highways, is something without which those crowds would not exist: parking. That humble 9-by-18-foot space (the standard size of a spot) is where traffic begins and ends. It is the fuel to traffic’s fire.
Popularity: 17% [?]
It was in 2000 that the Chinese government formulated a plan to build 400 new cities by 2020, in order to install the migration coming from the countryside towards the new urban agglomerations. This is the equivalent of 20 cities per week.
The site, located on the Qi’Ao Island, 27 square kilometer island in the north of Zhuhai, has the potential to become a gateway for Hong Kong - Shenzhen due to its strategic location and the increasing passenger flows through it. The island is threatened to become another generic Chinese urbanization that spread across farmlands. Thus the signs of scarcity of water resources, deforestation, fish farming and industrial pollution are already present.
Jorge Ayala started first with a research of new materials for the city with regards to performance and functionality. The project generated a rich base of indexes which traduce environmental, topographical and geographical parameters into a material ready to be use for the design. The spatial strategy that Ecotransitional Urbanism uses is an implementation of the relationship between the built and its context.
Popularity: 53% [?]
Experimental Geography explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). This lavishly illustrated book features more than a dozen maps; artwork by Francis Alÿs, Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen; and recent projects by The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Raqs Media Collective, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.
Popularity: 34% [?]
This is Los Angeles — the consummate infrastructural metropolis, famous for its networks of freeways and its dispersed, vehicle-based urbanism. This is also the departure point for The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles [ACTAR, 2008], an anthology of essays examining contemporary LA and contemporary urbanism. Today’s metropolis, as described above by volume editor Kazys Varnelis, depends upon layers of infrastructural networks — not just freeways — that connect the metropolis globally.
Popularity: 30% [?]
We all know the kiosks on the busy streets of our world cities — those small, neat pop-up booths that sell about everything, from newspapers and magazines to cigarettes and cold drinks. Kiosks mean a lot to me, and to the city itself. At these colourful places, where tourists buy their public transport tickets and commuters grab a fresh newspaper in the morning, is the metropolitan vibe at its best.
Popularity: 35% [?]
For American planners, Portland, OR is held up as a shining example of urban planning, and credit is given to its compact grid. But is Portland’s grid worthy of adulation? Perhaps not, say Fanis Grammenos and Douglas Pollard of Urban Pattern Associates.
Popularity: 30% [?]