Archive for November, 2009
November 19, 2009 · Filed under Food Deserts, Health, Urban Agriculture
America should increase its regional food consumption. Each metropolitan area, the researchers say, should obtain most of its nutrition from its own “foodshed,” a term akin to “watershed” meaning the area that naturally supplies its kitchens. Moreover, in a novel suggestion, the MIT and Columbia team says these local efforts should form a larger “Integrated Regional Foodshed” system, intended to lower the price and caloric content of food by lowering distances food must travel, from the farm to the dinner table.
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Popularity: 44% [?]
November 19, 2009 · Filed under Beauty, Great Streets, Urban Design
What do you want from your streets? Clean-liness, safety and good lighting, and the ability to go where you want and do what you want.
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Popularity: 35% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Big Box, Housing, Mixed Use, Multi-Level Urbanism, Retail
Paul Buck has spectacular views of downtown Vancouver from the two glass walls of his condo, which wow everyone who walks in. But what really impressed one of Mr. Buck’s friends, in from a town near the Yukon border, is that he lives over a giant Home Depot.
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Popularity: 46% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Highways, Infrastructure, Public Art, Suburbs, Traffic, Urban Structure
New Yorkers maintain that Los Angeles is a city with no center. But Angelenos argue that the city of freeways has its core in the Stack, a tower of overpasses — the first four-level connector interchange, according to the California Transportation Department — where the Pasadena, Harbor, Hollywood and Santa Ana freeways intersect.
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Popularity: 55% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Great Streets, Traffic
A 30-day test run of a new streetscape design in St. Louis has been so successful that the city may leave it in place, including restriped lanes and temporary concrete barriers, until final construction can begin next summer. With four city streets chosen for upgrading by the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, the six-block-long slice of South Grand Boulevard is the first that is seeing results.
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Popularity: 35% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Health, Planning, Urban Agriculture
One common lament about local food is that there simply isn’t enough of it. The best part about it — that it’s different in every foodshed, location to location — also means that the supply can have a hard time keeping up with demand. That’s especially true when it comes to larger, more dense urban centers, where locavores greatly outnumber farms and farmers.
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Popularity: 36% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Emergence, Grassroots, Master Planning, Place making
The importance of small ideas to urban revitalization isn’t widely appreciated. Particularly in the most recent real-estate cycle, many planners, design professionals, and developers produced grand schemes instead. But profound change is more likely to result from a deeply considered idea that alters an essential component of an urban environment than from an elaborate master plan that requires abundant resources and considerable political capital. While some large-scale plans, like Rockefeller Center, are successful, most become impersonal, overbearing failures—or, even more often, are stillborn, the victims of the long process of assemblage, environmental remediation, community participation, zoning adoption, and the securing of financing.
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Popularity: 33% [?]
November 11, 2009 · Filed under Creative Cities, Place branding, Revitalization
Through a unique methodology of Engagement Place Branding, one of Canada’s most neglected inner city communities (East Village) is an example of how to brand a community in ways that result in buy-in, without spending any advertising dollars by allowing the community itself to help build the brand. The nucleus of the program was creating a magazine that told the story of East Village from the year 2020 (an alternative to a traditional “vision” document that sits on shelves and collects dust, (the magazine has been subscribed to by the public and carried across the world by the city Mayor).
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Popularity: 28% [?]
November 11, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Ecosystems, Pollution, Traffic, Transit
By requiring car drivers to pay a fee to drive in a city at peak hours, congestion pricing reduces traffic and raises money that can be used to support public transit—both worthy goals.
Yet congestion pricing has dubious environmental value. Traffic jams, if they’re managed well, can actually be good for the environment. They maintain a level of frustration that turns drivers into subway riders or pedestrians.
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Popularity: 35% [?]
November 11, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Big Box, Density, Mixed Use, Multi-Level Urbanism, Retail, Shopping Malls
All-in-one projects with retail, residential and office components are attracting attention. But not everyone is onboard.
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Popularity: 48% [?]
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