Archive for May, 2010
May 31, 2010 · Filed under Landscape, Revitalization, Traffic, Urban Agriculture
Welcome to one of the busiest roads in London. I’m standing beside three lanes of heavy traffic and the cars are hurtling past – but that’s tremendous, because it means the drivers are too busy to notice me.
A fluorescent yellow jacket is not everybody’s idea of a disguise, but I’m wearing my bright cycling top so that if anybody notices me they might think I’m a contractor working for the local authority. After all, surely only somebody working for the council would dig a hole beside a busy road and plant an apple tree. That’s what I’m doing, in my ongoing attempt to turn the town into the country.
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Popularity: 53% [?]
May 29, 2010 · Filed under Active Transportation, Children, Families, Public Life, Public Space
Mel Antonen and his 3-year-old son, Emmett, were walking in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill one morning when a chocolate Labrador puppy named Wilson jumped at the toddler and wouldn’t go away — even after Antonen lifted his boy out of the dog’s reach, yelling at the owner, “Get him off! Get him off!”
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Popularity: 53% [?]
May 14, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Density, Economics, Planning, Shrinking Cities
“Are you moving poor people out of their houses?” a Detroit woman asks Jay Williams, mayor of Youngstown, at a recent symposium at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Williams was speaking about Youngstown 2010, a citywide plan adopted in 2005 that focuses on making Youngstown, a city east of Akron near the Pennsylvania border, relevant and alive. Youngstown’s population is shrinking, and downsizing, right-sizing, or whatever you want to call it, is a major component of the plan. The question of how to relocate people is huge. The thought of closing neighborhoods, cutting services and moving the widow Mrs. Jones out of the house she raised her children in touches a nerve.
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Popularity: 65% [?]
May 14, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Big Box, Housing, Master Planning, Real Estate, Shopping Malls
Imagine living in a Tesco house, sending your child to a Tesco school, swimming in a Tesco pool and, of course, shopping at the local Tesco superstore. According to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), the government’s adviser on architecture and design, this collective monopoly is not an imaginary dystopia. “Tesco Towns” on this model are already being planned across the UK, from Inverness in Scotland to Seaton in Devon.
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Popularity: 63% [?]
May 14, 2010 · Filed under Children, Diversity, Families, Grassroots, Happiness, Housing, Resilience, Social Networks
Imagine a community where you like your neighbours. You share meals and your children grow up together.
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Popularity: 39% [?]
May 14, 2010 · Filed under Density, Economics, Traffic, Transit
In cities across the United States, you can find examples of “streetcar suburbs”—enclaves of mostly single-family homes built between the turn of the century and the 1930s. These are often good-looking, tree-lined places full of heterogeneous character and history, in many ways so different from contemporary suburban sprawl.
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Popularity: 37% [?]
May 4, 2010 · Filed under Architecture, Density, Diversity, Economics, Real Estate, Tall Buildings
Why in the world should there be a “proper density”? A good case can be made that cities succeed by offering a diverse menu of neighborhoods that cater to a wide range of tastes. Some people love Greenwich Village, and that’s great, but I was perfectly happy growing up in a 25-story tower, and I don’t see anything wrong with that, either.
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If you love cities, then you should want more people to be able to enjoy them, and that means embracing, not eschewing, densities over 200 units per acre.
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Popularity: 46% [?]
May 4, 2010 · Filed under Information Design, Planning, Social Networks, Urban Structure, Visualization
We hear the word innovation a lot these days. But the word’s ubiquity in contemporary discourse speaks to the undeniable surge in new ideas of how to make complex systems, like cities, work better. Many of these ideas rely on recent technological advances that enable the capture of huge amounts of data and the interconnection of large networks of individuals. Regional Plan Association (RPA) has been in the business of coming up with new ideas to make the New York metropolitan region work better since 1922. A few months before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, RPA released a plan for the region that helped to pave the way for the systems that supported New York’s recovery from the Great Depression and subsequent growth. Two other long-range plans, in 1968 and 1996 have argued persuasively for coordinated planning across municipal and state boundaries that integrates community design, open space, transportation, housing, and economic and workforce development.
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Popularity: 42% [?]
May 3, 2010 · Filed under Active Transportation, Cycling, Revitalization, Traffic, Transit
It’s been more than a generation since the Brazilian city of Curitiba pioneered Bus Rapid Transit. Since then this cost-effective and flexible transit system — which repurposes existing roadways into bus routes rather than constructing capital-intensive new railways — has become a worldwide model for urban mobility in both affluent and developing nations. A new addition to the BRT network was recently launched in India. Last year the northwestern city of Ahmedabad opened the first phase of the Janmarg — the People’s Way. Though still in its infancy, the system has already attracted favorable attention: early this year the U.S.-based Institute for Transportation & Development Policy awarded Janmarg its Sustainable Transport Award.
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Popularity: 32% [?]
