Archive for Authenticity
October 21, 2011 · Filed under Authenticity, Creative Cities, Density, Diversity, Grassroots, Great Streets, Public Space
In Japan, ‘public’ is more of a mental construct than a physical presence” and the concept of ‘privacy’ has never taken hold. The closest native Japanese approximation of private-public may be uchi (family, clan, group)-soto (that which is not uchi) where uchi extends the Western ‘private’ to ‘other private’ plus ‘public’. A history and present of close quarters, paper-thin walls and sliding doors that open onto the street evoke the permeation of daily life into public space. Memory and current practice/conception regard whole neighbourhoods as ‘home’, with parks as multifunctional common yards.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
August 23, 2011 · Filed under Authenticity, Garden Cities, Urban Structure, Urbanization
The enterprise of surveying the intimate relationship between Urbanism and Utopia consists of reading the dynamics and transformations that affected cities and their planning over the centuries, together with the discourse surrounding this practice. Put otherwise, the topic at hand here is one of epistemological concern, and is conducive to a two-part analysis: it is as much a study of the urbs, the City itself, as of urbanism, the self-reflective scientific discourse underpinning the city’s development.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
May 9, 2011 · Filed under Authenticity, Suburbs
There is no more iconic suburb than Levittown, the postwar planned community built by the developer William Levitt in the late 1940s, so it is understandable that in launching Open House, a collaborative project to imagine a “future suburbia,” the Dutch design collective Droog in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects would make it the focus of their inquiry.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
July 9, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Creative Cities, Diversity, Economics, Industrial, Revitalization, Waterfronts
Maybe Richard Florida has promoted the wrong creative class. In his model, artists beget coffee bars that make formerly dreary neighborhoods attractive to real estate developers, who lure lawyers and accountants into luxury loft buildings with names like “the Shoe Factory.” Maybe there’s another model, one that sucks a little of the class bias out of the formula and privileges artisans over artists, blue-collar jobs over white-collar ones. Give enough people who are passionate about making things the stability to invest in equipment and hire workers, and you might slow, or even reverse, the death spiral.
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Popularity: 59% [?]
June 15, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Big Box, Cities from Scratch, Diversity, Happiness, Master Planning, Pedestrians
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Urban By Now: The case against a “walkable urbanism” that is neither walkable nor urban.
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Popularity: 74% [?]
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: 87% [?]
April 27, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Creative Cities, Public Life, Retail, Social Justice, Social Networks
All places, even countries – as brilliantly satirized in this image – are distinctive clusters of people, communities, organizations, institutions, beliefs, tastes, personal and public mania.
Go out on to the street, slip on a pair of psychological x-ray spex, forget the physical ways in which we organize ourselves and start to see the city as a zoo that encloses a multitude of social, economic and personal struggles.
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Popularity: 25% [?]
April 6, 2010 · Filed under Active Transportation, Authenticity, Beauty, Creative Cities, Cycling, Diversity, Great Streets, Happiness, Nature, Public Life, Social Justice, Social Networks, Uncategorized, Urban Design
Happiness itself is a commons to which everyone should have equal access.
That’s the view of Enrique Peñalosa, who is not a starry-eyed idealist given to abstract theorizing. He’s actually a politician, who served as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, for three years, and now travels the world spreading a message about how to improve quality-of-life for everyone living in today’s cities.
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Popularity: 70% [?]
March 16, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Creative Cities, Diversity, Happiness, Retail, Zoning
The District of Tofino near Vancouver Canada wants to keep its unique charm by keeping out franchises like the golden arches, Starbucks and Tim Hortons. Council made a motion Tuesday directing staff to draft a bylaw that would ban franchises in Tofino utilizing a section of the official community plan which discourages future development and location of large-format retail chains and fast-food chains that do not reflect the character of Tofino, according to Coun. Stephen Ashton who proposed the motion.
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Popularity: 39% [?]
March 10, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Diversity, Emergence, Place making, Urban Design, Urban Structure
When we speak of the identity of a place, we express a recognition of the patterns formed around us. We may not be conscious of them to the point of being able to draw them back with precision like Stephen Wiltshire, but we can remember them in the abstract, and in this way, identify different places from the abstractions we recall of their patterns. This is how one street can look sufficiently alike another that we can identify a neighborhood, and it is also why a landscape like Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto can feel like New York City, despite the fact that every object has been reconfigured to create a parody environment.
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Popularity: 27% [?]
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