The Case Against Fake “Walkable Urbanism”
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Urban By Now: The case against a “walkable urbanism” that is neither walkable nor urban.
Popularity: 46% [?]
urbanism.org
Urban news [almost] daily.Archive for Big Box
‘This town has been sold to Tesco’
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.
Popularity: 61% [?]
SubTropolis, U.S.A.
A large chunk of Kansas City’s real estate lies 100 feet below ground, and offers a creative solution to global warming.
Popularity: 22% [?]
Dawn of the Dead Mall
The landscape is littered with the giant carcasses of failed retail emporia. Ideas for what’s next are no less visionary. But are they any more practical?
Popularity: 24% [?]
Living above the store
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.
Popularity: 44% [?]
Living above the store
All-in-one projects with retail, residential and office components are attracting attention. But not everyone is onboard.
Popularity: 47% [?]
Inner-city L.A. hungers for good grocery stores
East L.A. resident Olga Perez has to take two buses to a store about eight miles away to get fresh fruits and vegetables, or decent cuts of meat, for her family.
“The only thing I can get at my corner store are spoiled or expired,” explains Ms. Perez, a dental assistant and single mother who lives in a two-bedroom apartment with two daughters and a granddaughter.
The round trip costs her $5 and limits what she can carry home. “I can only get so much milk and when I get home the eggs are cracked and the bread is smashed,” she says.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Creating Neighborhood Capital from Strip Malls
Strip malls are in virtually every American city, but they’re rarely an important part of those cities. Ava Bromberg says they can be. Her idea is to turn strip malls into community-owned hubs that generate capital within their neighborhood and keep it there.
More…
Popularity: 40% [?]
A (Radical) Way to Fix Suburban Sprawl
Some 120,000 people work in Tysons Corner, Va., but only 17,000 live there. To transform this hotbed of suburban gridlock into a green, walkable city, a soon-to-be-adopted plan-as envisioned by our artist-calls for as much as tripling the current square footage by expanding upward, with the tallest buildings located next to four new train stations, which should be completed by 2013.
Popularity: 64% [?]
Making Grocers more Appetizing to Developers
On May 16th, New York City unveiled a new initiative, Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH), which combines zoning changes and some financial incentives to make it less costly for developers to include supermarkets in their projects, and to allow the construction of supermarkets in light manufacturing districts without a special permit.
The initiative applies to four areas of the city with the least access to healthy, fresh food: the South Bronx, Upper Manhattan, Central Brooklyn, and Downtown Jamaica. The Bloomberg administration hopes the rezoning will stimulate the growth of supermarkets in these neighborhoods, and in so doing, provide more equitable access to food, promote healthier eating, and reduce the incidence of diet-related diseases.
Popularity: 17% [?]