Archive for Creative Cities
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% [?]
April 17, 2011 · Filed under Creative Cities, Planning, Urban Actions, Urban Design
The Institute for Urban Design in New York has launched By the City / For the City a crowdsourced ideas competition that will lead up to September’s Urban Design Week. It’s a chance for New Yorkers to submit ideas for proactive change in their neighborhood or even the entire city. The interactive map allows people to locate their ideas geographically and start a conversation at the local level.
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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 13, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Public Space, Revitalization
In May last year, as he was strolling down a sidestreet in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter, Alexandre de Nuñez spotted a sign on the front of a building near the white dome of the Panthéon. “For rent,” it said, with one provision: “For bookshop.”
Officially inaugurated this week by mayor Bertrand Delanoë, the Franco-Argentinian’s cosy new El Salon del Libro is one of a cluster of librairies opening in the city’s historic district of erudition, where students mill around the Sorbonne and lecturers recline in the Luxembourg gardens.
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Popularity: 67% [?]
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: 89% [?]
April 27, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Diversity, Economics, Master Planning, Planning, Real Estate, Revitalization, Urban Structure
The forces shaping our cities today are not municipal agencies but private organizations such as park conservancies, downtown associations, historic-preservation societies, arts councils, advocacy groups, and urban universities. Entrepreneurship also plays an important role. In projects large and small, real estate developers have replaced city planners and bureaucrats as the chief players on the urban scene, restoring neighborhoods, attracting residents to downtowns, helping to create the amenities that keep them there.
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Popularity: 36% [?]
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 17, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Economics, Resilience
Was coal a curse to Pittsburgh? Did cars destroy Detroit? Does the dominance of a single industry destroy the innovation and entrepreneurship of a region? If it does, then the economic crisis may have actually helped New York by enabling the city to avoid an over-concentration in finance.
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Popularity: 37% [?]
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% [?]
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