Jennifer and Andrew Greenberg didn’t fall in love at first sight with the 1950s ranch house they just bought in Portland, Ore. But they did feel that way about the neighborhood. They saw people out walking and noticed how close the house was to coffee shops and wooded paths. So they chose the home that needed more work over a comparably priced but more upscale option in another area. “When it came down to it, we weren’t willing to compromise on walkability,” says Ms. Greenberg, a 37-year-old event planner.
One of the foundational documents in our country’s history of car-centric street design is what’s known as the Green Book. These engineering guidelines, which have been published in various editions by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) since the 1930s, are only “green” if you’re looking at the cover.
New York’s ambitious experiment that closed parts of Broadway to vehicles last spring will become permanent, city officials said on Thursday, even though it fell short of achieving its chief objective: improving traffic flow.
A few hours after the public launch of the Active Design Guidelines here in New York, President Obama gave his first State of the Union Address. In an aside which drew the evening’s loudest applause, the President took a moment to acknowledge the First Lady’s new public health campaign to fight the epidemic of childhood obesity. Was it coincidence that the city chose this date to launch the guidelines? Probably not. Just as other municipalities and regions in this country have looked to New York in the past for answers on issues of zoning and historic preservation, for example, New York City is poised to lead in this new initiative as well. And as the debate about how to provide better, more efficient healthcare continues, perhaps designers here in New York City have an answer; a prescription that requires no doctor and no insurance coverage – just a livable, efficient, sustainable city.
Mumbai’s muddled streets are too packed to walk through, so India’s commercial capital has come up with a solution. Uplift the masses—not in some fuzzy metaphysical way, but on “skywalks” made of steel.
If you’ve ever been to Cleveland, you know the downtown area is a forbidding, pedestrian desert. The main public space, Public Square, is no better–it’s a wind-scarred, 10-acre expanse flanked by skyscrapers. But that could all change, thanks to a series of brilliant redesigns proposed by James Corner Field Operations, the firm best known as the landscape designers who did much of the heavy lifting for New York’s superb High Line Park.
One of Hong Kong’s smartest residential areas is called Mid-levels, and is served by an unusual form of transport: the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world. The Central-Mid-levels system consists of twenty escalators and three moving walkways - and it runs in one direction in the morning, and another in the afternoon.
Doug Farr is an architect and planner who wrote the book Sustainable Design: Urban Design with Nature. In this talk, Farr discusses how LEED certification of buildings can only do so much since it doesn’t take into account how buildings are integrated sustainably with its surroundings. He argues that we need to think differently about we organize our cities – more densely in more compact, complete, and walkable neighborhoods – to design sustainability into the way we live. The video is an hour and 20 minutes long, but may be worth it for the ideas and case studies presented about planning and architecture design.
Dubai just opened the ultimate trophy building — the world’s tallest skyscraper, which soars a neck-craning 2,717 feet into the air — but just try getting there from the airport.
Your polite, epaulette-wearing cabdriver screeches down a 12-lane highway and — with the tower in plain sight — he goes miles past it, leading you to wonder whether he’s lost his way or is ripping you off. Only when he finally reaches an interchange and then doubles back to the tower do you realize what’s going on: Dubai wins no medals for urban planning.
