Archive for Planning
September 19, 2011 · Filed under Active Transportation, Cycling, Density, Planning, Traffic
Can there be too many bikes in a city for safety? It’s not a question usually asked: the received wisdom, supported by research and backed by campaigning groups, is that the more cyclists there are, the safer the roads become for everyone.
But in Copenhagen – one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world in which 36% of its inhabitants cycle to work or school, and which has committed to increasing that figure to 50% by 2015 – there are controversial voices coming from unexpected places.
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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% [?]
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% [?]
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: 44% [?]
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% [?]
March 16, 2010 · Filed under Density, Diversity, Economics, Gentrification, Master Planning, Planning, Real Estate, Revitalization, Tall Buildings, Urban Design, Urban Structure, Zoning
Manipulative developers, shrill protesters, and a sixteen-tower glass-and-steel monster marching inexorably forward. What the battle for the soul of Brooklyn looks like—from right next door.
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Popularity: 66% [?]
March 16, 2010 · Filed under Exhibitions, Information Design, Planning, Social Justice
The exhibition ‘Otto Neurath. Gypsy Urbanism’ is dedicated to the work of the Viennese philosopher and economist Otto Neurath (1882–1945). this scientist, housing activist and museum director, who constantly worked for the advancement of participative forms of democratic exchange, collaborated with architects, designers and artists of his day – including Franz Schuster, Josef Frank, and Margarete Schütte- Lihotzky – and with protagonists of the so-called Vienna circle, of which he was a member.
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Popularity: 36% [?]
February 12, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Diversity, Planning, Public Space, Revitalization, Urban Design
Lower Manhattan, specifically Greenwich South, which is bordered by the Financial District, the World Trade Center site, Battery Park, and Battery Park City. This urban plan to reinvigorate the neighborhood is based on five overarching principles to improve connectivity and resident and business retention. From this plan emerged a 10-team charrette to develop specific building strategies and a list of action items to jump-start redevelopment.
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Popularity: 47% [?]
February 12, 2010 · Filed under Active Transportation, Cycling, Health, Mobility, Pedestrians, Planning, Play
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.
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Popularity: 43% [?]
February 8, 2010 · Filed under Architecture, Authenticity, Beauty, Place making, Planning, Urbanization
In chapter eight of Anthony M. Tung’s erudite and impressive Preserving the World’s Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis, there is a passage that stopped me in my proverbial tracks and hasn’t left my thoughts since. Tung is writing about Amsterdam at the dawn of the 20th century:
As parts of the inner city became slums and were threatened with clearance, and as picturesque canals were filled in to create new roads and better circulation, elements of the historic environment began to be eliminated. Growing numbers of citizens became alarmed and called for preservation of the historic center. In addition, a new ring of speculative housing began to surround the old metropolis. Numerous Amsterdammers began to ask that the expansion of the city meet a reasonable standard of beauty.
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Popularity: 34% [?]
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