Mr. Ratner’s Neighborhood
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.
Popularity: 66% [?]
urbanism.org
Urban news [almost] daily.Archive for Zoning
Tofino set to ban Starbucks, Tim Hortons and McDonalds
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.
Popularity: 39% [?]
Regulations make the city or vice versa?
Architecture bookshops are full of publications about fantastic architects, spectacular streets and extraordinary cities. Alex Lehnerer made a book about the regulations that shaped these cities, produced the streets, and guided the architects. Grand Urban Rules celebrates regulations as the ultimate instruments in shaping cities.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Sustainable Urbanism
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.
Popularity: 46% [?]
Whither the McMansion?
Don’t write the obituary for McMansions just yet. Although mass-produced behemoths more than 3,000-square-feet in size have only been common (and commonly criticized), since the late ’90s, home sizes have never been influenced by need alone. The builder association’s report also points out that houses ballooned most—about 1,000 square feet—during the period between 1970 and 2008, when household size dropped from 3.11 to 2.57. Homes are getting smaller now because people feel poorer, but all that will change once the recession ends and consumer confidence is restored.
Popularity: 38% [?]
Paying the Price for Grand Designs
With the property boom over, London’s planners urgently need to rethink their priorities. And that doesn’t mean looking to Prince Charles for inspiration.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Special Innovation Zone: Imagination Without Regulation
Existence is the ultimate proof of the possible. Every time a bold new project is tried, and works, we advance our sense of the achievable. Given how much transformation we need in order to meet the challenges we face, we need many more attempts at innovation, and we’re not getting them. The achievable is not advancing quickly enough.
Popularity: 26% [?]
Zone for Cloud
Pastures, forests, suburbs, cities, farms, and so on, all affect the skies in very particular spatial ways. Deforestation, for instance, has “substantially altered cloud patterns” in the Amazon; specifically, we read that “patches of trees behave as ‘green oceans’ while cleared pastures act like ‘continents’,” generating a new marbling of the local atmosphere.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Fast-food Density
In a research article published recently by the American Journal of Epidemiology, Oregon Research Institute (ORI) scientist Fuzhong Li, Ph.D., and colleagues show that a high-density of fast food outlets was associated with an increase of 3 pounds in weight and .8 inches in waist circumference among neighborhood residents who frequently ate at those restaurants.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Life on the lane
Zack Spencer will be one of Vancouver’s first homeowners to take advantage of the city’s laneway housing experiment. But is it a boon to ecological living or a recipe to crowd out single-family neighbourhoods?
Popularity: 29% [?]