Urbanism News
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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S(e)oul scape S(E)OUL SCAPE is the exhibition that recounts the outcomes of the urban and architectural transformation that involved South Korea in the last years. After a long period of dictatorship, Korea is today at the center of a unique and unprecedented process of economic, social and cultural development which is characterizing the role of this country in the contemporary world. |
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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Cyclists Court Death Daily Before the sun rises over Miami — before the highways swell with traffic and the streets begin to hum with the sound of a million motors turning at once — the first bicycles appear. From the east — the beaches, Key Biscayne — come the racers. Clad head to toe in thousands of dollars' worth of Lycra, they glide along in tight, silent packs, their wheels producing a collective whirring like a hive of wasps set loose. From the west come the construction workers, mounted on cheap, heavy mountain bikes, outfitted with hard hats and packed lunches. |
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Design steps up in the fight against obesity Two in three men and three in four women in England don’t get enough exercise, but the good news is that the answer lies on our doorstep. CABE has long argued that the design of your neighbourhood really does influence whether you’re fit in the long term or whether you’re going to gradually just put on weight. |
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Green With Style Around the corner from the famed Alte Pinakothek in Munich's museum district, evidence of architectural progress is becoming visible. The building, the Brandhorst Museum, scheduled to open early next year, is on course to become Europe's most energy-efficient museum. But the initial impact of the building is its beauty -- the shimmering flesh tones of its façade, which on closer inspection turn out to be created by 35,000 ceramic bars in dozens of colors, and its harmoniously balanced shape made up of assorted squares and rectangles. |
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NIMBY Comes to China
Shanghai's People's Square has been the site of vigorous middle-class protests over the impact of a high-speed maglev train on local quality of life. |
Sunday, January 27, 2008
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The New American Gentry The word "gentrification" conjures up images of once-poor urban neighborhoods invaded by cappuccino bars and million-dollar condos. Now, broad swaths of rural America -- from New England to the Rocky Mountain West -- are being gussied up, too. |
Saturday, January 26, 2008
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It's worse than you think -- but better, too The assignment sounded extreme, even preposterous: Take a 2,700-mile road trip and never leave Detroit. Starting in late May and finishing in late September, I drove all of the city's 2,100 or so streets -- from 7 Mile Road, which is 261 blocks long, to Detroit Street, which is only one. |
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Video - Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and GoLoco Robin Chase is the founder of the omnipresent and paradigm shifting Zipcar, and now the founder of 21st century carpooling and ride share system GoLoco. Robin shared her thoughts—and warnings—on the bitter reality surrounding carbon emissions and our future. Robin expelled the myths, highlighted the realities and offered solutions. Just as Zipcar revolutionized urban travel, GoLoco is poised to change the way we think about navigating, socially and physically, the world we live in. |
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L.A.'s trash goal: No waste by 2030 Hoping to make landfills relics of the past, the city of Los Angeles wants all 3,600 tons of trash picked up daily from its residents to be recycled or turned into compost or alternative energy by 2030. Under the plan, the city could make up to $100million annually by sending the extra tons of garbage to newly created recycling facilities around Los Angeles instead of dumping them in landfills. |
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My Other Car is a Bright Green City Today's cars are costly, dangerous and an ecological nightmare. What if the solution to the problems they create, though, has more to do with where we live than what we drive? |
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Developer ready to face public opinion with historic property A D.C. developer has just posted its face -- well, its logo, anyway -- on the otherwise youthful Facebook.com. After purchasing the "Blue Castle," a prominent fixture in the Southeast neighborhood around the new baseball stadium, Madison Marquette created a Facebook profile for the property, seeking community input about the property's future, said Kurt Ivey, a Madison Marquette senior vice president. |
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China says cuts bicycle thefts by half China has halved the number of bicycles stolen to about 2 million in the past nine months, police said on Thursday, following a campaign to clamp down on theft months before its capital hosts the Olympics. |
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NEXT-GENE: Ao-Di Grand Land Architecture International Project Twenty architects from various countries of the world are meeting in Taiwan, with the objective of designing 20 houses on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, specifically the landscape of the Northeast Coast National Scenic Area, about 50 minutes away from Taipei. The master plan provides an intimate and immediate relationship with open spaces, while at the same time offering the possibility for a direct comparison among different approaches to architectural research. |
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Germany begins ban on polluting cars in city centres Cars are stuck in a traffic jam on a road near Erfurt, eastern Germany, in 2005. Three German cities, including the capital Berlin, began implementing a new air pollution system on Tuesday that bans the dirtiest vehicles from their centres. |
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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We'd like 250,000 of these, please If Noah were here today, he would no doubt be ordering his timber. In an increasingly familiar scenario, the sandbags, mops, wellies and canoes have been out over the past week, as parts of Britain dealt with another spate of torrential rain, burst riverbanks and flash flooding. The outlook is for more of the same. Last month, a government panel ranked flooding alongside terrorism in terms of national threat, and advocated extreme measures. And it's not just a British problem. Last year saw catastrophic floods across the world: in Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, Mexico - even Australia. |
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Envisioning the San Francisco of 2108 As far as their business goes, the 18 employees of Pfau Architecture should be focused this week on design jobs that include a private house in Stinson Beach and a classroom building for City College of San Francisco. Instead, the firm put its clients on hold to tackle something larger: a vision of what San Francisco could look like 100 years from now. |
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New test for developers in Maine: climate change Huge development around Moosehead Lake would create 500,000 tons of CO2 over 50 years, environmentalists say. |
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Pasadena to test 'walkability' for first time Checklists in hand, more than 100 volunteers will fan out across downtown Saturday for the first evaluation of the city's "walkability." |
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London clamps down on cyclists Ken Livingstone has fought for low emissions in the capital, so why are the authorities now targeting bicycles? |
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Not Your Typical Redevelopment Board With little else to do, teenagers in the rural Indiana town of San Pierre have found a new place to hang out: community meetings. But they're not just hanging out, they are actively participating in the planning and revitalization of their community. |
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Sacking the Decks: How Parking Garages Got Ugly Parking garage connoisseur Shannon Sanders McDonald warms to her subject with a peculiar enthusiasm. Displaying the messianic zeal of someone who champions lost languages, forgotten old-model cars, or bugs, snakes and other dangerous animals, she laughs a little too early and a little too long at her own jokes. |
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Building the future: eco-architecture Home gave three leading eco-architects different budgets and one brief: to create a sustainable urban family dwelling. |
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Women in Green: A Conversation with the Authors Is there a greener gender? Q&A with Kira Gould and Lance Hosey about their motivation and experience for writing the book, and what have they learned from the process. |
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
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Philip Pullman: new brand of environmentalism Climate change, say the pessimists, will destroy our world. But in an exclusive interview, acclaimed author Philip Pullman champions a new brand of environmentalism that offers us all hope. |
Sunday, January 20, 2008
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Norway says aims to go carbon neutral by 2030 Norway, which last year set what it called the world's most ambitious target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, said on Thursday it aimed to go "carbon neutral" in 2030, which is 20 years earlier than its previous target. |
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How to liberate the soul of your home
Once, architects were only interested in building great landmarks. But today, some of the most radical and innovative work in Britain is being realised on a domestic scale, as top designers turn humble house extensions into Modernist palaces. |
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It Takes an Eco-Village In 1981, when 22-year-old David Tollas moved from Michigan to live in the middle of the Arizona desert as part of the Arcosanti community, his friends and family looked at him as a radical idealist. Located 65 miles north of Phoenix, Arcosanti was born in 1970 out of the vision of one man, Italian architect Paolo Soleri. |
Thursday, January 17, 2008
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Visions of a Brave New Washington In the year 2108, after the general collapse of society, Washington residents will flee the violent decay of the city and migrate to utopian "ecohubs" in the middle of the Potomac River. |
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Cities of the Future, Part 1: The Hyperstructure Concept Future cities should be compact habitat alternatives to urban sprawl and the single family housing concept. Local resources would be maximized and logistical systems for people, goods and services would be especially efficient. |
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
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Walkability = Livability = Billions Could it possibly be that Washington, for years bashed by politicians, its population shrinking and, at one point, almost bankrupt, has become a model of how the entire nation might smartly develop in the 21st century? |
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
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How Cities' Climate-Change Promise Became an Afterthought If mankind is going to overcome the challenge that climate change presents, cities will play an important role. The federal government can require more efficient cars. The state government can mandate how much electricity will come from renewable sources. But cities have the power to set land-use policies. They decide whether energy efficient appliances will be required in new homes, whether green building standards will be employed and where development will occur. |
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Planners Need To Work With Difference
There are many voices in the process of community planning. To create effective plans, planners need to welcome these many voices and their respective differences, not suppress them into consensus. |
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Welcome to paradise How do you co-ordinate a £1bn budget, 40 buildings, 22 architects and 90 consultants to deliver the most ambitious regeneration scheme Liverpool has ever seen? |
Monday, January 14, 2008
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New city plazas: Digital or not, interactivity key to great design In San Francisco, two relatively new pedestrian lanes - Mint Plaza and Yerba Buena Lane - each linked to Jessie Street and within walking distance of each other, signal the rise of interactive design emerging and melding with street life downtown. These clearings in the urban jungle point to what we can expect as the city grows; the best designs and spaces will be interactive in the way these plazas are, with new stores, arts and music venues and digital playgrounds. |
Saturday, January 12, 2008
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Slumming it is better than bulldozing it This is going to be a big year for the wrecking ball. By the time it's over, two of the world's most famous neighbourhoods will be gone, replaced with scaffolds, cement mixers and the sort of well-meaning mistakes that have scarred the cities of the West for decades. |
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Abandon thy car? Should local governments encourage bike commuting as a way to alleviate the area’s chronic traffic congestion? |
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Greetings, Earthlings. Your New Restroom Is Ready. When New York City’s open-armed embrace of tourists finally extends beyond the boundaries of Earth to creatures from outer space, these visitors will find themselves right at home in Madison Square Park’s sleek, shiny new public toilet. |
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Ghost Malls Malls aren't turning into haunted houses just yet, but they may be on their way, thanks to the recent wholesale shuttering of national retail chains. |
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Las Vegas to Build World’s First 30 Story Vertical Farm Las Vegas the tourist mecca of the World is set to begin development of the World’s first vertical farm. The $200 million dollar project is designed to be a functional and profitable working farm growing enough food to feed 72,000 people for a year and provide another tourist attraction to the city that does everything in a larger than life way. |
Friday, January 11, 2008
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Beijing’s Olympic Quest: Turn Smoggy Sky Blue Every day, monitoring stations across the city measure air pollution to determine if the skies above this national capital can officially be designated blue. It is not an act of whimsy: with Beijing preparing to play host to the 2008 Olympic Games, the official Blue Sky ratings are the city’s own measuring stick for how well it is cleaning up its polluted air. |
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Form Follows Feathers: Bird-Friendly Architecture Santiago Calatrava’s 2,000-foot-tall Chicago Spire is a lofty experiment in bird-safe design. The residential skyscraper is rising in the midst of a large year-round bird population and in the path of a major migratory flyway on the shores of Lake Michigan, but its glass is designed to be visible to birds, which should help prevent fatal collisions. |
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Cyclists' cellphones help monitor air pollution Cellphones used by bicycle couriers are monitoring air pollution in Cambridge, UK, and beaming the data back to a research lab. |
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A Place So Crowded, Nobody Goes There Anymore The increased congestion in the Times Square area has some real estate professionals wondering whether the tourist destination could become a victim of its own success. |
Thursday, January 10, 2008
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Study: Drivers on cells clogging traffic Drivers talking on cell phones are probably making your commute even longer, concludes a new study. |
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Only in Portland: Move by Bike! These days it seems nearly every month somebody, somewhere in Portland, Oregon is moving from one house to another using only bike power. |
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
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Bogotá, the Proud Revival of a City Arcam Amsterdam presents ‘Bogotá, the Proud Revival of City’. The exhibition displays the efforts of Colombia's capital during the last 15 years to manage problematic spatial, social and economic aspects characterising most Latin-American megalopolises. |
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'Village of the future' given green light
The first phase of ‘greener’ homes planned for the new urban village of Cheswick, near Bristol, has been given the ‘green light’ by planners. |
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Are the suburbs a health hazard? The suburbs are a nightmare — a total planning disaster. People move in because they're affordable, and then they can't do anything. They're in the car all the time. You get this big house, but studies show that the rate of heart attack increases with the length of time you are stuck in traffic. |
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Forget oil, the new global crisis is food BMO strategist Donald Coxe warns credit crunch and soaring oil prices will pale in comparison to looming catastrophe. |
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Our idea of cities needs a rethink Our urban planning and zoning laws are tied to needs of an out-of-date industrial economy. |
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
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Facts: urban settings as a social determinant of health Fact 1: Of the three billion people who live in urban settings, an estimated one billion live in slums. |
Monday, January 7, 2008
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Getting ready for a no-growth future Can you do well without having more? In these austere and bloat-sapping weeks after the holidays, a lot of us find ourselves asking that question. And it's one that the whole world is pondering at the moment, since it appears that 2008, for many countries if not the whole world, will be a year without economic growth. |
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Street Smarts This coming year, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population will be living in cities. Cities are engines of growth, but cheek-by-jowl existence also poses a problem or two. Here’s how a few are making it work: |
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The Windy Necropolis Want to know how a city used to work? Talk to the dead. |
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Haven on earth Wool-filled walls, water-gathering whiskey barrels and a roof that needs weeding. How a Brighton brownfield site turned green. |
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A Borrowed Place on Borrowed Time For more than 100 years, Hong Kong has continually razed and rebuilt itself, evolving from trading post to industrial hub to global financial center. But the impulse toward redevelopment here is facing increasingly urgent challenges from residents hoping to save the few tangible remains of the city's rich history. |
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A World Full of Grand Plans Some of the biggest cities in the world are proposing the most ambitious real-estate projects in a generation, a sign of growing confidence in urban living even as the current financial landscape grows bleaker. |
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Design visionary to present futuristic 'building for today' William McDonough - recognised by Time magazine as a 'Hero for the Planet' - was commissioned by Fortune magazine to come up with a design for a skyscraper office tower that would anticipate a 100 percent positive impact on people and place. Since his firm of architects embarked on the project, he has been approached by numerous companies keen to turn the idea into reality. |
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Bikes outsell cars in Oz “Soaring petrol prices, concern over climate change, crippling traffic congestion and the desire to lead healthier lifestyles all contributed to the record breaking year,” said Elliot Fishman, policy advisor at the Cycling Promotion Fund. |
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5 new mega-cities in Delhi by 2021 Those worried sick about Delhi’s population explosion and its housing requirements need not press the panic button. For, five new mega townships will come up in the capital by 2021. These will be self-contained sub-cities with hospitals, universities, markets, amusement parks, exhibition centres, art galleries and a modern public transport system. |
Friday, January 4, 2008
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Ecological Strategies in Today's Art Ecomedia - Ecological Strategies in Today's Art, presents projects founded on progressive ecological models and conceive utopian horizons in the process. It peruses fundamental considerations concerning ecosystems, sustainability, renewable energy sources, as well as visions of the future. |
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Mayor urges city to go on a diet The mayor has issued a New Year's challenge to residents of Oklahoma City. Mick Cornett wants them to shed a million pounds by watching what they eat. |
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Why life is good A dangerous gap exists between our personal experience, which is mainly happy, and our view of a society in decline. |
Thursday, January 3, 2008
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Barratt contracted to build UK's first eco-village Britain's biggest housebuilder is to build England's first eco-village, the housing and planning minister, Yvette Cooper, announced today. |
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A Whole Kansas Town Is Going LEED Mark this up to the popularity of sustainability; the tornado-damaged town of Greensburg, Kansas, has announced last month that the City Council has adopted a resolution that all city buildings greater than 4,000 square feet must be certified LEED Platinum. These buildings will also be required to reduce energy use by 42 percent over current building code requirements. |
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Famous cities don't have happy residents Statistics Canada has just released a fascinating study of how people feel about Canadian cities. There's a big surprise. Cities that rank high in international surveys of livability, such as Vancouver and Victoria and Toronto, score poorly with their local residents, when ranked for satisfiction among residents. |
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Cabe champions design competitions An exhibition opening at New London Architecture in London on 17 January 2008 will show what design competitions can achieve – and that they are one of the best ways to procure well-designed buildings and places |
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What’s Your Consumption Factor? To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences. |
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People power to warm new building in Stockholm The body heat from hundreds of thousands of people who pass through the Stockholm Central Station each day will be used to heat a new office building nearby, the project leader said Wednesday. |
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Albert Speer's Son, Urban Planner German urban planners have never been as active worldwide as they are today, and Albert Speer is the protagonist in the current success story. The son of the Nazi architect of the same name is preparing a new Olympic bid for Munich, has the ear of Moscow's mayor -- and is designing entire cities for the Chinese. |
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2008 Olympics: new towers for a new superpower Beijing today remains shrouded in smog - the product of heavy industry, three million cars and eight thousand construction sites. Tellingly, it casts the place in the same melancholy light that bathes Monet's and Whistler's depictions of London at the end of the 19th century. The cause is much the same: the capital of the world's fastest-growing economy is turning into a metropolis. |
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Modernism minus utopia There is no escaping China: Chinese art, Chinese exports, the Chinese economy, Chinese dollar reserves, Chinese growth. Next year's Olympics in Beijing are focusing the world's eager eyes on the Chinese capital. While London struggles to persuade a sceptical public about the need to spend more than £9bn, Beijing is spending more than double that. That construction costs there are around seven per cent of London's gives you some idea of what is happening. |
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Donald Shoup Plays With Parking Fees and Matchbox Cars During his recent visit to New York, Donald Shoup, professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, sat down with Open Planning Project's Mark Gorton to discuss parking policy and play with Matchbox cars on a miniature New York City street grid. |
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Apartment Prices in Manhattan Defy National Real Estate Slide As the housing market across the country continued to stagnate in the fourth quarter of last year, the market in Manhattan set a record, according to reports to be released on Thursday by four of the city’s major real estate brokerage firms. |
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Designers push to make cities more female-friendly In a neighborhood where 54% of the residents are women, 70% of the households are headed by women and 70% of the elderly are women, the broken walkway on North Sloan Street symbolizes some of the physical challenges that women in America's cities face: an unsafe urban environment that's not conducive to walking. |
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It's Way Too Easy Being Green In a high-end Mumbai neighborhood, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's personal high-rise, named Antilia, is under construction. When completed, the 24-story Ambani family home will include its own health club, terraced sky-gardens, and 50-seat screening room (the reclusive Ambani is reputed to be a huge Bollywood fan). Antilia also boasts three helipads and a 168-car garage. This may sound like transportation overkill, if not outright eco-terrorism, for a family of six. But despite its 38-to-1 car-to-person ratio, Antilia has been billed by its American architects as a "green building." And under the leading standards for green architecture, the building will likely qualify. |
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Better Ways Guess it was alright for another laugh. Since my best friend hadn’t killed the cyclist he drove off the road thirty years ago. We were joy riding that cube van it was his job to drive. Not much clue what we were laughing about in the first place. Most anything. You’re high off the ground in a cube van. Almost right up there with the truckers. Looking down on traffic. Feeling that the road is yours. Knowing what doesn’t belong had better get from your road. And fast. |
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Meatropolis This article about meat in the city will start between the most superficial of resemblance between a diagram of cuts of meat and a diagram of Manhattan neighborhoods. These are two very different things that merely look the same, aren’t they? |
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The World of Tomorrow New Year’s Day one century ago — The New York World greeted readers with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America. The title of the article was simply “1808 — 1908 — 2008.” The World began by marveling at how far America had come since 1808, then turned to the question of the future: “What will the year 2008 bring us? What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?” |
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Birth, death and shopping The Southdale shopping centre in Minnesota has an atrium, a food court, fountains and acres of parking. Its shops include a Dairy Queen, a Victoria's Secret and a purveyor of comic T-shirts. It may not seem like a landmark, as important to architectural history as the Louvre or New York's Woolworth Building. But it is. “Ohmigod!” chimes a group of teenage girls, on learning that they are standing in the world's first true shopping mall. “That is the coolest thing anybody has said to us all day.” |
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Best of the Worst in Planning for 2007 Keeping track of the weird things that occur in the planning and government world – from rules prohibiting screaming on amusement park rides to “green” cremation techniques – isn't really necessary. But someone should do it anyway. |
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The Orwell Index Here's a world map of the state of surveillance based on measures developed by Privacy International. The US takes the cake in terms of "statutory protections and privacy enforcement," where it is the worst ranking country of all. |
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Top Planning Issues of 2007 Over the course of the year, the Planetizen staff editors review and post summaries of hundreds of articles, reports, books, studies, and editorials related to planning and urban development. Now, we take a look back at 2007 and the trends and issues that defined the year in urban planning. |
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China vows 'forceful measures' to rein in rising prices Chinese President Hu Jintao has vowed "forceful measures" to curb rising food prices and address a booming real estate market that has seen property prices skyrocket, state press said yesterday. |
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Why making the scene makes good cents for the rest of us Artists are free to live and work almost anywhere, yet they tend to gravitate to places where they can rub shoulders. Who cares? Anyone interested in fostering conditions that lead to prosperity. |
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French smokers take it outside In a land where cigarettes were viewed as a sign of intellect, lighting up in cafés is now banned. |
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The Hudson Yards Proposals: Plenty of Glitz, Little Vision It is hard to believe that teams with this much assembled star power could come up with something so awesomely bad. |
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Devilish definitions In came two mastiffs, and the mice had to scamper down and run off. "Good-bye, Cousin," said the Country Mouse. "Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear." The 1970s was the decade of the country mouse. Population and industry fled urban areas for the suburbs and the country. New York City's economy collapsed and everyone said cities were finished. But they didn't die. Instead, they mutated like cartoon superheroes into jargon-generating beasts: "mega-cities", "mongrel" cities, "global" cities, "post-industrial" cities, "nodal" and "fractal" cities, "cityregions" and "post-metropoli". Even the United Nations has had trouble keeping up. Faced with 228 countries defining "urban" by as many administrative, population and infrastructure criteria, it settled on "urban agglomeration". |
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