Urbanism News
Monday, April 30, 2007
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The Tower - An Anachronism Awaiting Rebirth? Is the tall building an anachronism? Does it, like sprawling suburbia and out-of-town shopping malls, seem doomed to belong only to what is increasingly referred to as “the oil interval,” that now fading and historically brief moment when easily extracted oil was abundant and cheap? The answer is probably “Yes,” particularly for the conventional freestanding, air-conditioned, artificially lit tower that guzzles vast amounts of energy and is built for short-term profit out of high-embodied-energy materials, many of them petroleum derivatives. Such buildings are utterly contrary to the requirements of times of increasingly insecure and dwindling oil supplies, in which even the United States must one day embrace the quest for more sustainable lifestyles and forms of development. Energy-wasteful buildings also offend values held by more and more people. |
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Mixed use is the answer Everybody loves walkable small towns and cities where most worthwhile things are close at hand, but not everybody wants to live in them and spend hours commuting to and from work. The only alternatives in a big city are tight little neighbourhoods or, much more likely, mixed-use developments, which are becoming more popular and varied with greater downtown "live, work, play" intensification. |
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Looking Back at Moses A trio of New York museums explores the voluminous works of controversial urban planner Robert Moses. |
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Rethinking Robert Moses What if New York’s notorious master builder wasn’t such a bad guy after all? |
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Automatic for the People A space-aged and space-efficient alternative in parking arrives in New York City. |
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Single and green? If you feel as though no one else understands your overly close relationship with the cat, you're not alone. The kingdom of one is the fastest-growing type of household in Canada, climbing from 2 per cent to more than 14 per cent in the past 50 years, with the figures steadily rising. The new solo-living cohort are young (25 to 44), far more flush than the thrifty jar-reusing widows that once ruled the one-person roost and, as it turns out, the biggest consumers of energy, land and household goods. Now that their numbers are shooting up, people who live alone represent what Joanna Williams, a sustainable development professor at University College London, calls "an environmental time bomb." |
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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood They came in sweatshirts and fuzzy slippers, suits and oxfords, seeking chocolate muffins and Cheerios. Some grabbed a yogurt and left. Others lingered. In the room high above the Hudson River, they relished the food, the vistas and one another’s company for as long as they could stretch a New York minute. So began another morning at Orion, a 60-story condominium on West 42nd Street with a glass body and a Club Med soul, where residents in anything from pajamas to pinstripes can enjoy a taste of camaraderie with their free (yes, free) daily breakfast, Starbucks coffee included. |
Saturday, April 28, 2007
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There and Back Again Last year, Midas, the muffler company, in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, gave an award for America’s longest commute to an engineer at Cisco Systems, in California, who travels three hundred and seventy-two miles—seven hours—a day, |
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When development and tradition clash Last month, in Nandigram, West Bengal, police forced their way into barricaded villages slated for displacement. The villagers were protesting the establishment of a special economic zone for the chemical industry and the forcible expropriation of approximately 22,000 acres of fertile farmland devoted to the cultivation of rice and betel leaf. After the dust cleared, at least 14 peasants were dead. |
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Civil Twilight Team Wins 2007 Metropolis Next Generation® Design Prize Members of San Francisco design collective awarded $10,000 for energy-conserving "Lunar-Resonant Streetlights" proposal. |
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Green roofs strike a chord with designers, builders Garden-topped buildings are suddenly in vogue, but experts disagree as to whether they are worth the expense. |
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Can we turn parking lots into paradise?
Architect aims to transform Toronto's 'Green P' parking lots from featureless rectangles to mini-parks. |
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Bringing green to the concrete under our feet
Problem: Too little room for trees to grow in downtown Toronto. Solution: An artificial forest of undulating umbrellas? |
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Street smarts Toronto is getting used to splashy buildings, but our public spaces could use a little imagination too. |
Friday, April 27, 2007
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Jon Jerde redefines the urban experience Jerde has redefined the urban landscape with “experience architecture” as magnified in the structures he designed and built for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the mega complex of Roppongi Hills in Tokyo and Steve Wynn’s Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. |
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World House Our mission is to create a Web-based housing-design system adaptable to local context worldwide. |
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China to Force Rain Ahead of Olympics Chance of showers during the 2008 Beijing Olympics: 50 percent. But Chinese meteorologists have a plan to bring sunshine. The meteorologists say they can force rain in the days before the Olympics, through a process known as cloud-seeding, to clean the air and ensure clear skies. China has been tinkering with artificial rainmaking for decades, but whether it works is a matter of debate among scientists. |
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Alsop revitalizes urban space From an old New York power station springs a fanciful ensemble that could teach us a post-industrial thing or two. |
Thursday, April 26, 2007
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Call it green medieval Planned hamlet homes have both 12th century and modern inspiration. |
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Low carbon tower to be built in Dubai The first low carbon commercial tower in Dubai will be built in Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). Atkins Middle East is currently undertaking the concept design for the 400m, 66-storey office tower known as ‘The Lighthouse'. Atkins is aiming to set a new benchmark in green building by reducing total energy consumption in the tower by up to 65% and water consumption by up to 40%. |
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High rise city on the water This 40-hectare, Ł5.5 billion development, forms part of Liverpool’s World Heritage Site, stretching from Princes Dock in the South to Bramley Moore Dock in the North, and will create a vibrant new district for the city. |
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New resolve on Earth day U.S. buildings account for nearly the same carbon emissions as the economies of Japan, France and the United Kingdom combined. U.S. energy consumption will increase, an expected 37 percent over the next 20 years, a significant contributor to an expected annual global energy consumption jump of 54 percent. |
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Ancient Lights "Ancient lights" is a colloquialism for the "right to light," guaranteed under English law, whereby windows that have seen twenty years' worth of "uninterrupted" daylight cannot be blocked by the construction of new buildings. |
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City birds sing for silent nights Robins in urban areas are singing at night because it is too noisy during the day, researchers suggest. |
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
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Studying Early China, To Learn Why Civilizations Rise And Fall In the Yellow River valley of northern China, Zhichun Jing digs through the remains of long-ago cities to find insights for modern survival. Over the past 10 years, Jing has been excavating the cities of the late Shang Dynasty. Flourishing between 1,200 and 1,050 BC, the Shang was one of the first literate civilizations in China and East Asia. Its last capital city was Yinxu, where the present-day city of Anyang now stands. |
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As people rediscover inner cities, will Detroit be next? In his lecture Monday evening, Fishman said while Detroit lags behind virtually all of big-city America in experiencing a rebirth, he believes the city will, someday, see its long hoped-for renaissance. The return to cities is a powerful trend, Fishman said, "and as expectations of urban living rise...this is going to come to Detroit as well." |
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Cities peddle parking for bicycles Communities hope that valet and other services will encourage residents to use bikes for commuting and doing errands. |
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Media City plans revealed A Public plaza twice the size of Trafalgar Square will be created as part of the BBC's new base at Salford Quays. |
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The power of No A Harvard professor argues that the secret to a better Boston -- and a better nation -- is to learn the creative power of rejection. |
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My, how the city has grown, and not all of it for the good Surveying the urban landscape in his 1965 book "The City Is the Frontier," Charles Abrams described how "the flight to suburbia in America has taken on the semblance of a flight from scourge." |
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In Las Vegas, Too Many Hotels Are Never Enough Stephen A. Wynn, the hotel and gambling impresario, still remembers the first time he was asked if he and other developers had lost their minds building so many casino hotels here. It was the mid-1970s, when Las Vegas had about 35,000 rooms. He was asked that same question in the 1980s, while building the 3,000-room Mirage, and again in the early 1990s. By that time Las Vegas was home to more hotel rooms — 106,000 — than any other city in the country. |
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Planning panel rejects status quo Unwilling to tolerate shoddy development any longer, the Los Angeles Planning Commission is floating a list of 14 bold principles under the telling title "Do Real Planning." Some of the principles the commission released last week had a familiar ring — putting more housing and jobs near mass transit and combating "mansionization" of neighborhoods, for example. |
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
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Top of the stops The most impressive new building in Melbourne is the Ł290m Southern Cross railway station. Its architects are Grimshaw, a British practice based in London. And the most impressive new building in Manchester is the 16-storey, Ł160m Civil Justice Centre. Its architects are Denton Corker Marshall (DCM), an Australian practice based in Melbourne. |
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The middle class have hijacked the English countryside for themselves Unless the urban majority has a sense of entitlement to the land, they're hardly going to become the eco-consumers we all need. |
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Massachusetts steps up climate rules for developers In a major change to Massachusetts environmental policy, private developers will now be required to estimate the greenhouse gases their large-scale projects will produce and reduce them with measures such as energy-efficient lighting, alternative fuels, or commuter shuttles |
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China Plans the City of the Future: It's Big, Green, and Quick to Build Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world — the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak. |
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Moscow's suburb for billionaires Suddenly we plunged out of the forest, and in to a different world. It was a little like a scene from Doctor Who. One minute we were in Russia, the next in Beverly Hills. |
Monday, April 23, 2007
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Where we live may be to blame for rising obesity Because he was going to graduate school, retired environmental researcher John Holtzclaw left San Jose and a job that had him driving 25,000 miles a year. His bicycle became his primary form of transportation. After graduation, he settled in an apartment in the Russian Hill-Chinatown area and gave up his car altogether. During those middle years when most of us gain girth, Holtzclaw lost 30 pounds bicycling and walking up the steep hills. |
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Understanding sprawl Far from being evil conspirators, developers are more like visionary dreamers satisfying a public need. |
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Super-sized malls raise concerns A building boom is in full swing as developers reinvent the shopping experience. But some fear traffic gridlock, other woes. |
Saturday, April 21, 2007
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Of Cars, Dogs, Golf, and Bad Feng Shui: An Interview with Jeffrey Inaba Jeffrey Inaba is very busy. He heads Inaba Projects; he teaches architectural theory and design studios at Columbia (where he is the founding director of C-Lab) and SCI-Arc (where he and Paul Nakazawa run SCIFI, the Southern California Institute for Future Initiatives); and he regularly contributes to a wide variety of periodicals and books, not the least of which is Great Leap Forward: The Harvard Design School Project on the City. |
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The loft re-imagined Razor wire and Zen gardens. Graffiti and secure parking. Loft life in Los Angeles is both edgy and comfortable -- a hybrid style of urban living that's all our own. |
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City of the future? For four days until last Sunday, the Museum of Anthropology hosted “Architecture in St. Petersburg 2007,” a special exhibit put on by the Union of Architectural Firms or OAM (a self-described “symbol of enterprise, quality of services and security of success”), and the Pro Arte Institute, an organization founded in 1999 to promote contemporary culture in the fields of visual art, music and dance in St Petersburg. |
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Working on the public domain Architectural Positions is a series of seminars at Delft University of Technology in which the relation between the public domain and architecture and modernity is questioned in different ways. The format of the seminars allows is two architects to give their views on the theme, following an introduction by various eminent thinkers and architects. On Thursday March 22 Felix Claus and Kas Oosterhuis were invited to shed light on their ideas about temporality and the public domain after an introduction from René Boomkens. |
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Who wouldn't rather go to a school like this? Eight years ago, the pupils at Kingsdale School in south London can't have much enjoyed looking out of the window. For one thing, the graffiti epidemic had reached such proportions that the school had stopped calling out the glaziers every time a pane was tagged. For another, the view must have been pretty hard to take. Immediately next door stands Dulwich College, a fee-paying school where places are as sought after as any in London. |
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Bloomberg to Unveil Long-Term Vision for City With New York’s population expected to grow by one million in two decades, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will call on Sunday for a raft of ambitious and sometimes contentious proposals that are intended to ease traffic congestion, reduce air pollution, build housing, improve mass transit and develop abandoned industrial land. |
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Education, education, conservation: Schools go carbon neutral This week the British Goverment has pledged that every new secondary will be carbon neutral. And there's one school in Liverpool that the rest can take a lesson from. |
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Earth Day Voices: William McDonough Design is the first signal of human intention. And we need a new design. As Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” |
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A Vision for Toronto's Western Border Imagination still has a fighting chance in the City of Toronto. Ideas are being floated around for the creation of gateways to the city, and the initial design for a flotilla of 24 stainless-steel masts by Sweeny Sterling Finlayson & Co. Architects deserves our attention. |
Thursday, April 19, 2007
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Curbs on pavement snacks aim to thwart Delhi belly Capital's street kitchens face closure amid hygiene drive ahead of 2010 Games. |
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Working on the public domain Architectural Positions is a series of seminars at Delft University of Technology in which the relation between the public domain and architecture and modernity is questioned in different ways. |
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A City of Capital London is diverse, dynamic and rich. It is also unequal, expensive and congested—and getting fuller every year. Can London's socialist mayor preside over a hyper-capitalist city-state while keeping it a decent place to live for most citizens? |
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Will Alsop's designs Middlehaven at the former Middlebrough docks The development is centred around waterfront land at the former Middlesbrough docks. It will include 750 homes, significant office space and leisure facilities, including a hotel, destination retail, bars and restaurants. |
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The Ranch House Anomaly In his new book, Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville, Witold Rybczynski follows the design, construction, and marketing of a new residential subdivision over the course of several years. In the process, he explains how modern homes and communities are built. In yesterday's excerpt, the first of three, Rybczynski examined why we live in houses. Today's excerpt explains how Americans fell in and out of love with the ranch house. Wednesday's slide show follows the evolution of New Daleville step-by-step, from cornfield to subdivision. |
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Why Do We Live in Houses, Anyway? In his new book, Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville, Witold Rybczynski follows the design, construction, and marketing of a new residential subdivision over the course of several years. In the process, he explains how modern homes and communities are built. In today's excerpt, the first of three, Rybczynski examines why we live in houses. Tomorrow's excerpt explains how Americans fell in and out of love with the ranch house. Wednesday's slide show follows the evolution of New Daleville step-by-step, from cornfield to subdivision. |
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Back to the playground American children, overprotected and overprogrammed, have ever less time and space for play. But an eclectic collection of advocates is fighting back, designing bold new playgrounds that are manifestoes on the importance of fun. |
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Lessons from Gritty Brits
When architect Niall McLaughlin defines the “post-industrial landscape,” it could seem out-of-place and academic. After all, what does this cantering Irish brogue and the hard-sell confidence of a London professional have to do with rusting steel mills; with, as he defines it, a landscape emerging from a crisis of place, of labor, and identity. Architecture for a place “that found its identity in something that the people did, and which they’ve now lost.” |
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Cities For Sale If you live in or near a big city, you may not realize that neoliberalism is fiendishly taking over your environ. No, it's not just the Starbucks by your office, or the Gap that just opened in the once-edgy neighborhood. It's also the high-rise condominium apartment building going up over the subway station, the new sports arena downtown, the industrial loft conversion, and even the brownstone getting flipped in that sketchy neighborhood. |
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Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken has always been ahead of his time. In 1966, he co-founded Erewhon Trading Company, the country’s first natural foods business. Later he launched several successful sustainability-focused companies, including the garden-tool boutique Smith & Hawken, often cited for its environmental awareness. Hawken continued breaking new ground with several books on socially responsible business. His 1993 release The Ecology of Commerce went on to become a cornerstone of business-school curricula. |
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Hopes for a Renaissance After Exodus in St. Louis Cities, like most living things, have sensitive spots. Here in the old “Gateway to the West,” the subject of population loss is one of the touchiest. |
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Europe Plans For Sustainable 'Transport of Tomorrow' An American transportation planner reports from the 17th annual Polis Conference -- where European city leaders recently gathered to exchange advice on innovative local transportation strategies -- and wonders what lessons U.S. cities can learn from its counterparts in the E.U. |
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Hudson World Bridge An architect's proposal to span the Hudson River would be a gathering place like no other. |
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
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Black Cloud Drive one day less and look how much carbon monoxide you'll keep out of the air we breathe. |
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Speeding drivers take young passengers on deadly ride Two in three young people say they have been a passenger in a speeding car, and more than half of those put their lives at risk by not asking the driver to slow down, Co-operative Insurance (CIS) and Brake reveal in a survey of 4,500 young people. |
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Architect's future city model: one multiuser house Architect Hitoshi Abe has created a design for cities of the future that creatively deals with the effects of an aging population. |
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Architect of optimism Brazil’s most famous architect, Oscar Niemeyer, will turn 100 in December. This has already been a busy year for him, with commemorative exhibitions opening throughout the country and homage being paid from all quarters of public life. After recovering from surgery following a fall late last year, he is not shying away from public attention. |
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Mayor aims to cut city's greenhouse emissions The city of Boston must steeply reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its vehicle fleets and government buildings under a plan by Mayor Thomas M. Menino unveiled yesterday that would put the Hub at the fore of cities acting to counter global warming . |
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Cover art with a difference Novel project that cleans up graffiti earns street cred and creates turf with artistic touch. |
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
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Ł67m Eden project will show the perils of a warmer world Plans for Britain's first tourist attraction dedicated to climate change and how humans will live with increasing temperatures will be unveiled this week at the Eden Project in Cornwall. |
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Why bad planning = bad preservation Chicago is about to reveal that bad urban planning leads to bad historic preservation -- and a botched cityscape where only the developers win. The case revolves around a plan to awkwardly tether the 11-story Farwell Building, a gracious Beaux-Arts dowager at 664 N. Michigan Ave., to a 40-story condominium tower that will be crammed onto a tiny site. But it has national implications because it is the latest instance of the controversial practice called the "facade-ectomy." |
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30 Architects Sound Off about New York’s Future Ask David Childs, of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, what he thinks the most important project in New York City is right now and his reply might surprise you—not the Freedom Tower, as you might expect, but the relocation of Penn Station from its current site under Madison Square Garden into a McKim Mead & White post office across the street. |
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Planning panel approves Pitt's 'green' project The official name of the applicant, Douglas and Andry Sustainable Building LLC, was scarcely as attention-grabbing as, say, Brad Pitt's name would have been. The official language of the application -- "a request for a mixed-use planned community district overlay including residential and commercial uses in new structures in an LI light industrial district" -- was no more exciting. |
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The 'Humane Metropolis' -- Are We Ready? Cities were once celebrated as ports of trade, railway hubs, seats of smoke-belching industries. Then they became known as office and banking centers. In the late 20th century, each big town had to have its own aquarium and stadiums. Recently there's been a new mantra -- cities as magnets for ``young creatives'' in arts and entrepreneurship. |
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More Infrastructural Greening It's hard to tire of projects that involve wallpapering, paneling, and roofing urban structures with plant life. Though it's becoming a more common design approach for enhancing air quality, catching runoff, highlighting the "green" aspects of a building, and sometimes even providing food, it always has an unexpected effect, accustomed as we are to surfaces made with impermeable and dull materials. Three projects that passed through our suggestion box in the last few weeks address urban density and CO2 emissions by incorporating vegetation into structures designed for crowded cities. |
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A Road Not Taken, Much Once an Indian path, then a busy wood-plank toll road that connected the farms of Long Island to the Brooklyn ferry docks, Jamaica Avenue appears today to be decidedly average in everything except length, stuffed fowl notwithstanding. The street, which extends roughly 15 miles from eastern Brooklyn all the way to the Nassau County line, is not up-and-coming, it is not celebrated in song or letters, and it is not well traveled by people who don’t live nearby. |
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A Tale of Two Cities An interview with Toronto's Robert Freedman and Vancouver's Brent Toderian explores the attitudes and ambitions of these two city-builders. |
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Disparities in impact fees grow wide in Tucson Should Burger King pay for a police car? The city of Tucson wants to charge additional one-time fees on new developments to pay for new police, fire and public facilities. More than 30 jurisdictions in Arizona already have impact fees for these areas. |
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Billboard ban in Săo Paulo angers advertisers Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom. |
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Sears catalogue houses: part history, part restoration, mostly obsession She speaks with the fervour of a woman possessed. In the cadence of a grange hall auctioneer, Laurie Flori jabs a finger at each house on her street, every one ordered from Sears, Roebuck and Co. "That's a Carlin," she pronounces. "That's a Whitehall. That's a Warrenton. That's a Lebanon." Starting nearly a century ago, these stately names were bestowed upon a modest line of homes that could be purchased by mail. To Flori, they are verses in a hymn to working-class America, to a time when things were built better and cost less, when everything in the Sears catalogue looked bigger and better than ordinary life. |
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The Lower Don's rise Where river meets lake is a forgotten bit of city. But four plans show how it could become one of T.O.'s most desirable areas. |
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Tired, headachy and cranky? Blame the commute For seven years, Gail Ennis has been spending as many as three hours a day behind the wheel of her Subaru, commuting between her law office in Washington and her home on Gibson Island, Md. What she's gotten out of the 100-mile daily round trip is sciatica — a shooting pain down one leg — and a lack of time for exercise. |
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The New Suburban Poverty Stories of downward mobility in America's suburbs have not exactly cluttered the headlines over the past decade. Gated communities of dream homes, mansions ringed by man-made lakes and glass-cube office parks: These are the images typically evoked by the posh, supersized subdivisions built during the 1990s technology boom. Low-wage jobs, houses under foreclosure, families unable to afford food and medical care are not. But venture beyond the city limits of any major metropolitan area today, and you will encounter these things, in forms less concentrated--and therefore less visible--than in the more blighted pockets of our cities perhaps, but with growing frequency all the same. |
Monday, April 16, 2007
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Walk This Way Homeowners want walkable neighborhoods and a sense of community—and city planners are taking note. Imagine how your week might look in a community with a range of transportation options. Monday is sunny and pleasant; at lunchtime, you walk from work to a European-style open-air café. On Wednesday, you leave the car at home and walk to the nearby light-rail stop, but Thursday you need to take the kids to T-ball and stop by the grocery store after work, so you drive the flex-fuel minivan. Friday you again commute by rail, then walk from work to a nearby shopping center for dinner and a movie. Saturday morning you carry your bicycle onto the city bus, which you ride to a lakeside park for a day of bike riding. |
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Designs released for Lower Don Lands The designs for the Lower Don Lands from the 4 shortlisted teams in the “Innovative Design Competition for the Lower Don Lands” being run by the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation were released today in conjunction with an exhibition. |
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Battle Over the Banlieues “If I could get my hands on Sarkozy, I’d kill him.” I had asked Mamadou, a wiry young man wearing gray camouflage pants and a tank top, what he thought of France’s former minister of the interior, who is also the right’s standard-bearer in this spring’s presidential elections. “I’d kill him,” he continued and then paused as if savoring the thought. “Then I’d go to prison. And when I got out, I’d be a hero.” We were in Les Bosquets, one of the impoverished housing projects that are scattered across the banlieues, the heavily immigrant working-class suburbs that surround Paris. I asked Mamadou’s friend Ahmad if he felt the same way. He said he would not go that far. “I wouldn’t kill him, no,” he said. “But I hate him. We all hate him.” |
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Seven Principles for a New Pittsburgh Pittsburgh is more than a city or a region. Recent decades of out-migration have resulted in a significant diaspora population that retains strong ties to its homeland. The aim of GlobalBurgh.com is to intensify this network in hopes of realizing a new geographic understanding of Pittsburgh. |
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The Power of Green One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It’s called “green.” |
Saturday, April 14, 2007
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Jim Isermann's Subway Train US artist jim isermann was commissioned to wrap the entire length of a london tube subway train in an original artwork. The trains have been used for ads before, but nothing like this, which is purely graphic and bears no text or sponsors’ logos. |
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Great myths of L.A. housing
The biggest myth about housing in Los Angeles is that it's impossible to live the dream here. Despite what the City Council and homeless industrial complex have done to the city, it is indeed still possible to live the American dream in Los Angeles. |
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Developers finding room for bicycles in their plans In addition to such green features as dual-flush toilets, 100-per-cent wool carpeting and energy-efficient windows, buyers of an apartment in the First new-home project in Kitsilano will have the opportunity to take their sustainable style to the streets by purchasing, at a substantial discount, a jorg&olif "citybike." |
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Free bicycles plan for city visitors FREE bicycles could soon be available to Melbourne visitors, under a plan before the council. Melbourne City Council has been in talks with outdoor advertising giant JCDecaux, which has launched free city cycle programs in four European cities. |
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Colossal Plans for Hudson Yards The city is about to unveil its preliminary proposal for the 26-acre Hudson Yards site over the MTA's rail yards, a colossal development that is said to include about 13 million square feet of an undetermined mix of residential and office space. |
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Shortcut to home may run through a back alley Jake Fry and Aaron Rosensweet have discovered an affordable housing gold mine in the most unlikely of places -- Vancouver's gritty back alleys. Together the two Vancouver designers have formed Smallworks, a design/build company, to push their vision for laneway housing, boasting that they can build quality yet affordable homes quickly, while at the same time reducing the impact of urban sprawl. |
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High density a failure: report Urban consolidation in Sydney has failed to deliver on its goals for the past 20 years and the high levels proposed in the State Government's Metropolitan Strategy will be hard to achieve, says a new research paper. |
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Blockbuster directors to build T.O. studio Europe's largest film studio, Pinewood Studios Group of London, is expected to open a major new studio complex in west-end Toronto, giving Hollywood North a badly needed lift, the Star has learned. |
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Endangered Art: The controversial beauty of Albany Bulb It's a little spit of land jutting out into the San Francisco Bay from Albany on the eastern shore. Boasting a world-class view of the Golden Gate bridge and spectacular sunsets, the Bulb was originally a dump, covered over with dirt and then by vegetation. Deemed toxic, and neglected for many years, this unwanted trash heap was claimed by kindred spirits; fellow outcasts like homeless people and artists and finally, dog-walkers who could let their canine charges run wild. |
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A Plan to Tame the Architectural Chaos of India’s Capital It is late morning in the Pahar Ganj neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the New Delhi railway station at the heart of the capital, and the narrow lanes are alive with commerce. But the city authorities view this thronging, vibrant stretch of land as the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the city. |
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Economist urges state to reject subsidies
The Mall of America is asking Bloomington and the state for $222 million in tax subsidies to help finance a $1.8 billion expansion. In return, mall representatives predicted the project would create 7,000 construction jobs and 10,000 permanent jobs and would generate $53.8 million a year in new state taxes. |
Friday, April 13, 2007
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Sydney – City of Landscapes Since the 2000 Olympics, and in light of an ongoing explosion in population, the need for a drastic overhaul of Sydney’s urban system has become clear. A series of new landscape projects provide physical models that respond to diverse planning challenges. |
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Managing Urban Growth in Shanghai The targeted urbanisation of Shanghai’s suburbs leads to a decentralized growth that forms a polycentric regional network. New Towns take various Western urban developments as their models. |
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Mirage Metropolis
Vancouver has become such a global model for urbanism that Vancouverism refers to the twin ideals of increased residential density and liveability in the city core. The article critically reflects on this |
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paraSITE: A Decade of Urban Intervention Michael Rakowitz, discusses his 10-year old ongoing project, paraSITE, sharing a compelling narrative that bears repeating. |
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Guerrilla Benching You have heard of guerrilla gardeners, well now there are guerrilla benchers. Their goal is the same: to improve neglected spaces and add something positive to public life. Only these guys say it with benches. |
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Tokyo urbanism project is hard to top I'm not particularly keen on revisiting the same territory on this page but having just wrapped up a week of business and holiday in Japan, I feel it would be irresponsible not to deliver a live report from the Tokyo Midtown project I wrote about four weeks ago. In case you missed that column (see iht.com/travel) I had just had a sneak preview of the Japanese developer Mitsui Fudosan's plans for their newest mega-development in the city's Roppongi district. Impressed by the size, scale and overall ambition, I put it close to the top of my Tokyo must-see list when I hit town last Thursday but wasn't expecting much more than was revealed during my visit a month earlier. |
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Worldchanging Interview: Bill McKibben on Creating the Durable Future Bill McKibben is one of America's leading environmental writers. HIs first book, The End of Nature (1989), was well ahead of its time as the first book for a general audience about global warming. In his latest, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, McKibben examines the unintended and intertwined consequences of both fossil fuel dependence and economic globalization. Strengthening local economies is essential to creating an ecologically sustainable future. |
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Cities are the answer Many of the world's most difficult environmental challenges can be addressed and solved by cities. |
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Marks Barfield reveals vision of wind-powered London Architect says London could meet half of energy needs by installing thousands of wind turbines alongside rivers and roads. |
Thursday, April 12, 2007
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Buildings Called Key Source of City’s Greenhouse Gases Laying the groundwork for a plan to reduce the production of greenhouse gases in the city, the Bloomberg administration released a study yesterday showing that New York’s roughly 950,000 buildings are responsible for a vast majority of the city’s carbon dioxide emissions. |
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There and Back Again People may endure miserable commutes out of an inability to weigh their general well-being against quantifiable material gains. |
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Branch Banking - How much a street tree is really worth. A source of shade and privacy. A streetscape brightener. A place for dogs to pee. How can anyone know the true value of a New York City sidewalk tree? Impossible, perhaps—but this being the Bloomberg era, someone had to come up with a number. “It’s New York, and we like to quantify things,” says Fiona Watt, the Parks Department’s chief of forestry and horticulture. And so over the last two summers, more than a thousand people volunteered to conduct a tree census of the five boroughs, the second in the city’s history (the other was in 1995)—and the first to put a price tag on each specimen. |
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The Suburbanization of New York On the one hand, we like the abundance of restaurants and stores on almost every major street and avenue in Manhattan, as well as the revitalized Steinway Streets and Flatbush Avenues in the outer boroughs; we like the lower crime rates that come with more street activity and the lack of noxious fumes emitted by a dwindling manufacturing sector. On the other hand, we’re concerned about skyrocketing real estate prices, gentrifying neighborhoods, and the slow disappearance of mom-and-pop stores in favor of brand name outlets owned by multinational corporations. |
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McAdam and his chocolate factory Anglo-Russian practice, McAdam Architects – has orchestrated the selection of eight top international architects including Foster & Partners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, and Jan Stormer Partner, to design buildings for the project. The final list of architects drawn up for the historic 19th Century Red October chocolate factory site located on a peninsula where the Moscow river meets the Vodootvodny Canal also includes Wilmotte & Associes, Willen Associates, Project Meganom, Mosproject 2 as well as McAdam’s own scheme. |
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Second Life ploy for Paris garden A Paris residents' association is using the virtual world of Second Life to get the town hall to press on with plans to redevelop a central area of the city. |
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This city could use a fiesta of street furniture In Toronto, streets are used to get from one place to another. In Mexico, people live, work, eat, play and die on the streets. |
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
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Brussel, Marx & PepsiCo ‘Europe’ turned 50 last weekend: perfect timing. The public presentation of ‘A Vision for Brussels / Brussels Capital of Europe’ by the Rotterdam-based Berlage Institute coincided nicely with the festivities marking the anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. A few thoughts on a mediagenic manifesto in the form of a book and an exhibition. |
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UC Berkeley Graduate Students Win National Urban Design Contest With their plan to redevelop a chunk of downtown Los Angeles, a team of five UC Berkeley graduate students won the fifth annual Urban Land Institute Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition last weekend. |
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
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Shanghai Prepares for 2010 World Expo Beijing's may be getting today's headlines, but China's other major city is setting up some major infrastructure changes of its own. |
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Curbing the sin in Montreal's red-light district
A plan to scrub the peep and porn from the lower Main threatens the city's identity, some say. |
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Reinventing The City - The 80/20 Rule Why is it that when people of all types and backgrounds take on a big task we inevitably fall into the 80/20% rule? You know what I mean. The majority of the work gets done quickly but the remaining 20% takes disproportionately longer. |
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Pyramid scheme Fancy living in a ziggurat? Or a pseudo-medieval castle? Then the Netherlands' defiantly 'unmodern' architecture may fit the bill. |
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The danger of becoming skin deep Chicago historic buildings become shells as new rules of preservation are letting city's history slip away. |
Sunday, April 8, 2007
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Welcome to Coco Brown’s Neighborhood Mr. Brown asked a friend, the acclaimed architect Richard Meier, to recruit a roster of internationally recognized colleagues to help brand the development. The plan called for the “starchitects” to create reasonably sized single-family houses that were ecologically sensitive and artistically visionary. |
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Women's Quiet Revolutions in Work, Home ... and Travel? Gender is both an archetypal and adaptive dimension of the urban condition and thus remains a key moving target for planning practitioners and scholars alike. This is especially true of women’s growing, if not revolutionary, involvement in the economy. A familiar exception is the trip linking work and home, which is consistently and persistently shorter for women than men. That said, recent data hint that the gender gap in travel, much like those in education and careers, may have all but vanished. This might suggest that women are not only comparably prepared for employment, they are finally willing and able to successfully compete for jobs near and far. |
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Instant Urbanism Citified suburbs becoming new model for the Bay Area. |
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Back To The Future: The 1970 Los Angeles 'Centers' Concept Plan Many say Los Angeles is a city that grew without any rational planning. In reality the planning was there -- but much of the best planning never quite materialized. A perfect example is the 1970 Concept Los Angeles plan -- a vision of what the city could have looked like and now a history lesson for planners. |
Friday, April 6, 2007
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Have-it-alls don't want it anymore Less house, less stuff? welcome to the eco-density movement, |
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Edible City - Part 2 In Edible City - Part 1, my report on an exhibition about the urban environment and its food systems, i was talking to Debra Solomon, curator of the show and author of Culiblog, about utopian projects. This second part will focus more on some recent or ongoing proposals and strategies to produce food in or near the city. |
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Painting the town Graffiti is the most prolific - and enduring - genre of public art. Although its association with vandalism tainted its early modern life, it is rapidly being accepted as a genuine form of art, exhibited in museums and even coming under the high-class hammer at Sotheby's in recent years. |
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Guerrilla Wars in Everyday Public Spaces In recent years, many governments have tended to take a rational and development-oriented approach to planning, designing and managing city spaces. Some sociologists, however, have started to criticize this approach, and have begun to advocate instead the importance of taking into consideration the everyday lives of ordinary people. These sociologists offer us a new perspective for examining how “city users” are tactically living in their cities. |
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Developers Say They Can’t Build Green Despite the hype about green roofs; despite the rampant branding of luxury residences with names like the Solaire and Tribeca Green; despite the cachet that once-repulsive ideas have now garnered (waterless urinals! recycled rainwater!), technologies that allow buildings to generate at least a portion of their own power in a clean, efficient way are having trouble catching on in Manhattan. |
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The towers of London The capital’s flirtation with tall buildings is becoming a love affair, thanks to the commercial and aesthetic success of recent designs. |
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Rather than carpool, drivers adapt to gridlock: analyst Drivers are getting more cozy in their fully equipped cars and becoming accustomed to gridlock, which one traffic analyst said is leading to the demise of carpooling. |
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Booking your high-end condo takes on a whole new meaning The most lavish and expensive art books produced in British Columbia this decade cannot be bought in any bookstore. Cloth-bound in linen, with stitched signatures of oversize colour pages, and set into handsome slip-case boxes, these books are produced to the highest graphic design and publishing standards, sometimes running $100 apiece for printing costs alone. Alas, these books will never make it into any library. This is because what they celebrate has nothing to do with sculpture, painting, installation art, or even the art of writing itself. The art these spectacular volumes illustrate and describe is real estate. Especially for high-end housing projects, the mere brochure — no matter how glossily printed — is no longer enough. Project-by-project, B.C.'s top-drawer real estate has been booked. |
Thursday, April 5, 2007
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Seattle mayor unveils $240M master bike plan Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels on Wednesday released plans to make the city more bicycle friendly in the next 10 years, an effort estimated to cost $240 million. |
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Atelier Bow-Wow: Practice of Lively Space No matter how the work of Atelier Bow-Wow (the mild-mannered, brilliant husband-and-wife team of Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima) tends to be interpreted or misinterpreted -- an exploitation of contextual constraints, an elaboration of personal quirks, an exploration of the potential of narrow spaces, and so on -- it is above all based on taking things seriously. |
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Harvard planner likes 'very basic' Union Square The man who wrote the book on urban plazas had an iced coffee last week in Union Square, surveyed the swirl of fashionable people there, and bestowed his blessing. |
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Architecture: Green and Greener A new report from the UN Environment Program (UNEP) released last week [re]confirmed what many of us already know, but what policy-makers and giant development corporations still need to hear from places like the UN: that the building sector plays a huge role in achieving the greenhouse gas reductions necessary to effectively combat climate change. |
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Nottingham grabs a piazza of the action Can the binge-drinking capital of the nation really civilise itself by transforming its main square into a joyous continental-style public space? |
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Emissions-linked parking in force A scheme charging drivers for residents' parking permits according to the level of their car emissions has come into force in a London borough. |
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Reinier de Graaf: The City as Predictor of the Future What is the future of cities? Why is it important to invest into cities? What changes should we make in our investment policies in cities? |
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Perspective: A tale of two railways Philadelphia and New York may both be large, post-industrial metropolises separated by a mere 100 miles, but they are worlds apart. |
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
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We Must Imagine a Future Without Cars Kunstler argues that the coming age of energy scarcity will change everything about how we live in this country -- most of all our dependency on automobiles. |
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Alsop Makes U.S. Debut in Yonkers The latest European architect to hop the pond for a U.S. debut is Will Alsop, a Brit who hopes to transform a long-unused power plant along the Hudson River in Yonkers, New York, into a sweeping residential complex featuring a museum, restaurant, and park. |
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Participatory Urbanism Participatory Urbanism, a work by Eric Paulos, Ian Smith and RJ Honicky turns the mobile phone into a “networked mobile personal measurement instrument." |
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Strip Joints Make Way for Museums as Tokyo Reinvents Roppongi Tokyo's nighttime entertainment district of Roppongi is swapping strip bars for Shogun relics and dancers for designers as a 370 billion yen ($3 billion) project brings in luxury shops, a new museum and a design center. |
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Robert Moses Reconsidered: Blight is in the Eye of the Beholder “Everybody, it would seem, is for the rebuilding of our cities…But this is not the same as liking cities…most of the rebuilding under way and in prospec |