Urbanism News
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
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Welcome to the O.C. China’s rising elite is importing a new American lifestyle, complete with fake lakes, stucco ranch houses, and Hummers in the driveway. But as these gated communities grow, is China doomed to repeat all of America’s mistakes? |
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Good-Bye, Cheap Oil. So Long, Suburbia? The suburban landscape has been marred by foreclosures and half-built communities abandoned in the subprime aftermath. But James Howard Kunstler, author of a dozen books, including The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, thinks there's a bigger threat to those far-flung neighborhoods: the scarcity of oil. |
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Urban planning needs green rethink The focus on greening homes and offices is ignoring the wider landscape of our towns and cities, argues Martha Schwartz. In this week's Green Room, she says 21st Century urban spaces must undergo a green revolution. |
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Is a Giant Mall an Eyesore? Developer Urges Patience Just months before the mall’s opening the animosity that has dogged the project from the outset remains apparent. Though the project is not being directly subsidized, it is being built on state-owned land, and a company spokesman said that about $81.3 million is being spent on roadway and other improvements at or near the site. Questions continue to be raised about whether a minor league baseball park will ever materialize, as promised. |
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Fashioning Skylines, Not a Personality Cult Urban architecture has taken on a new urgency and relevance in recent years, driven in part by global population growth. In Asia and the Middle East, ambitious buildings are rising with breathtaking speed and to dizzying heights. And Western cities from London to New York are responding with the most significant additions to their skylines in years. |
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Highlights from the 7th EcoCity World Summit "In order to transform our cities, we need to move from ego-culture to eco-culture." |
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
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Boston streets a tangled, wonderful web Boston and neighboring Cambridge are sliced by alleys, footpaths and arcades, each one revealing a facet of life not seen in a "Cheers" rerun or the panoramas that accompany televised sporting events. Some are aesthetic treats, others are atmospheric shortcuts. And the way they enrich the landscape offers hints of what cities like San Francisco can strive for - even though Boston has a long head start. |
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Urban wetlands park to be developed in South L.A. The City Council this week unanimously approved construction of an unusual urban wetland park on an old Metropolitan Transportation Authority maintenance yard in South Los Angeles. |
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PlaNYC 2030: One Year Later On Earth Day 2007, Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a wide-ranging plan to make the city more environmentally friendly as it expands to meet the needs of 1 million more residents by 2030. His PlaNYC offered 127 specific proposals on land use, transportation, energy, reducing greenhouse gases and other vital issues. For Earth Day 2008, Sustainability Watch, a joint project of Gotham Gazette and the Hunter College Center for Community Planning & Development, asked experts to assess the plan -- its successes and failures, what it does and does not do -- and what the next steps are in the long-term effort to create a livable city for 9 million people. |
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Can the earth provide enough food for 9 billion people? That's how many are expected to inhabit the world by 2050. Experts worry over looming food shortages. |
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An Underlying Problem: What's Below Our Cars and Feet A crisis looms. America's infrastructure is in terrible shape, performs badly and is destined to fail more often. Neglect, lack of political will, bureaucratic myopia and woefully inadequate funding are the primary causes. |
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There goes the neighbourhood: mortgage crisis sees suburbs slump As the banks foreclose on loans across the US, worried householders watch their tree-lined streets change. |
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UN condemns biofuels growth The United Nations is expected to reveal a new battle plan to tackle the growing crisis in global food provision. |
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The Big Thirst Oil prices rose above $116 a barrel last week, setting another record for the world’s most indispensable energy commodity. What was striking about this latest milestone was what didn’t happen: there was no shortage of oil, no sudden embargo, no exporter turning off its spigot. |
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Southlands: A Vision for Agricultural Urbanism Agricultural Urbanism (AU) is an approach to integrating growth and development with preserving agricultural resources and enhancing elements of the food system. The cornerstone of AU is creating an urban environment that activates and sustains urban agriculture with important elements such as educational programs, small-scale processing opportunities and a farmers’ market or other local sales conduits. |
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Los Angeles votes for tolls on some carpool lanes by 2010 The plan to ease congestion in Los Angeles County would start by 2010 with the 10 and 210 freeways. |
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Leon Krier talks sustainable architecture The Prince of Wales’s architecture guru Leon Krier talks with Jules Lubbock about the environmental merits of traditional buildings. |
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Urbanization and Suburbanization The renaissance of the city is a hot topic in Europe. But what does the term renaissance mean? Generally it designates the renaissance of the inner city, the complex, mixed used inner city. The term renaissance is often applied to the city center only. Is such a perception appropriate? Does it mean that suburbanization is in decline? |
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Stephen Graham on the politics of urban space At the NAI, values of architecture are defended that we are fond of to defend. Most architects and policy makers do belief that architecture is about shelter and enclosure, occupation and representation. New questions arise about how new technologies affect architecture and what this says about the individual? It is not solely about designing and archiving our world anymore, but also about looking at new possibilities. |
Monday, April 28, 2008
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City redesign can help millions We're all hearing the bad news: 7.8 million Americans are out of work, while the subprime mortgage crisis exacts a continuing, ghastly toll on the American Dream, and rents rise faster than incomes. |
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Bicycle-Sharing Program to Be First of Kind in U.S. Starting next month, people here will be able to rent a bicycle day and night with the swipe of a membership card. A new public-private venture called SmartBike DC will make 120 bicycles available at 10 spots in central locations in the city. The automated program, which district officials say is the first of its kind in the nation, will operate in a similar fashion to car-sharing programs like Zipcar. |
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Design for Despots Tour a few of the most ambitious and audacious designs breaking ground in some of the world’s least free countries. |
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Streetfilm: Paris Skates! Streetfilms' Elizabeth Press kicks off a series of videos about livable streets in Paris with this look at the city's two weekly romps on skates -- roller-versions of Critical Mass that attract up to 15,000 participants. Notice that the police are an essential part of the proceedings (and they seem to have fun doing it -- check out the cops on blades at the 1:35 mark). |
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Like-Minded, Living Nearby The more diverse America becomes, the more homogeneous it becomes. No, that's not a misprint; it is the thesis of "The Big Sort," Bill Bishop's rich and challenging book about the ways in which the citizens of this country have, in the past generation, rearranged themselves into discrete enclaves that have little to say to one another and little incentive to bother trying. "As Americans have moved over the past three decades," Mr. Bishop proclaims, "they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics." |
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LEED's Big Market Bias According to a study last year by institutional investment advisor RREEF, LEED buildings are found in 400 or so U.S. cities, but are "highly concentrated" in the nation's largest metro areas, such as New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles. |
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Pitfalls in paradise: why Palm Jumeirah is struggling to live up to the hype
Low-paid workers and villa gripes cast a cloud over 'eighth wonder of the world' in Dubai. |
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Stand by your beds
Around the world, a shadowy army of plant lovers is on a mission: to make their dull, grey neighbourhoods more beautiful places to live. Armed with seedbombs and spades, these green-fingered outlaws are stealthily filling neglected public land with flowers and shrubs. Richard Reynolds explains how he joined their ranks and became a guerrilla gardener. |
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Outdoor ‘Living Rooms’ Bring Touches of Cheer to Central Los Angeles Their requests could have been lofty, expensive and totally unrealistic, but in the end what the people of central Los Angeles really wanted was just a place to sit down. |
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Cities 'food deserts' The migration of supermarkets to the suburbs has left some Canadian cities with "food deserts" in their most vulnerable neighbourhoods, according to new research that counters previous studies suggesting that phenomenon wasn't happening in this country. |
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Tearing itself down Something odd is happening to the cities of eastern Germany. Plattenbauten, the soulless prefabricated apartment blocks thrown up by the region's former communist rulers, are being knocked down. Occasionally one will be truncated, shorn of its upper storeys. Older streets are gap-toothed where wreckers have removed abandoned houses. Cityscapes are being pruned, removing dead and dying edifices in the hope of saving the rest. |
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A Reminder to the City: Neighborhoods Are Building Blocks of Civic Life Neighborhoods -- their habits, their participants, and their values -- are what create and define value in a city and in a home. Cities need to embrace this fact if they want to preserve values and retain residents. |
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Chinese artists painted into a corner
Beijing's 798 district has evolved from a low-rent home for bohemians to a consumer and tourist mecca. |
Sunday, April 27, 2008
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What became of downtown Canada? In 1965, pop singer Petula Clark floated to the top of the charts with her airy ode to city living. Downtown painted a picture of idyllic urban life: a tight-knit community, an energetic vibe, a place to forget all your troubles. In reality, by the time the song hit Canadian airwaves, city cores were already showing signs of decay, largely from the flight to the suburbs. Since the mid-fifties, politicians, planners and developers have tried - and mostly failed - to rebuild the dreamy downtowns Ms. Clark sang of. |
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The Bilbao Effect—Does It Work on Campuses? Can a high-profile architect produce a masterpiece that doesn’t just appeal to big-name donors who want to put their names on a fresh and exciting design? Can a building ultimately attract students, faculty members, and—dare I say it—tourists? |
Saturday, April 26, 2008
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7 Engineering Wonders of the Modern World Would you believe that the tallest bridge in France reaches higher than the Eiffel tower, or that a single dam in China can hold back 1.4 trillion cubic feet or water? |
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Abu Dhabi - building a creative city
What makes a creative city – a city marked by both artistic creativity and technological innovation? |
Thursday, April 24, 2008
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The Market Force of Nature Putting the "invisible hand" to work for nature could reshape the values of capitalism. |
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On Pride Cities are sized-up, measured and analyzed in countless ways. The Economist uses statistics to indicate how New Yorks financial sector is faring against its London counterpart. Richard Florida measures the extant of the creative class. Allan Jacobs carefully records intersection densities and Jan Gehl simply counts pedestrians. Some, like Peter Calthorpe, go beyond the city line and take stock of the whole region. |
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Windows, panes and the hole damn thing Socially, then, men see individuals (earning this, driving that, bedding the other) while women typically locate themselves, says the US academic Carol Gilligan, within a "web of attachments, affiliations, obligations and responsibilities". Women read fiction, especially relationship fiction, men read documentary. Women read people-books, men read thing-books. In architecture, similarly, men emphasise the object while women focus on the space around and between: the hole. This would make urban design - which typically casts buildings as space-shapers first, objects second - a feminised, if not feminist, pursuit. |
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When Neighbors Become Farmers When suburbanites look out their front doors, a lot of them want to see a lush green lawn. Kipp Nash wants to see vegetables, and not all of his neighbors are thrilled. |
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Is tree house above the law? Vancouver–It's a tree fort grand enough to make waves in one of this city's oldest neighbourhoods. But the wooden pirate ship, nestled in a cedar tree and complete with faux cannons, is taking fire from a next-door neighbour and Vancouver City Hall. |
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
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How Paris is Beating Traffic Without Congestion Pricing The mayor of a global metropolis, elected to his first term in 2001, set out to reduce driving and promote greener modes of transportation in his city. Congestion pricing turned out to be unfeasible, because influential political forces in the suburbs believed, rightly or wrongly, that charging people to drive into the urban core was regressive. Undaunted, the mayor found other means to achieve his transportation agenda. |
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Design your own home: Tutti Frutti awards The first winning designs in Manchester's pioneering Tutti Frutti project have been revealed - and the innovative housing project will receive ministerial approval tomorrow when Hazel Blears, the Secretary for Communities and Local Government, visits the site in Ancoats. |
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
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Greenprint for the homes of the future A green dream is becoming reality for 2,500 residents of Dockside Green, a super eco-friendly development in Victoria that is already being hailed as a design icon. |
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Pedal-powered cabs coming to Toronto A fleet of pedal-powered EcoCabs will hit the downtown Toronto core starting May 1, offering passengers a speedy — and free — ride to their favourite restaurant, nightclub, business meeting or even the Rogers Centre for a ball game. |
Monday, April 21, 2008
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Why Bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart. |
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Go: West 8 Young Man I have a hard time controlling my joy of seeing anything done by West 8 both for it's whimsical graphics and heady, but grounded ideas (read more about the firm and said philosophy here). This will be an on-going referential discussion about their work, so check back for more down the road. |
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Virtual Traffic This year, as the first wave of 76 million baby boomers reaches official retirement age in the U.S., traffic engineers are already anticipating a potential shift in driving patterns that could well have enormous impact on fuel consumption and traffic technology needs for years to come. Imagine 20 million people in the U.S., exiting the work place in five-year segments over the course of the next two decades. In total, that's half of today's work place. As many as 70% of boomers want to build their own small companies from a home setting. |
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Bicycle parking tower What is a dense city like Tokyo to do when it runs out of space for cyclists to park their bikes? Build a bicycle parking tower! |
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Crackdown on cell phones on public transit ignites debate The world has never been more connected, but in some corners, it's developing a real hang-up over the ubiquitous cell phone. Taking a cue from France's national railway, which offers phone-free "zen zones" on high-speed trains, Austria's second-largest city this week began ordering public transit commuters to keep their phones on silent mode.
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Recycling slum faces redevelopment Walking through Dharavi, home to an estimated 15,000 single room factories, it is difficult to find anything that is not recycled here. |
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Art of graffiti, minus the paint No cleanup required for images rendered in light, using buildings as giant canvases. |
Sunday, April 20, 2008
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A Line in the Yard: The Battle Over the Right to Dry Outside Rob and Laurie Cook are not prone to breaking the law, but these days they have been given to a regular act of civil disobedience: hanging their laundry to dry out in the backyard. The deed to their home — like most in this upscale suburb — prohibits outdoor clotheslines as eyesores. |
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Rome at Night Rome after dark was once a perilous place, according to the satirist Juvenal, the dangers ranging from robbers to cutthroats to flying chamber pots. |
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Urban-bicycle schemes in Vienna and Paris. Recently both cites – Paris and Vienna – have introduced a self-service bike rental system: “bike-hire” stations distributed over the city allow you to pick up your bike from one service point and drop off to another. |
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Green good for business, say developers You don't have to be a wild-eyed environmentalist to benefit from going green. |
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The Green Issue Some bold steps to make your carbon footprint smaller. |
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Land Matters Most kids aren’t walking to school anymore. Can landscape architects do anything to change that? |
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Like Urban Renewal, Only Backward America’s mayors are in a unique position to help rebuild our blighted federal government. |
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Creeping sprawl overtakes refugees from cities Fed up with the encroaching sprawl, Linda Jimenez fled Silicon Valley for Tracy in 1990 in search of more affordable housing and the small-town way of life of her Santa Clara County youth. Eventually, the sprawl caught up. |
Saturday, April 19, 2008
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San Antonio Riverwalk The Lower 48 has few urban experiences to match a sultry evening's stroll along San Antonio's Riverwalk. These waterside pathways attract millions of conventioneers, distraction-seeking locals, vacationing families, and sauntering hipsters because Riverwalk is a secret realm — close, but not part of the rest of downtown. |
Thursday, April 17, 2008
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How Affordable is that Subdivision, Really? How much of your monthly budget you pay for transportation is largely influenced by where you live. |
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Media Density Discussions are Needed for Cities Can any North American city have a meaningful public discussion about sustainability, about its "green-ness" or ecological footprint, without having the challenging but necessary public discussion about the city's density? |
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
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A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream After five years of study, scientists concluded that the average noise in Cairo from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louder than a freight train only 15 feet away. |
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Solving Climate Change Saves Billions Amidst increasingly dire news about the economy and climate change, Architecture 2030 released a seminal study at the Eileen Rockefeller Growald Symposium on Collaborative Philanthropy today, showing how a small investment of only $21.6 billion in the Building Sector would produce 216,000 permanent jobs and save 86.7 Million Metric Tons (MMT) of CO2 in a single year. This same amount invested each year for five years would net over one million permanent jobs and save 433.5 MMT. |
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Push for urban parkland takes root The housing market is tanking, but one kind of real estate is gaining value in major U.S. cities: parkland. |
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Nomads at last Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other. |
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Portland Considered Most Bicycle-Friendly City in North America For many, Portland is a haven of green-friendly urban planning. It recently topped Popular Science‘s list of the Greenest Cities in the United States. A big part of that is bikes. Portland is widely considered the most bicycle-friendly city in North America, so much so that bikes are on display throughout the Portland airport. Worldwide, it’s seen as only second to Amsterdam. |
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After the Deluge, The Farm The Viet Village Urban Farm project represents an effort to reestablish the tradition of local farming in this community after Katrina. New Orleans East was one of the most damaged areas of the city during the storms of 2005. |
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Blue Sky on Canal Street We offer four architects a fantasy job: a full block downtown, with no client to worry about. |
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Modern suburbia not just in America anymore A Chinese delegation from Beijing arrived in Phoenix last month and headed west to the Sonoran Desert, deep into suburbia. Its destination: a quintessential American residential development in Buckeye, one of the many suburbs dotting the sprawling metropolitan area. |
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How to Plan for Climate Change The London Olympics' site reflects a trend toward urban planning that contemplates climate resiliency and reduced emissions. |
Monday, April 14, 2008
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Hunger. Strikes. Riots. The food crisis bites Across the world a crisis is unfolding at alarming speed. Climate change, China's increasing consumption and the dash for biofuels are causing food shortages and rocketing prices - sparking riots in cities from the Caribbean to the Far East. Robin McKie and Heather Stewart report on the millions facing starvation - and the growing threat to global security. |
Saturday, April 12, 2008
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Blame Le Corbusier Toward an Architecture is the most influential book on architecture of the modern era. Perhaps only Vitruvius can match it for influence from any age. So let's make that the most influential book on architecture for about 2,000 years. Emerging from the era of manifestos, it is a radical, hectoring, brilliant book. It blends the eye-catching absurdity of Dada, the strange juxtapositions of surrealism and the technophilic cutaway drawings of a boys' magazine with text that is incisive, sometimes funny and occasionally wholly convincing. |
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In London, a levy for sins of emission In an unusual municipal experiment aimed at fighting global warming where the rubber meets the road, the British capital in October is to begin imposing a $50-a-day carbon emissions fee on every gas-guzzling private vehicle driven in the central city. |
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A sign of the times – how road markings have developed The earliest road markings came from the Romans, who installed milestones on their new roads. The invention of bicycles in 1871 led to roads becoming busier and more dangerous. The Bicycles Union started installing danger signs at sharp bends and steep hills – with a skull and crossbones sign for the most strenuous hills. |
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Vermont Towns Try to Find Their Roads Less Traveled With magnifying glasses to decode old handwriting and tissues for dust-induced sneezing, citizen volunteers are poring over record books with a common, increasingly urgent purpose: finding evidence of every road ever legally created in their towns, including many that are now impassable and all but unobservable. |
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The World's Largest Parking Lots For years, traffic got all the attention: Cars in motion were exciting; cars at rest were boring. Hardly anyone talked about parking. In the past 10 years or so, though, parking has become a paramount concern among city planners and company heads. Space is limited, and yet the demand for parking places keeps increasing. |
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On the smart side of the street The title of Mark Kingwell's latest book, Concrete Reveries, is at once an elegant encapsulation of this remarkable essay and a neatly tailored metaphor for the defining paradox of the city: a complex (and man-made) invention capable of rendering durable the inevitably fleeting nature of human consciousness. |
Thursday, April 10, 2008
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Respect for the Human Scale An interview with urban theorists James Howard Kunstler and Nikos Salingaros. |
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Building Under Peril Nature will always challenge developers, but landmark studies of wildfire in California and flooding along the Mississippi are showing new ways of living in America’s most dangerous regions. |
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Child Friendly Cities Our society makes a show of being child friendly, from playgrounds at fast food restaurants and furniture warehouses to the vast array of child-protection devices available to consumers. At the same time, our actual built environment is extremely hostile to children's most basic needs. |
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Amsterdam to get freight streetcars In hopes of reducing air pollution and truck traffic, Amsterdam is launching a new freight-carrying streetcar plan. To make it work, however, Amsterdam officials need to balance the initiative with the existing needs of businesses and truck freight carriers. |
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Neighborliness, Innovation and Sustainability Two approaches have tended to define the debate about sustainable prosperity in recent years. The first is conscious consumption, which manifests at the shallow end as green shopping (even greenwashing) but can prove out at a deeper level as strategic consumption. The second is green technology, which is a topic that we tend to cover here in great depth, and which covers everything from energy to transportation, housing to product design. Sometimes that technology is trivial, sometimes it is profound. |
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Corner Store Cornucopia At Romano’s Grocery, a small bodega in northeast Philadelphia, former staples like beef jerky are suddenly hard to find. That’s because last December, Juan Carlos Romano renovated his old establishment and 'created what many hope will become a national model: the healthy corner store. |
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Museums sprout 'green' architecture A wave of energy-efficient architecture – and ecofriendly retrofits – is sweeping through public showcases. |
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Drivers are people, too Even the most bike-aware driver can’t function if cyclists just do whatever they want. |
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Still Got Love For the Streets These various fragments are connected in my mind by recent conversations regarding the legacy of The Smithson’s ‘streets in the sky’ and how these might intersect with current ideas of public space. In particular, the Smithson’s notion of streets in the sky was based on their close reading of street life in London’s east end and therefore on an idea of public space that is used, useful but non-prescriptive. Their idea of the content of public space therefore seemed to acknowledge the various lives that might be lived within it. Crucially therefore it avoided the formalist gesture of the piazza in favour of a more subtle elaboration of the street. So…. |
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Your Asphalt Parking Spot Can Become a Blooming Garden Plot The asphalt will crack and erupt, and green plants and vines will sprout forth. No, this isn't my end of the world prophecy, this is about parking. Or gardening. Or both. |
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Ultimate eco-city Arup design and masterplan Dongtan eco-city in China. |
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"The creative city...when do we actually get to see it?" "We hear so much about the creative city, but when do we actually get to see it?", Scott Burnham, curator of Urban Play wonders. "Urban Play gives cities the opportunity to show the inherent creativity of its people." |
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Shifting the Costs of Public Transit In a trend being seen across the country, cities and states are thinking about new ways to fund public transportation. One California bill aims to shift the costs of public transit to drivers. |
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Ontario's greenbelt a model for the world
Toronto-area protected zone earns high marks for its vastness and for the strong government support it has. |
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
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Arcology "Arcology, from the words "ecology" and "architecture," is a set of architectural design principles aimed toward the design of enormous habitats (hyperstructures) of extremely high human population density. These largely hypothetical structures, which are themselves commonly referred to as "arcologies," would be self-contained, contain a variety of residential and commercial facilities, minimize individual human environmental impact, and possibly be economically self-sufficient."
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Architects design vertical farms Chicken farms on the 12th floor of a residential block? Fields of corn on the 47th storey of a Toronto skyscraper? Welcome to the world of vertical farming. |
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On Borrowed Time
Urban decline moves to the suburbs. |
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
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Going Local When oil becomes scarce, our current way of life will become obsolete. |
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A visit to HafenCity Hamburg is reclaiming its long overlooked and underused industrial waterfront on the River Elbe with the development of HafenCity, currently the largest urban construction initiative under way in Europe. The 380 acre redevelopment zone will be a mix of office, retail, residential, and cultural uses. |
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How Car-Based Growth Imperils New Cities Beyond global warming and poverty afflicting urban masses of the developing world, there's a threat we Americans actually modeled. It's how we grew in the age of the automobile — separating where people live, work and buy, separating classes economically, then investing first and foremost in highways and disinvesting in cities where humans can mix and relate. The threat now: that new and growing cities across Africa, Asia and Latin America are too easily drawn to thoughtless mimicry of our "motors first" model. |
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Taking Back the Streets New York's streets are as gritty as the city’s reputation, traffic-clogged canyons of concrete where New Yorkers, on foot and in vehicles, jostle and growl, exulting all the while. Stared down a Hummer lately? Yet there is a growing desire to tame New York’s 5,800 miles of streets, sidewalks and highways, which constitute the city’s principal social space. |
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Bat-Yam = Landscape Urbanism This international event will present 30 outdoor rooms in the public domain. All sites will be open to the public and introduce innovative ways for using urban open spaces, integrating community projects and students proposals together with designs by artists, architects and landscape architects. |
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Scientists Unveil High-Res Map of the U.S. Carbon Footprint A team of scientists has completed a carbon dioxide emissions inventory of the United States plotted down to 100-square-kilometer chunks. |
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For cycling czar, gung ho is only speed Nicole Freedman's official position may be director of bicycle programs for the City of Boston. But she's frequently referred to as Boston's "bike czar." It's a dictatorial-sounding job title that comes with big expectations to change the local cycling climate, and quickly. |
Monday, April 7, 2008
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Eco-towns risk becoming communities of Stepford Wives The film Stepford Wives described the goings on in a small Connecticut town which, for reasons kept secret by the men of the community, is maintained in a state of isolation from outside influence. The homes are beautifully presented, the gardens well manicured and the public spaces inviting. Ostensibly it is a picture of suburban perfection. But deep down it is a town without substance. |
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Architecture and Happiness Car drivers who don’t read traffic signs but find their way with the help of points of recognition and buildings along the roadside will have to be extra careful from April 4 onwards. That’s when the Revolving House starts turning on the Hasselt roundabout in Tilburg. The idea for this house that revolves with the traffic comes from John Körmeling, who will also build the Dutch pavilion for the Expo 2010 in Shanghai. |
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State Farm on the Humiliation of Biking to Work Drop what you're doing, click the "play" button and enjoy 30 seconds of outstanding car culture courtesy of State Farm. |
Saturday, April 5, 2008
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Andrew Maynard's Suburb-Eating Robots Andrew Maynard has what some may consider to be a peculiar vision for the future of the Australian suburb - lush forest wilderness, or otherwise natural untouched land devoid of cookie-cutter human settlements. And it would all be thanks [if he had his way, perhaps?] to something resembling the image above. |
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Chavez seeks Shangri-La with 'socialist cities' Will Caribia be a retreat from Venezuela's wealth gap and capitalism, or an unrealistic dream? |
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Architecture: A city that works in spite of itself London is the city not of the passeggiata or fiestas, of piazzas or boulevards, but of gated gardens, pubs spilling their pissed and puking progeny on to narrow pavements; the city where local authorities treat teenagers like bothersome flies, to be deterred from hanging around by introducing high-pitched whining loudspeakers that only the young can hear. It is a city of privatised public space in which you can be (and I often am) moved on for trying to take a photo of a building, a city of clunky bollards, piles of bin bags, crushed crush barriers, enigmatic steel boxes that are surely too large to hold simple circuits for traffic lights or telephones, mass-produced mini-brick paving laid like a shroud over pavements in front of dying shops or monotonous chains... London’s public space is, er, different. |
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Building Cities in the Virtual World Hot technologies like blogs, mashups, YouTube, Flickr, and social networking are among the most notable of new Internet technologies that are collectively known as Web 2.0. These technologies offer nearly limitless possibilities for entertainment, business, communication — and even city-building. And although planning's ultimate goals will always reside in the real world, planners are harnessing this new virtual world in a variety of innovative ways. |
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The Green Giant Whole Foods' local flagship: the supermarket as hybrid SUV It's more like the grocery store version of a hybrid SUV made by Lexus or a 12,000-square-foot "green" house with a swimming pool and six-car garage accompanying its solar panels and sustainably harvested decking. |
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Campaigns ignoring city issues Candidates talk of playgrounds and bike trails. But what of the crumbling infrastructure? |
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Artist beats ticket for 'driving' pedal car The prosecutor's case began to unravel when he turned his attack to the tea light-candle headlights. Up until that point, Daniel Lerner had argued that the car in question was unsafe because of its dangerous braking system. Granted, classifying the hollowed-out Buick a car is a bit of a stretch. |
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The mathematics of preservation and the future of urban ruins "I don't want to encourage more cars onto the roads," New Scientist wrote, "but if topology and beauty mean anything to you, get out there and enjoy I-95/695 now. It may soon be too late." |
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Free of planners in the land of the free Ten per cent of Americans now have "negative equity" — they owe more on their mortgages than the value of their houses. Here in Texas, the housing meltdown is on everyone's lips, even the lead singer of country band Southern Culture on the Skids. About to launch into his trio's funky paean to mobile-home living, Doublewide, lead singer Rick Miller asked the largely wide-beamed and Jim-Beamed crowd at Houston's Continental Club last Saturday night: "Y'all gettin' settled into your 'trouses'"? A "trouse," this Alberta cowboy learned from his Texas friends, is local slang for a "truck-house." This means a sleeping bag in the back box of a pickup truck, home sweet home after the sheriff repossesses your dwelling. |
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Revolutionary Minds Design and architecture translate ideas into objects we can hold, touch, or occupy, or into visuals we can interpret and understand. At its best, design takes on our most inspiring and troubling questions and forces us to confront implications we might otherwise not have imagined. Increasingly, science and technology are driving this dialogue. |
Friday, April 4, 2008
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Automobile Association to use scooters to beat jams AA patrols are to use electric scooters and motorbikes to beat traffic congestion and get to breakdowns in central London. |
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Study shows urban planning linked to physical fitness, health A new study by University of Alberta researchers has found that urban planning is an important factor in determining what we eat and how much we exercise, and as a result, whether or not we’ll struggle with obesity. |
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Sprawling neighborhoods not linked to obesity, study finds Using urban planning to fight the obesity epidemic will probably not work because people's weight does not change when they move to the suburbs, researchers said on Wednesday. |
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Deconstructing the New Urban Fortress: UK’s Mandate for Terror-Proof Buildings The latest directives from the U.K.’s Home Office urge architects to design terror-proof buildings, complete with panic rooms, concrete, and steel blockades; however, the American perspective from the public and private sectors is typically one that integrates transparent security with design excellence, openness, and blast-resistant design. |
Thursday, April 3, 2008
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A Swamp Forest Grows in Brooklyn An abandoned reservoir inspires dance and debate around a new kind of landscape. |
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Urban Exploration: a Subculture at a Glance As subcultures go, "urban exploration" or "urbexing" is a very materially embedded one, where community formation happens around specific physical locations, even though as a global phenomenon, it is almost entirely facilitated by the internet. |
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
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Life in the 'Burbs: Heavy Costs for Families, Climate Millions of Americans have moved to the suburbs in the past 60 years, drawn by the lure of larger houses and cheaper prices. But until recently, few were aware of the impact those choices had on the environment. |
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Cities for sale Privatised city centres with no guarantee of public access and patrolled by security guards... a grim vision of the future? No, it's happening right now in London and Liverpool. |
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Turning cities into art galleries Public art can generate big revenues and beautify urban areas. Or it can anger residents. How does one measure its success? |
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Architecture Is a Team Sport So why do they award the Pritzker Prize to just one person? |
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The Singles Map Which cities have a surplus of single men (or women) - and what that means for the country. |
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With billboards, cities are facing the digital decision Ah, for the good old days, when billboards were merely a blight you could avoid, sort of, by averting your eyes. Now the outdoor advertising companies have us right where they want us: stuck in traffic or at a red light, facing a digital sign that changes about every seven seconds. At least at home, zombied out in front of our televisions, we get a little programming with our digital ads. With digital billboards, we just get ads. |
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Alleys for Cool Cats While Paris has its boulevards and Miami its beaches, San Francisco’s lure is its labyrinth of back alleys, those mysterious midblock detours that seem to offer, in equal doses, the promise of discovery and the slightly scary possibility of getting lost — really lost. |
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5 Urban Design Proposals for 3D City Farms: Sustainable, Ecological and Agricultural Skyscrapers
Imagine the world in 2050 with almost 80% of the planet’s population living in urban centers and our fruit, vegetables and even animals are grown in … skyscrapers? |
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Bike, transit use rising along with gas prices A majority of British Columbians say rising gasoline prices are causing financial hardship in their households, according to an Angus Reid Strategies survey released Thursday. |
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Learning from Losers Best practices are all well and good. We make a case for a center to study the worst. |
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Mr. Sustainability
A job title is born as cities get serious about global warming. |
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
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Faking Places Annual April fools articles at Project for Public Spaces. |
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