Urbanism News
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
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German travel company buys up entire Tuscan village The entire Tuscan village of Tenuta de Castelfalfi has been snapped up by the giant tour operator TUI and is due to be turned into an integrated holiday playground for German tourists within the next two years. In a move which would no doubt make the Tuscany-loving author EM Forster turn in his grave, the exquisitely beautiful but rundown medieval settlement north of Siena, and close to Florence and Pisa is soon to be renamed Toscana Resort Castelfalfi. "The Germans have conquered our village!" declared the local paper, Il Tirreno, following news of the sale. |
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Egos 'a threat to skylines' Britain is entering a dangerous new phase of architectural excess with a harmful emphasis on building skyscrapers in our bigger cities, says the chief executive of English Heritage. He is warning of the 'extraordinary ambition' of individuals who want to 'create a monument to themselves'. |
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TreePeople Imagines Planting Another Million Trees In L.A. Los Angeles has set an aggressive agenda to become the greenest city in the world. Yet funding and implementing one of the centerpieces of that agenda, the Million Trees program, presents a hefty logistical and ecological challenge. Andy Lipkis, president and founder of TreePeople, has been helping municipalities develop and implement green strategies for over three decades. |
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
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Draft charter calls for leap in housing density Vancouver should put high-density housing next to its major parks and along every one of its major streets, suggests the first draft of Vancouver's ecodensity charter, released today. |
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Olympic masterplanner quits Foreign Office Architects leaves over fears that design of Olympic park has been dumbed down. |
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Pay-as-you-drive trial rules laid down Ten areas in England, including Manchester and Birmingham, have expressed an interest in road pricing but have insisted any schemes should only follow large investment in public transport infrastructure. |
Monday, May 28, 2007
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Defiant Gardens Defiant gardens are gardens created during times of extreme crisis, built behind the trenches of World War I, on both sides of the Western Front; in Jewish ghettos and Nazi concentration camps during World War II; in POW and civilian internment camps of both wars, tended to by prisoners and their captors; in internment camps for Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II; in garrisons, depots and battalion headquarters; in refugee camps; on the hollowed out concavities left behind by the Blitz. They are “short-lived, their marks on the land quickly obliterated.” |
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The latest perk: the office veggie patch Most of the 1,600 employees toiling inside a converted warehouse at the foot of the Cambie Bridge in Vancouver are techies who build complex business software. Starting this August, they'll also be farmers. |
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History reduced to rubble In Zhuhai, a prosperous city neighbouring the former Portuguese enclave of Macao, the Chinese government has built a replica of the Old Summer Palace so Chinese tourists can learn about history. The original was destroyed in 1860. First French forces and then the British attacked Emperor Qianlong's pleasure dome. The instructions to burn it down were given by the 8th Lord Elgin - son of the 7th Lord Elgin of Marbles fame - who was leading British forces in the Second Opium War. The ruins lie just outside Beijing. |
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An urban fabric reduced to tatters They loom, desolately incandescent, over the city that was. Glowing spikes claw at the sky, reaching ever upward, wilfully ignorant of what lies beneath. This is modern Shanghai, the most hyperbolic evidence of China's frenzied growth in a nation rife with such extremes. Radiant towers, monuments to the new – so important here – root themselves deeply in the city's urban fabric, which, simply by their prodigious sprouting, they have reduced to tatters. |
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In Market, Hopes for Health and Urban Renewal It seems that anyone you talk to in the streets around Progress Plaza, a tattered shopping center in a mainly black, poor part of North Philadelphia, is excited. There has not been a supermarket nearby since the last one in the plaza suddenly shut down in 1999, part of a nationwide flight from blighted urban areas by many large chains. |
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Conference aims for greener cities As the world becomes more urbanized, and cities grow in size and number, it becomes increasingly important urban areas are built in a way that preserves the environment they overlap. Last month, the Institute of Ecosystem Studies held an international conference exploring how ecology can inform urban design. |
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Buffalo bets on its waterfront Once a symbol of American urban blight, the Lake Erie city has ambitious plans for its waterfront, backed by heavy dollops of federal and state funding. |
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Condos and clubs clash With more condos and plans for a shelter, Toronto's Entertainment District is getting crowded. |
Saturday, May 26, 2007
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'netropolis' explores how future global cities will develop Michael Najjar's 'netropolis' investigates the current development of global mega cities - sprawling urban masses whose space is too big and elusive for its inhabitants to comprehend. |
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Sprawling Cowtown needs to grow up Canada's fastest growing city should set an example by growing up instead of out. That's the word from a multidisciplinary University of Calgary team looking at ways to tackle the suburban sprawl-obesity link. |
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Koolhaas, Foster clash over ‘similar’ designs Two of the world’s leading architects, Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster, have clashed over claims of a “remarkable similarity” between two of their most ambitious projects. |
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I love infill - just not in my backyard It's a dark day when an urban planner must admit to being a NIMBY. |
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What is Effective Urban Planning?
Mayors from around the world convened this week in New York to get serious about climate change. They have a growing number of examples to learn from and one of the best is Starbucks. |
Friday, May 25, 2007
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It takes a tower Sustainable design means more than energy efficiency and windows with hinges. It describes a built environment that merges with its natural landscape, an architecture that embraces (and enhances) its surroundings. |
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Doctors say new road plans can drive off obesity "If we want to give our streets back to children and young people, we need to be looking at our urban areas and take cyclists away from our main, arterial roads," he said, "We need far more no-through roads in urban and residential areas which would have a big effect on communities. Urban design is the key to cracking this problem." |
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The quest for a green city Cities today are breeding grounds for pollution, poverty, disease and despair and, with careful planning, they can be turned into flagships of sustainable development. |
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Living Building Challenge
It is time to move beyond LEED to the level of the Living Building. Imagine a building that is informed by the eco-region’s characteristics and
* that generates all of its own energy with renewable resources, |
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Flower powered The giant mechanical plant dazzling visitors at the Chelsea Flower Show is a triumph of sustainable urban design. |
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Trying to Rescue A Sunken Plaza A recent informal poll among real estate developers concluded that the General Motors Building, on the east side of Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th streets, may be the most valuable office building in the city, commanding the highest rents. From the developer's perspective, the 1968 building is a masterpiece. The critics have not been so kind. |
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A Caracas gem is cleaned up "They made Caracas into Calcutta," the Venezuelan writer Fausto Maso lamented in the epilogue of a recently reissued memoir of bohemian exploits in the 1970s and 1980s along Sabana Grande, the tree-lined boulevard that once symbolized this city's effervescent intellectual life. Until recently, it was hard for anyone with the nerve to exit a subway stop on Sabana Grande to disagree with that assessment. About 3,000 street vendors associated with black-market sales and crime had taken over the boulevard since the start of the decade, and the area had become emblematic of the city's decline into lawlessness and neglect. |
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Cape Town unveils housing-upgrade plan The City of Cape Town on Wednesday unveiled a two-year plan to provide essential services to all 222 informal settlements within its boundary |
Thursday, May 24, 2007
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Imagine a world where every house is 'visitable' It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. But one thing we know for sure -- we are all getting older, and in increasing numbers. In three years, about one-third of the U.S. population will be 50 and older, an unprecedented demographic milestone. It is the first time in history that a nation has achieved such an extended life span for so many of its citizens. |
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City plugs into hybrid car trend Toronto to launch pilot project with cars that can be charged from any wall socket. |
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
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Adapting to 'inevitability of 40C city' Climate Change Adaptation ‘by Design Guide’ for sustainable communities, published today by the Town and Country Planning Association, shows how adapting towns and cities to climate change offers enormous potential for creating high value, quality places where people and businesses will want to spend time. |
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The Things We Throw Away By the time I worked out the style of our death the leaves were back on the trees. The journey in search of rubbish had taken the whole winter long and now I was here with the bins. The evening it was all over I emptied the latest rubbish onto some newspapers spread out on the kitchen floor – a cornflakes packet and old razor blades, apple cores and cotton buds. Looking through the stuff I felt how secret the story had been. I’d gone looking for the end but had always been brought back to this, the rubbish on the floor appearing grave and autobiographical. The seasons are like that and so is our trash: you examine their habits of repetition for long enough and you begin to think of lost time. |
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Atelier Bow-Wow: Tokyo Anatomy Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, along with his partner Momoyo Kaijima, is one half of the Tokyo-based Atelier Bow-wow. Founded in 1992, Atelier Bow-wow is one the most unique practices of its generation. With Japanese architecture once again taking center stage through the work of Yoshio Taniguchi, Toyo Ito, SANAA, Kengo Kuma, and others, it is refreshing to witness a practice confident enough in itself to shun a particular style. Instead, Bow-Wow embraces a kind of accidental urban vernacular, using their research/work to chronicle the complex - and often unforgiving - logic of the city. Acting as urban detectives, Bow-wow has catalogued the agility of Tokyo's fabric to produce radical programmatic collisions (Made in Tokyo) and nuanced micro architectures (Pet Architecture). |
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Bay Area design could use a taste of Slow Food's philosophy "One of the benefits of the Bay Region's food and wine culture is that it has reconnected city dwellers psychologically with the countryside," write Bender and Parman. "Growth can be positive, an indication of quality and urbanity, when approached in the right way." |
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A crisis of confidence plagues public art Modern architecture and urbanism is connecting with the public more. Nevertheless, it is artists – rather than architects – who are achieving this. They somehow manage to illuminate a moment, a fragment, a glimpse of urban existence that has the power to touch and move us. |
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In a city? Tyler Brűlé recommends taking to the street and wandering It's time for a revolution in your weekend schedule - abandon all plans. If you're about to leave the house to run a series of errands, let them wait a day. Instead, put your feet up, have an extra coffee and reconsider what you're going to wear. Once you've reassembled yourself, take to the street and simply wander. If you're reading this in a hotel breakfast room and are about to venture out the front door to follow a meticulously planned itinerary, rip it up and just wing it - no must-see lists, no reservations, no timetable. |
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A bicycle built for a better world At the Taipei International Cycle Show in March 2007, John Burke, president of the Trek Bicycle Corp., gave an address arguing that if bicycle manufacturers wanted to expand sales, they would have to do more than just focus on the old standbys of marketing and new product innovation. They would have to become evangelists for "a bicycle friendly world." |
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It won't be easy getting public transit back on track Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay unveiled a $5-billion plan for urban transit in Montreal last week: streetcars, new subways, more buses, bicycle paths, a rapid transit line to Trudeau airport - and, by the way, tolls for entering Montreal. Yes, tolls for road commuters to Montreal to help pay for the public transit plan. And a tax on businesses in Montreal, too, to defray the costs. |
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
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Zorro-like Audacity Weiss/Manfredi’s Olympic Sculpture Park boldly reconnects Seattle to its long-neglected waterfront. |
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The Accidental Environmentalist One late evening in March, Shigeru Ban, dressed as always in black, left his office, a large recycled-paper tube structure about the size of a subway car temporarily wedged onto the top floor of the Pompidou Center in Paris. Mimicking the shape of the glass escalator tubes on the building’s outside, the office blends imperceptibly enough into the architecture that nobody on staff at Georges, the trendy rooftop restaurant with a big glass window facing Ban’s studio, even knew it was there. |
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Living Larger, and Drawing Fire Like the many Eskimo words for snow, a multitude of nicknames exist for the oversize houses commonly referred to as McMansions, and they mirror the uneasiness over the spread of the homes. |
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This Old, Organic House The house that I live in is an exquisitely tuned, environmentally sensitive machine — or at least it was when it was built, back when Thomas Jefferson was president, more than two centuries ago. |
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Visible Green Green building strategies often seem complicated and confusing, but really they fall into two simple categories: those that affect visible design and those that do not. The second list (thermal insulation, material content, water efficiency, etc.) has become more familiar, partly because technical factors are easier to regulate and measure. But the first, which includes layout, massing, and fenestration, actually can have a greater impact on a building's performance. For example, smart engineers warn that the most sophisticated mechanical system cannot compensate for poor solar orientation—if you face a building west, it's going to get hot. |
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Soup kitchen becomes a depot for change The new brick building on the eastern edge of downtown Baltimore looks curiously like a train station, with its arched windows and overhanging roofline. But trains will never stop there. It's home to the Our Daily Bread Employment Center, and it was designed as the starting point for a different sort of journey. |
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The Road to Curitiba On Saturday mornings, children gather to paint and draw in the main downtown shopping street of Curitiba, in southern Brazil. More than just a charming tradition, the child’s play commemorates a key victory in a hard-fought, ongoing war. Back in 1972, the new mayor of the city, an architect and urban planner named Jaime Lerner, ordered a lightning transformation of six blocks of the street into a pedestrian zone. The change was recommended in a master plan for the city that was approved six years earlier, but fierce objections from the downtown merchants blocked its implementation. Lerner instructed his secretary of public works to institute the change quickly and asked how long it would take. “He said he needed four months,” Lerner recalled recently. “I said, ‘Forty-eight hours.’ He said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m crazy, but do it in 48 hours.’ ” |
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Urban Re:Vision Attracts Visionary Thinkers
San Francisco-based Re:Vision (www.urbanrevision.com) has announced the winners from the first of five jury selections as part of a unique international competition to create the National prototype for sustainable urban living. The first stage of the competition titled Re:Volt, received hundreds of proposals from throughout the world which focused on innovative methods of incorporating “clean” energy into an urban environment. |
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More bike lanes? No thanks L.A. should treat cyclists as motorists' equals, not as pesky afterthoughts. |
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Who is Vedran Mimica? From May 24 to June 10, Rotterdam will be the centre of the international architecture world, says Vedran Mimica. Who is Vedran Mimica? And what is his relation to the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam? |
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Sex and the City, Pregnancy and the Suburb? If a correlation exists between birth rates and urbanization, does the post World War II baby boom owe its existence to urban sprawl? |
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In a neighbourhood near you: NIMBYism Anyone planning on creating a commercial or retail real estate development in Canada better get ready for a fight: Canada's theme song is "Not In My Backyard," according to a recent survey. In fact, not only do 75 per cent of Canadians oppose any new commercial and retail development in their own neighbourhoods but one in five Torontonians and an astonishing one in three Vancouverites says they have actively worked to oppose such projects. |
Saturday, May 19, 2007
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Die Another Day The cycle of codependence between critics and stars does a disservice to both public and profession alike. |
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Transplant Recipient Copenhagen’s waterfront gets new life with a planning infusion from Amsterdam. |
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For Sale: Condo With Chicken Coop Forget the golf-course community or the manicured subdivision. A number of developers are now offering homes on working farms. |
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Bicycles beat subway as fastest mode of travel in New York City Two wheels, four wheels or dozens — which offer the fastest mode of travel in the largest — and most congested — U.S. metropolis? The winner of the New York City contest: The bicycle, followed by a train and a car. |
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Indian slum population doubles in two decades The number of people living in slums in India has more than doubled in the past two decades and now exceeds the entire population of Britain, the Indian Government has announced. |
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The next big thing: Carpooling by Web Launched this past Earth Day, Cambridge-based Web site GoLoco — viewable at www.GoLoco.org — functions as part personals ad, part carpooling service. The point is for commuters to get personal with their fellow carpoolers, without having to search on their own. |
Friday, May 18, 2007
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Dancing About Architecture You know the saying: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Does that hold when dancing about architecture has a soundtrack — the beep-beep-beep of a truck in reverse? |
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Invisible Cities Cities are composed of layers. Invisible Cities: Toronto is a sonic composition celebrating the layers of the city of Toronto. There are layers of natural history, the economy, history and culture, which transform over time. |
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Old architecture lends soul to modern cities More and more old residential buildings in Shanghai are being torn down to make way for new roads, metro lines or large high-rise residential and commercial compounds. |
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Architects visit their foes' citadel To those civilians who merely live and work in buildings, architecture may appear to be a genteel profession dominated by people in cool eyeglasses and black clothing. Little do they know of the furious clashes raging between the Modernists and the New Urbanists, an ideological rift every bit as bitter and unbridgeable as America's Red State/Blue State divide. |
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China chasing an urban utopia Pipe-dream design or realistic vision of the future? Standing on the bleak concrete expanse of the world's largest square, it's hard to visualize Chairman Mao Zedong's mausoleum surrounded by trees and a carpet of grass. Such is the wind of change currently blowing through China's native architectural scene, and the day when a visit to Tiananmen Square means a walk in the park may not actually be that far away. |
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Coalition to Make Buildings Energy-Efficient A coalition of 16 of the world’s biggest cities, five banks, one former president and companies and groups that modernize aging buildings on Wednesday pledged investments of billions of dollars to cut urban energy use and releases of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. |
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Is urban form the root of politics? Much of the world seems to lean towards communal - or somewhat left-leaning - politics: Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the big coastal cities in the US. These places are often characterized by large, relatively dense cities. When you live in density, what your neighbor does very directly affects you, and so you're more likely to support a more active government that puts a lot of controls and planning in place. And not just land-use regulation and transportation choices, but income redistribution, because the poor and homeless are much more "in your face" in a dense city, and you naturally want somebody to do something about it. |
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Crosswalk as pedestrian memorial We’ve just had our attention drawn to an ingenious project in Portugal to raise awareness of pedestrian safety. The zebra stripes of a pedestrian crosswalk have been created by painting onto the road the names of pedestrians who were killed by cars, along with a note that “1/4 of car accident victims are pedestrians.” |
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A Nation in Transition: What the Urban Age Means for the United States In an address to a gathering of the Urban Age in New York City, Bruce Katz argues that contrary to popular opinion, the United States exemplifies the world's drive towards urbanization, and that to remain prosperous, the U.S. must recognize the central lesson of the Urban Age: that the ability of the U.S., or any nation, to compete globally and meet the great environmental and social challenges of our time rests largely on the health and vitality of major cities and metropolitan areas. |
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Sprawl is our 'inconvenient truth' The two biggest factors determining our personal greenhouse-gas profiles are where we live, and how we move around. The latest census figures reveal growth in periphery municipalities at three times the rate of central cities. The nature of this development, with its heavy automobile dependence, is changing our global atmosphere. |
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We would use less energy living closer together Cities have powerful environmental advantages: They make it easier to walk and use public transit. |
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An over-the-top restoration For the past half century at very least, Vancouver has been a cauldron of innovation for new housing ideas. In the 1960s we developed the West End's trademark small floor plate, medium-rise apartment tower. Nudged upwards as the small floor plate high-rise condominium tower, this housing form is of increasing interest world-wide — from Dubai to San Diego. More recently, Vancouver has been developing housing hybrids — buildings that combine two quite different uses, or else two quite different physical formats of multiple homes. Divergent uses brought together by an unbeatable confluence of ultra-high land prices and mandates from our all-powerful urban planners have prompted an unexpected laminate of functions: big box stores topped by the buttons and bows of rooftop condos. Vancouver is home to the world's first Costco store capped by condominium towers, on Pacific Boulevard. |
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Green bins in condos: A city how-to An ambitious plan that will bring the city's successful green bin system to apartment and condo dwellers has been drafted to help Toronto divert 70 per cent of garbage from landfill by 2010 |
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As Vancouver gas prices soar, so does transit use Gas prices are up across the country, but no major city has been hit harder than Vancouver with an average pump price of $1.272 a litre for regular unleaded gasoline. It's been climbing steadily toward that record since February. But as gas prices continue to rise, so does the number of people who use public transit. |
Thursday, May 17, 2007
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Two Wheels Better than Four in France Paris officials are making 20,000 bikes available for rent across the city in a bid to reduce the number of cars. It's one of the most ambitious efforts anywhere but critics believe it won't appeal to many potential cyclists. |
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Russian capital's architectural gems bulldozed Its buildings include florid art nouveau houses, brutalist Stalin-era skyscrapers and a magnificent Willy Wonka-like chocolate factory. But Moscow's unique and diverse architectural heritage is under "full-scale attack" and in serious danger of disappearing altogether, a group of British and Russian experts warned yesterday. |
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City parks could cool urban areas by 4°C Creating more parks and green spaces in urban areas could cool cities by up to 4°C – possibly enough to offset the warming from climate change – say researchers. |
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Back to the future Science fiction promised us a tomorrowland of jetpacks, Smell-O-Vision and male mammary implants. So what happened? |
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Architects Urged to Seize Power Globalization, militarization, and surveillance—these themes are much in evidence within political and academic circles at the moment, but how do they impact the built environment? “Evasions of Power,” a symposium held at the University of Pennsylvania earlier this spring, addressed the many manifestations of political and economic power affecting architecture and urbanism. Topics ranged from free trade zones to Hurricane Katrina, but Penn architecture chair Detlef Mertens cited their common interest as “architecture understood in a political register.” |
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Architects Urged to Seize Power Globalization, militarization, and surveillance—these themes are much in evidence within political and academic circles at the moment, but how do they impact the built environment? “Evasions of Power,” a symposium held at the University of Pennsylvania earlier this spring, addressed the many manifestations of political and economic power affecting architecture and urbanism. Topics ranged from free trade zones to Hurricane Katrina, but Penn architecture chair Detlef Mertens cited their common interest as “architecture understood in a political register.” |
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Intermodality What is the center of Houston? Downtown, perhaps. But not really. There’s more retail in the Galleria, more health care in the Medical Center, and new centers growing up in places like the Woodlands. Houston is a metropolitan area with multiple centers, and it’s getting more so. So how do we build transit for a place with many centers? |
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The Undiscovered Bedrooms of Manhattan
A friend of mine once told me about the "typical dream of a New Yorker," as he described it, wherein a homeowner pushes aside some coats and sweaters in the upstairs closet... only to reveal a door, and, behind that, another room, and, beyond that, perhaps even a whole new wing secretly attached to the back of the house...Always fantasizing about having more space in Manhattan. |
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Cities revisit needs of the elderly Six days a week, County Express vans and buses roam the vast plains of northeastern Colorado. They pick up older residents of this rural region and drive them sometimes more than 100 miles to the town of Sterling. It has the only dialysis center in 9,600 square miles, an area the size of Maryland. |
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Designing Cities for People, Rather than Cars… The world’s cities are in trouble. In Mexico City, Tehran, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the quality of daily life is deteriorating. Breathing the air in some cities is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. In the United States, the number of hours commuters spend sitting in traffic going nowhere climbs higher each year. |
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Decongestion Five innovations in urban transportation that you won’t find in America, yet. |
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Slussen in Stockholm by Bjarke Ingels Danish wonder architect Bjarke Ingels and his office BIG has been working on the new Slussen in central Stockholm. A place which connects the northern and southern parts of the town. Stockholm town has been talking many years now how to best replace the current Slussen which actually is slowly falling apart. Cars, bikes, pedestrians, metro, shops, urban plaza, boats, buses and shops have to share the space. |
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
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StreetFilms: Secure Bike Parking for Pennies per Hour In the East Bay area of California you'll find electronic, on-demand Bike Link locking facilities that provide secure bike parking for between 3 to 5 cents per hour. |
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From No. 1 to No. 213 in local quality of life How does your neighbourhood rate as a place to live? The City of Edmonton has an answer. In a wide-ranging study that looks at everything from the number of single parents to the condition of city streets, the city has amassed a huge pile of data, and a corresponding quality-of-life ranking, on 213 Edmonton neighbourhoods. |
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Gateway to better design If much of modern life is rubbish, it is not surprising that much modern housing is too. So how can we ensure that future social housing - planned in its tens of thousands for the Thames Gateway and other areas - is of top quality? |
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Book: Superuse Superuse, about the construction of new buildings with surplus materials is a practical and inspiring book. It was initiated by the Rotterdam Recyclicity foundation, that specifically addresses this theme. |
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The city a school A place in which to make contact, negotiate and sharpen points of view. That’s how Herman Hertzberger sees the city. And that’s how he wants the countless schools he designed to function. The exhibition Hertzberger’s Amsterdam, organised by ARCAM architecture centre to mark his 75th birthday displays a number of them. |
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Beijing mayor blasts billboards promoting luxury Beijing's mayor has expressed disapproval of outdoor advertisements that promote luxury and indulgence, for fear they would escalate hostility between the rich and the poor, state media said Friday. |
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Growing the big apple As New York City soared into the sky in the early 20th century, Eugene de Salignac documented its progress in thousands of extraordinary photographs. And amazingly, he worked for the local council. |
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Clean slate The debate over what to do about Boston's City Hall is missing the point: it's not about a building, it's about reimagining the heart of the city, its connections to the past, and its possibilities for the future. |
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Time for dynamic architecture? Just three weeks ago, CW announced the launch of a project that will see an entire tower being assembled using precast concrete in order to cut down on build time and labour costs. The US $330 million (AED1.2 billion) rotating tower has been designed by Italian architect and chairman of Rotating Tower Technology International, David Fisher, and is set to be the first prefabricated skyscraper in the world. |
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All Planned Out? For 60 years the British 1947 Town and Country Planning Act has been an international model for regulating the production and reproduction of the built environment. However, much has happened in Britain and internationally since the Second World War. Many people around the world are considering how land use planning affects development in the twenty-first century. |
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New eco-towns to ease house crisis The eco-towns, the first of which will be in the south-east of England to ease chronic housing shortages there, will be modelled on the eco-villages proposed by the Prince of Wales in Cornwall. They will each hold between 10,000 and 20,000 new homeowners, with a total of 100,000 new homes. |
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Mayor asks world's cities to join Toronto's green scheme The mayor of Salt Lake City calls it a "fantastic idea." And a spokesperson for the mayor of Seattle says his boss is always up for a good bet. |
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
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A Garden in the Sky Work crews are about to start planting the roof of the new California Academy of Sciences museum in Golden Gate Park -- an architectural capstone that also qualifies as one of the world's most ambitious biodiversity experiments. |
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What's with white? Call it the new gray A reader wants to know: "What's with all these white buildings?" He's not the first to wonder about the current boomlet in all-white architecture. Call it "the Calatrava effect": In the wake of the 2001 addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, with its pristine white wings unfurled across the blue horizon, it seems that everyone wants whiteness and lightness in our buildings. |
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Roman remains threaten metro A planned hi-tech driverless underground railway line set to bring desperately needed transport links to the historic heart of Rome has run into a minefield of Roman remains |
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Clearing The Air On January 1st, 2007, a funny thing happened in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The city of approximately eleven million people, South America's largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal. |
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Green Envy What are the true environmental benefits of the "green" house movement? |
Monday, May 14, 2007
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Digital mapping captures Glasgow A 3D virtual online map of Glasgow has been launched modelling parts of the city down to incredible detail. |
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Massive rise in London cyclists The number of people cycling in London has risen 83% in the last seven years, mayor Ken Livingstone has revealed. |
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Animal House Meets the Empty Nest Real-estate developer Lee Schaefer is hovering over a model of his company's latest swinging-singles complex in Nashville, Tenn. As he surveys the scene, complete with bikini-clad quarter-inch figures frolicking by a pool, he plucks out a tiny plastic figure from a reject pile -- a senior citizen with white hair and a cane. "That's really not our target demographic," he says. |
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Planet Earth has a dirty little secret You don't expect a place called Earth to be running short of its namesake. It defies logic and goes against the evidence of our eyes that there might not be enough good earth to go around. If anything seems to be everywhere, it is dirt. Scratch the surface of the soil and what do you find? Much more of the same. Nothing could be more commonplace, more reassuringly eternal in its ability to outlast generations of human folly - dust to dust, as the graveside recital puts it, as good an affirmation of immortality as you'll find on a planet that otherwise prefers to think in the self-destructive short term. |
Saturday, May 12, 2007
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The Escalators of Hong Kong Twisting up through the narrow streets of Hong Kong is the world’s longest escalator system, spanning over 800m. The escalators, moving walkways and pedestrian bridges connect the downtown financial district to the mid-levels, a upscale neighborhood of condominium towers where many executives live. The escalator system was conceived to alleviate car traffic by helping commuters travel efficiently to work while providing protection from rain. The escalators have proven to be very popular, carrying over 45,000 people a day. |
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Lawn wanted in New York Since 2005, Fritz Haeg's project Edible Estates is challenging the American lawn, this "carpet of conformity", by inviting families to replace their front lawns with food-producing vegetable gardens. |
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Housing project needed Hollywood muscle Greenola could become a template for sustainable communities along the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast. |
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The Meta Rankings A look at how architectural power is measured and honored—and what it means today. |
Friday, May 11, 2007
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SpongeCity Last month in the journal Nature Materials, Japanese scientists reported that they've developed a gel that can swell up to 500 times its dry size when it comes in contact with solvents. Originally, we thought what great news this must be to mothers (and fathers), to the aged, and to the simply incontinent, because it's classed in the same group of super absorbent polymers with gels found in diapers. Turns out the new substance was designed to soak up nonpolar organic solvents, and water is neither nonpolar nor organic. Nevertheless, it can absorb waste oil and tackle chemical and various other industrial spills about to wipe out an entire ecosystem. |
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San Francisco seniors and Bicycle Coalition call for bicycles not ridden on sidewalks Pedestrian right advocates, seniors and parents of small children gathered Wednesday to reclaim San Francisco’s sidewalks for walking. |
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Shanghai: Creating a global city Shanghai is the ultimate poster-child for the effects of globalisation on cities and regions. |
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Bid to Develop Indian Slum Draws Opposition
One of India's most squalid slums sits on extremely valuable property. The government has a plan to let private developers build projects for the rich in exchange for free housing, schools and health clinics for the poor. But many long-time residents oppose the plan. |
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Dharavi: Mumbai's Shadow City As Mumbai booms, the poor of its notorious Dharavi slum find themselves living in some of India's hottest real estate. |
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The bigger they are, the harder they fall... While the much-derided tower blocks of the 1960s continue to crash down, so the skylines of many major cities are slowly being redrawn by today's love of steel and glass high-rise. |
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Germany's First Playground for Seniors Berlin has opened Germany's first playground for seniors. Inspired by fitness parks in China, the idea is to encourage old people to keep fit and socialize -- that is, if they can stop the kids from taking over. |
Thursday, May 10, 2007
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Portsmouth FC unveils Herzog & de Meuron stadium plans Portsmouth Football club and Sellar Properties have today unveiled ambitious plans for a Ł600m development in Portsmouth. Designed by Olympic stadium architects Herzog & de Meuron, a new football stadium will seat 36,000 people. The Waterfront Quarter scheme will also include more than 1m sq ft of residential on a 13-acre reclaimed land site adjacent to the city’s dockyards, as well as a 1.5 acre public space. |
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Deutsche Bank Creates $100,000 Award for Solving Urban Problems If projections hold, 1.4 billion people will live in vast mega-city slums by 2020. Last night, in the dramatic atrium of the Hearst Building in New York, Deutsche Bank Chief Executive Josef Ackermann announced the creation of the annual $100,000 Urban Age Award, given to programs that aggressively and imaginatively try to improve city life. |
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Sidewalks crack suburb tranquillity Residents throughout the area are concerned that their lifestyles will change if walks are added to their neighborhoods. |
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Abu Dhabi rules out 'cataclysmic' growth Abu Dhabi has outlined plans for a major development programme to transform the UAE capital into a global city by 2030, while avoiding the cataclysmic growth of other emerging economies. |
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
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Designing the Sustainable Urban Experience How different would we feel if our cities were designed “for the long term health of human and natural systems?” |
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Designing Cities For People "The world's cities are in trouble. In Mexico City, Tehran, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the quality of daily life is deteriorating. Breathing the air in some cities is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. In the United States, the number of hours commuters spend sitting in traffic going nowhere climbs higher each year," says Lester Brown, President of Earth Policy Institute, in his book Plan B 2.0. |
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How the Inca Leapt Canyons Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail. |
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With his pocket parks, Philadelphian enriched the city The name John F. Collins may be unfamiliar, but if you've spent any time wearing down shoe leather in Center City, you've probably passed through his world. A landscape architect, Collins has made a specialty out of slipping pocket parks into the cracks in Philadelphia's street grid. Stumbling upon one of his secret gardens today is like finding a $10 bill on the sidewalk - better, in fact. |
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In World Skyscraper Race, It Isn’t Lonely at the Top When work began on the Shanghai World Financial Center in 1997, in the headiest days of China’s economic takeoff, Shanghai was already a city that was hard to impress. |
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Do schools need playgrounds? The most expensive state school in Britain thinks not. Designed by Norman Foster, the Ł46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy will open its doors to 2,200 pupils in September. The blancmange-shaped building offers a wetland eco-pool and plasma screens on its main concourse but no playground and no traditional breaktime. |
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Foster unveils green utopia in the desert Foster + Partners says the walled city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi will be the world's first zero-carbon and zero-waste city. |
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India's middle class is set to bust out India's new middle class is ambitious, dynamic and upwardly mobile. It is also relatively small. Only about 50 million Indians, or about 5 per cent of the population, have the income to afford a middle-class lifestyle. But that may be about to change - and fast. A new report by McKinsey & Co., the global consultancy, says that if India's economy continues to expand at its current, healthy pace, the middle class will grow more than tenfold over the next two decades, reaching 41 per cent of the population by 2025. |
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
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China Cracks Down on Copycat Architects In China, the business practice of bootlegging is not just confined to DVDs and Louis Vuitton handbags. Foreign architects have discovered that their designs, even their company names, are also attracting copycats. But some are beginning to fight back. In one of the first cases in which the government is allowing a foreign firm to sue a Chinese business, Woodhead International, Australia’s second-largest design firm, filed a lawsuit in Shanghai earlier this year against its former local partner on the basis of “unfair competition.” Very few of these cases ever made it to a Chinese court in the past because foreign companies had limited powers in China. |
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Jefferson Award: Presented to John Peterson John Peterson is an award-winning architect who strives to promote cultural enrichment and community service through his nonprofit organization, Public Architecture. |
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The world goes to town After this year the majority of people will live in cities. Human history will ever more emphatically become urban history. |
Monday, May 7, 2007
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A house with a minimal footprint Builder and designer campaign to create livable spaces in back lanes. |
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The ghosts of what might have been Given Toronto's historical approach to city-building, the mildly predatory scenario is apt – drab modern structures stalking the city's past and hunting it to near-extinction |
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Have Architects Abandoned The Livable City?
Modernist architects, who reigned from the middle of the 20th century into the 1970s, roughly, created no shortage of stirring buildings. But their attempts to rewrite the rules of the modern city were about as successful as the Hindenburg, with which modernism shared German roots. |
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Down at the heel, flying high Do the shoes mean anything, or is it just shoefiti for shoefiti's sake? |
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Building a Better Bike Lane Bike-friendly cities in Europe are launching a new attack on car culture. Can the U.S. catch up? |
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Metropolis strives to meet its thirst The Australian of the year 2007, environmentalist Tim Flannery, once predicted that Perth in Western Australia could become the world's first ghost metropolis, its population forced to abandon the city due to lack of water. |
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China plans 'no car' day China's smog-choked capital and the financial hub of Shanghai have agreed to close their roads for the country's first "no car" day, along with over 100 other cities, the official Xinhua agency said on Saturday. On September 22 private cars will be barred from some roads, forcing people to walk, use public transport or get back on the bicycles for which Chinese cities used to be famous. |
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As Its Population Declines, Youngstown Thinks Small Hanging next to city planner Bill D'Avignon's desk is a giant map of this city, divided into neighborhoods. One is Oak Hill, a gritty enclave just south of downtown. The neighborhood, once densely populated, has lost 60% of its population in recent decades and is dotted with abandoned buildings and empty lots. |
Saturday, May 5, 2007
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Why Tiananmen Square could go from red to green Renowned architect proposes turning Beijing centrepiece into a forest. |
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Forget pay-as-you-go; think pay-as-you-stop "The meter automatically knows when and where you're parked, and it knows the rates," says Mr. Grush. "You park your car, do your business, then drive away." |
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Local merchants reinvest in city, their study says While chains and big-box stores spread throughout the country, San Francisco remains a stronghold of locally owned retail businesses. And these local stores and eating places recycle much more of their revenue in the surrounding community than do their chain competitors, according to a new study by a San Francisco merchants' group. |
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Density's Darlings Many active older adults want to live in a city environment close to shopping, cultural events and transportation. |
Friday, May 4, 2007
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These buildings are for the birds With activists and their exhibit of 2,500 carcasses in attendance, city unveils guidelines for bird-friendly towers. |
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Is Vancouver building a design gap? Condos, condos going up everywhere, but apparently none are worthy of a medal. |
Thursday, May 3, 2007
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Orestad South Competition Results Orestad Development Corp. The international design competition about urban spaces and urban life promoted by the Řrestad Development Corporation ended with the award of two first prizes which will together create attractive, unique and functional urban spaces in Řrestad South. |
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Field Guide to Sprawl Words such as "city," "suburb," and "countryside" no longer capture the reality of real estate development in the United States. Most Americans inhabit complex metropolitan landscapes layered with tracts, strips, malls, office parks, and highways. Widespread dissatisfaction with speculative building has provoked many critiques, but precise terms to define the physical elements of sprawl are often missing. |
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Eastern Promise? China's cityscapes are being shaped by some of the most innovative and futuristic design to be found anywhere in the world. Is this a new architectural utopia? |
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Faster than a speeding pedestrian Grant Spence did it on Bay Street in 11.17 seconds. In Ottawa, it takes most people 13.72. The time it takes pedestrians to walk 60 feet has decreased significantly in recent years, according to a new study, as people rush to keep up with the pace of their busy lives. |