Urbanism News
Saturday, May 31, 2008
|
Beam Me Across the Street, Scotty The Virtual Wall provides a barrier made up of plasma laser beams depicting pedestrians doing what they do best and any car that crosses that barrier suffers the consequences. Okay so maybe those lasers aren't powerful enough to do any harm but the effect is enough to make drivers and pedestrians alike follow crosswalk rules to the tee. |
|
The president pulls a switch on the City of Light The French capital is overcrowded while its suburbs are poor and blighted, but Nicolas Sarkozy has a solution - an ambitious competition to create an urban vision for an expanded 'Greater Paris.' Not everyone, however, thinks that it's a good thing. |
|
An age of transformation America's suburbs are coming to resemble its city centres. That is both good news and bad. |
|
Cities and Ambition Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. |
|
Climate Concerns Shape the Cities of Tomorrow "We are tired of cities that force people to move around in rigid, clanking, cumbersome, often dangerous metal capsules -- cars, trains, elevators, escalators and all the rest," he writes. "We propose cities that are softer, gentler and more sensual." |
Friday, May 30, 2008
|
Future cities will be more like ecosystems that enrich society and the environment "Sustainability" as a term is not provocative enough for cities. At the urban scale we need to think about integrated and positive ecological solutions—solutions that fit holistically within the metabolism of urbanity. |
|
Robin Hood Gardens estate: heritage icon or concrete slabs? To the untrained eye and to most of its residents, it is a grim and dilapidated concrete block that looks distinctly out of place alongside the flashy glass structures of Canary Wharf near by. But to eminent leaders of the architectural world, it is a heritage icon and posterchild for 20th-century high-rise living that must be preserved. |
|
Is Vancouver a 'World Class City?' (And Is It Making Us Too Expensive?) What does affordability have to do with whether Vancouver is a "world-class city?" |
Thursday, May 29, 2008
|
Bountiful Backyards: Edible, Urban Landscaping Bountiful Backyards works with nature, not against it. We catalyze multi-functional mini-ecosystems that benefit soil microbes, insects, and fungi. Only when they are healthy can we create thriving polycultures of edibles, fruit trees, and insectary plants that create the balanced living systems which are possible in any amount of space, shade, or drought. |
|
Companies Respond to Ecosystem Degradation Climate change may dominate headlines today. Ecosystem degradation will do so tomorrow. Why should business care? Because ecosystem health goes straight to the bottom line. |
|
Bicycles=Freedom For Pinellas County's homeless, bikes are the training wheels for a new life. |
|
City dwellers produce less carbon than country cousins While cities are hot spots for global warming, people living in them turn out to be greener than their country cousins. |
|
Wired for vision Britain's latest attempt at creating a new town is bold, magical - and raises two fingers to sneering middle-class utopianists. |
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
|
A Fountain on Every Corner Bottled water's main virtue, it seems, is convenience, especially for people at large in the city. Delivered by gravity, tap water generates virtually no waste. All that, and it contains no calories, caffeine or colorants either. But as the editor of Beverage Digest told The Times, "t’s not so easy, walking down Third Avenue on a hot day, to get a glass of tap water."
|
|
Out of the Blocks Beijing's Olympic architecture is spectacular, but what message does it send? |
|
In varied Vegas, two buildings spark architectural debate On the Strip, a giant black glass pyramid sits next to a fairy tale-inspired castle with brightly colored turrets. A faux-Deco rip-off of Manhattan’s skyline stands down the street from respectful if miniaturized copies of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. Is this jarring mishmash of architectural styles necessarily a bad thing? To the tens of millions of tourists who flock here annually, the answer apparently is no. |
|
David and Goliath fight over Britain's Greatest Street title One has some of the highest rateable values in Britain, nearly a mile of chic antique shops and the offices of the London Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. The other has a name for cosiness, magical pork pies and the friendly clutter of a weekly newspaper. But for the next six months huge differences in size and wealth will be set aside, as London and the Yorkshire market town of Skipton compete for the right to claim Britain's Greatest Street. |
|
A chilly development JDS/Julien De Smedt Architects and Aarhus-based CEBRA, in collaboration with the Dutch firm SeArch and French architect Louis Paillard have won the competition to build a 25,000 sq m housing complex in the new Aarhus Docklands development. |
|
N.Y. Hopes to Ensure Smooth Pedaling for Bike Commuters The view from the lens of photographer Mark Weiss's camera is of a treacherous world of cab drivers weaving into bike lanes, of double-parked delivery vehicles, of car doors opening suddenly, of pedestrians wandering blindly and of narrow passageways between trucks. It is the world of the Manhattan bicycle commuter, which Weiss captures on a camera affixed to a bar on his single-gear bike. |
|
Private jet sharing It's the ultimate dilemma for the seriously rich with a conscience - how to enjoy private jet travel without the guilt about carbon footprints. But now a scheme has been set up which claims to allow travellers the chance to cut their carbon emissions without compromising on the luxury and sheer convenience such flights offer. Jet-sharing, based on the kind of car-sharing scheme popular with the eco-conscious, is the latest concept to emerge from Britain's booming market in private jet hire. |
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
|
With Gas Costs Rising, Farmers Take to Mules Two Tennessee farmers have found an old-fashioned solution to a new problem: Tired of high prices at the gas pump, they've hitched their farming equipment to two mules named Dolly and Molly. T.R. Raymond and his son Danny say it's a lot cheaper to fuel their mules than to fuel their tractors. |
|
Cramped Monaco plans new district - on stilts It's a playground for the rich, a Mediterranean tax haven crammed with luxury apartment blocks, where moneyed visitors will flock this week for the grand prix. But Monaco, the second smallest country in the world after the Vatican, has a problem: it has run out of space. |
Monday, May 26, 2008
|
Living within our means When characteristics such as density, mixed use, connectivity, high-quality public realm, local character and adaptability come together in a city, as they do in Barcelona, they provide an alchemy of sustainability, social benefit and economic vitality. |
|
Proposal would turn streets into recreational spaces An idea to shut down portions of major city streets on Sunday mornings and open them for pedestrian, bicyclists and other exercisers has drawn the interest of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. |
|
Mapping our future: Look to past for city life without cars With gasoline nudging $4 a gallon and people increasingly aware of the need to walk or bike more and drive less - for their health and the health of the planet - interest is growing in transportation alternatives to automobiles. The trouble is, it is nearly impossible to navigate the modern city without an automobile. It's time to rethink the way we design cities. |
|
Born to Be ... Fuel-Efficient Chris Casal, a Brooklyn, N.Y., elementary-school teacher, used to drive to work almost every day, mainly because it took 12 minutes compared with an hour by subway. But rising fuel and parking costs made the trip "kind of ridiculous," he says. |
|
City veggie gardens flourish Forget budget furniture or do-it-yourself interior design - New Yorkers are switching to homegrown dining in an effort to cut costs as the economy flounders. The number of green-thumbed residents using the city's vegetable gardens has increased by the bushel in recent months because of soaring prices in the food aisles. |
Sunday, May 25, 2008
|
Resisting Representation
Until recently, obtaining maps and aerial photographs of Rio de Janeiro was not as easy as logging on to Google Earth. Now, from a computer anywhere in the world, one can spin a virtual globe, descend on a target, and hover over a pixilated field that eventually comes into focus as a city. This image renews itself in response to one's commands, making it seem that few boundaries exist between the user and the abstract, flat clusters of houses, roads, buildings, airports, factories, and parks that form a city. |
|
Where' Home? For many Americans—rootless and unbound to place—this is not a simple question. |
Saturday, May 24, 2008
|
Putting the brakes on wildlife deaths Driving indigenous species off-road may be key to saving them from extinction. |
Friday, May 23, 2008
|
Intent Shapes Environment, Environment Shapes Life Sometimes we talk about the environment without considering what it is. There are two: the natural environment (made by Nature and adversely impacted by man), and the physical environment; the local environment that surrounds each of us in our day-to-day life – our room, our home, our streets and parks. When we talk about saving the environment, we tend to focus on the natural environment and the depredations done by man. |
Thursday, May 22, 2008
|
Rogers attacks eco-towns as a big mistake Richard Rogers has launched an extraordinary criticism of the government’s eco-towns project calling it one of the government’s “biggest mistakes”. |
|
Cyclists need a bicycle built for T.O. Dust off the Raleigh 10-speed you haven't used since high school because it's time for riders to unite! |
|
Where housing bust hits hard In many metro areas, far-flung suburbs and exurbs face sharp declines in home prices. |
|
Call for liberation lacks motivation On April 4, to mark the publication of Volume #14 – theme: 'Unsolicited Architecture' – the NAi organised a discussion about 'unsolicited architecture'. During the evening an emphatic moral appeal was made to architects. |
|
Community Supported Agriculture and the Return of the Small Farm With the rise of corporate farming and the decline of small farming operations, Americans are increasingly disconnected from their food. Some are attempting to counteract this disconnect through local small farming operations known as Community Supported Agriculture. |
|
Friedman building ‘green’ parking structure Chicago developer Al Friedman plans to spend $50 million building a 900-stall environmentally friendly parking garage to accommodate his 30 tenants and customers in the River North area. |
|
New Urbanism vs. Suburbanism
As population and pollution problems continue to develop in our world, new solutions to existing obstacles must be cultivated. Instead of expanding roads and building more bridges for more cars to congest, we must move to a different standpoint. New Urbanism sets out to make cars a source of secondary or even tertiary transportation in an interactive setting where people can prosper together healthily and ecologically. |
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
|
Is 'Walking Distance' Overrated?
The common wisdom about walkable neighborhoods holds that density – proximity to destinations – determines the number of walking trips. An ideal walking distance of a quarter mile is usually prescribed between residences and the nearest transit stop or retail center. |
|
Rent Control Part 1: Microeconomics and Hoarding Those of us who have studied microeconomics understand the near-universally accepted supply/demand consequence of rent-control: a decrease in the quality and supply of rental housing over time. |
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
|
Where Industry Once Hummed, Urban Garden Finds Success Amid the tightly packed row houses of North Philadelphia, a pioneering urban farm is providing fresh local food for a community that often lacks it, and making money in the process. |
|
Best solution for traffic woes? Eliminating the drivers Economists, Nobel Prize-winning physicists and traffic psychologists have all sought solutions to the nation's congestion problem, as have urban planners and civil engineers. But current plans to expand roads and introduce specialized tolls do not address the ultimate cause of traffic ---- people. |
|
Don't Supersize Me The old adage “less is more” has been revived in Los Angeles. On May 6, the LA City Council unanimously approved its “Mansionization Ordinance,” also known as the Neighborhood Character Ordinance, which will restrict the size and bulk of new or remodeled single-family dwellings in many LA neighborhoods. First proposed by council member Tom LaBonge in 2006, it is one of many similar pieces of legislation in the region, all hoping to limit the spread of the much-reviled McMansion. |
|
Oklahoma City swaps highway for park Oklahoma has a radical solution for repairing the state's busiest highway. Tear it down. Build a park. |
Sunday, May 18, 2008
|
As Deaths Outpace Births, Cities Adjust It was a very age-selective migration: young, working-age people took away their families and future families, leaving behind a population that aged in place. |
Saturday, May 17, 2008
|
In Siberia, Shopping Malls Are Sprouting All Over Siberia, where Russians waited in long lines to buy food with ration cards not long ago, is the improbable epicenter of a huge mall boom. As retail businesses shrink in the United States, provincial Russian towns like this one have become targets of retailers and shopping center developers from around the world. Malls in this area are even poaching managers from as far away as California. |
|
The San Francisco Ecocity Declaration An ecocity is an ecologically healthy city. Into the deep future, the cities in which we live must enable people to thrive in harmony with nature and achieve sustainable development. People oriented, ecocity development requires the comprehensive understanding of complex interactions between environmental, economic, political and socio-cultural factors based on ecological principles. Cities, towns and villages should be designed to enhance the health and quality of life of their inhabitants and maintain the ecosystems on which they depend. |
|
Walkable Urbanism Gen X’ers are speaking out across the nation and setting a new trend towards walkable urbanism – a place you can live, work, shop and play – all within walking distance. |
|
Key role of artists in urban development discussed at Cleveland conference Sprinkle some galleries on a dying main street. Change the zoning to allow live-work loft space. Throw in some government money for facade renovation or mortgage assistance. Voila: Property values will jump, and you'll soon worry about how to avoid gentrification, which is what happens when people with money move into a former zone of blight. |
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
|
Redesigning a Building to Preserve Peace in the Neighborhood You have to pity any architect who appears before the landmarks committee of the Upper East Side’s community board. Packed with amateur preservationists, it is notoriously adverse to anything new. |
|
Priced Out: Fleeing Seattle's costly core, they live on the edge When Aaron Cone goes upstairs in his South Park house and looks out a north-facing window, he can see the skyscrapers of downtown Seattle rising above the industrial expanse that separates his up-and-coming neighborhood from the city center. |
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
|
As gas prices soar, more commuters hop buses, trains With the price of gasoline approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are leaving their cars at home and taking trains or buses. |
|
Activist turns L.A.'s traffic islands into national parks There's a serious purpose behind his seemingly farcical 'The Islands of LA Nat'l Park' campaign. He wants people to discuss uses of public spaces. |
|
Day in the Work Life: Urban farmer Ah, life on a farm. Getting up early to milk the cows, smelling fresh cut grass and of course, the clamor of car horns, shoppers and public buses. At least, that's what it's like when your farm's located in the city. |
|
Architecture on an urban scale Urbanism has always been a weakness in the UK. A century and a half of dedicated suburbanism has left a gaping hole and “iconic” architecture, the desire of so many designers to be noticed with a single striking, simplistic gesture, is incapable of filling it. Not every building can be foreground, most buildings need to be fragments making up a larger whole; fabric and not landmark. |
|
Parking Space as Living Space? Generating both praise and criticism in a county with plenty of expensive housing but not much of the budget-friendly kind, a Department of Planning report urges towns and villages here to use land in existing office parks as sites for new housing, some of it for moderate-income families. |
|
Neurath’s open-source urbanism Stroom De Haag recently staged an exhibition on the work of Austrian economist, sociologist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945) entitled After Neurath – The Language of the Global Polis. Under the motto ‘better late than never’, here follows an introduction to the grandfather of open-sources. |
|
The Sorted Nation: A Discussion with Authors Bill Bishop and Richard Florida – Part One Planetizen talks with authors Bill Bishop and Richard Florida about how American cities and communities are increasingly attracting people with similar personality types, professional interests and voting preferences -- trends they've each documented in new books. |
Monday, May 12, 2008
|
Transit key in pollution, poverty fights Linfen has the dubious distinction of being one of the world's most polluted cities, a place where taking a simple breath can make you ill. Nearby coal mines are a major culprit, but the city is also overrun with automobiles. Cars and motorcycles are the main mode of transport there, as public transit is almost nonexistent. The city averages roughly one bus for every 2,000 people – one of the lowest rates in China |
Sunday, May 11, 2008
|
In California, Building a Town With a Gentle Footprint Codding Enterprises is in the final planning stages of what promises to be America's first one-planet-living community, Sonoma Mountain Village. |
|
The Gloves Are Off. The shortlist for England’s 10 eco-towns is out but now the real contest begins. With the winners due to be announced by the end of the year we brought eco-town supporter Wayne Hemingway and eco-town protester Myles Pollock together to slug it out. |
|
Sweden's carbon-tax solution to climate change puts it top of the green list
Buses and lorries running on dead cows and a train station using commuters' body warmth to heat an office block are two innovative solutions to lowering carbon emissions that have put Sweden top of an environmental league table. |
|
Born in Brooklyn: the Ashland Center Mixed-use project strives to give neighborhood tools and resources to maintain borough’s resurgence. |
Saturday, May 10, 2008
|
Engineering utopia with architecture As I was about to file away one of the many newsletters I receive, my eye caught the headline, “First LEED and Now SEED.. LEED, of course, means Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or “green” design. SEED stands for “Social Economic Environmental Design Network.” |
|
Portland pedals to Platinum Portland has a lot to offer bicyclists. Amenities include: Bike lanes, blue bike lanes, sharrows -- "shared-lane marking," in Portland bicycle-speak -- and green bike boxes being painted this spring at about a dozen intersections. On Tuesday morning, this bike-proud city celebrated an honor that recognizes its efforts to better accommodate bicyclists: the coveted Platinum designation as a bike-friendly environment. |
|
Water lily plan for solar power Large lily-shaped discs which harness solar power could soon be seen floating on the River Clyde. |
|
A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More Mayor Gavin Newsom is competitive about many things, garbage included. When the San Francisco found out a few weeks ago that it was keeping 70 percent of its disposable waste out of local landfills, he embraced the statistic the way other mayors embrace winning sports teams, improved test scores or declining crime rates. |
|
Why Do So Few Women Work in New York ... ? If I wanted to be a kept woman I would not start my quest in Minneapolis. High density, as you find in Manhattan, means lots of fun things to do in your copious free time as a kept woman and also a higher degree of income inequality and thus the hope of snaring a rich man. There's a reason why they didn't set Sex in the City in Paramus and most of the women there will be working even when the traffic gets worse. |
|
London as Venice This is lovely. It's London re-imagined in 1899 as La Serenissima-upon-Thames. Go see. |
Friday, May 9, 2008
|
Deep in the basement of an ancient tenement on Second Avenue in the heart of midtown New York City, I was fishing |
Thursday, May 8, 2008
|
Cities of the Future, Today As cool as ultra high-performance green buildings are individually, the real action is all with districts. Individual buildings may blaze paths, and as we engage in acupunctural infill (changing sprawling or underused areas into walkable, compact mixed-use communities by adding new buildings and redeveloping older properties -- something we'll be writing more about soon) we're going to need a lot of small-scale, even individual architectural solutions. |
|
Urban Farmers' Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market In the shadows of the elevated tracks toward the end of the No. 3 line in East New York, Brooklyn, with an April chill still in the air, Denniston and Marlene Wilks gently pulled clusters of slender green shoots from the earth, revealing a blush of tiny red shallots at the base. |
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
|
Urban Splash's Bridewell Island: winner and runners up The contest for Urban Splash’s Bridewell Island saw two different approaches adopted in designs for the key central Bristol site — construct a new tower or recycle most of what’s already there. |
|
Why Airlines Might Abandon Your City Airlines are bailing out of certain cities and routes. Your city could be next. |
|
Steal magnolias Gardeners now spend £4bn each year on making the land around their homes more beautiful. But our green-fingered obsession has set off a crime wave, with thieves uprooting plants, trees, lawns, ornaments and even ponds full of fish. |
|
Join the urban guerrillas for clandestine night-time gardening Meet 8-ish on the Lambeth Road,” the text read. “Tree pit as yet undecided.” |
|
Give us a square foot and we'll give you a year's worth of produce And Mel Bartholomew stumbled upon a simple, even slightly revolutionary, idea a little more than 25 years ago when he coined the term "square foot gardening." |
|
Photographer's bird's-eye view finds our surface geometry Pilot and photographer Alex MacLean shoots while he flies. His daredevil antics garner him some amazing color photos that capture the abstract in aerial views without losing the sense of landscape. |
|
City under the City Early 2008 an ambitious plan was launched to realize roads and carparks under Amsterdams historic city centre, called AMFORA (Alternative Multifunctional Underground Space Amsterdam). This is a plan by Strukton and Zwarts & Jansma. This infrastructural plan solves parking problems and contains facilities for sports, leisure and recreation. |
|
Watershed for this liveable city of ours Melbourne is fast running out of options for growth. The larger city now spreads about 100 kilometres from Melton to Pakenham and from Frankston to Epping, meaning Melbourne has a footprint of about 10,000 square kilometres, and a population of more than 3.5 million people — which by 2030 will approach 6 million. |
|
New London Mayor Talks Up Buses and Bikes (Updated) Here's an interview from last year with London Mayor Boris Johnson, who ousted Ken Livingstone last week. It's pretty remarkable in that Johnson spends the first eight minutes talking about buses and bikes. |
|
The Machinic Landscape of Tulips Nature turned into a machine, detached from the natural cycles of time and geography — in other words, detached from itself — re-landscaped here to service a $40 billion global flower industry. |
|
All Streets All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. This began as an example I created for one of my students in the fall of 2006, and I just recently got a chance to document it properly. |
|
Are livable cities just a dream? When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. What always strikes me is the immensity of the project, a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living and working in this wonder, things are quite different and the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill one’s view. The truth is that our cities have always been dominated by the rich and powerful and built and operated to serve their needs — not those of the mass of working people who live and toil in them. |
|
Bike Lanes, Intended for Safety, Become Traffic Battlegrounds On streets clogged by pollution-emitting cars, buses and trucks, New York City’s quest to establish reasonably safe cycling paths by adding to its roughly 300 miles of bicycle lanes has been welcomed by cyclists. But the lanes are often battlegrounds between cyclists and drivers who seem undeterred by the clearly demarcated paths. |
|
Fighting Global Warming Block by Block King County Executive Ron Sims has a simple test for every new public works project, building plan or government land purchase: Will it increase the region's total greenhouse-gas emissions, or reduce them? |
|
Against Planners No profession has done more harm to the American city than urban planners. |
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
|
Tired of paying through the nose, Americans try praying at the pump "Someone's making a lot of money and it's really, really wrong," added Twyman, who founded the Prayer at the Pump movement last week to seek help from a higher power to bring down fuel prices, because the powers in Washington haven't. |
|
San Francisco sculpted in cookware Beijing-based artist Zhan Wang sculpted the San Francisco cityscape out of pots, pans, graters, and other kitchenware. |
|
From Housing Complexes with Love In Japan, housing complexes are ubiquitous but most of them are nondescript and stand there for decades unappreciated. However, there are some wonderful people out there who uncover the special charms of such buildings. |
|
Infrastructure and Unfrastructure Here in Minneapolis there's a housing complex called riverside plaza. It was designed by the great Minnesota architect Ralph Rapson and opened in the early 70s. It sits squarely between the university of Minnesota campus and downtown. |
|
Crosswalk Culture As virtual bridges crossing the overwhelming number of black rivers, crosswalks may someday be an anthropological resource. Within the accompanying urban signage exists a multitude of behavioral indicators. |
|
Growing some food It seems that three different major trends are coming together: historically high transportation costs, a renewed appreciation for local foods, and questions about the viability of the American suburban experiment. At the center of these trends, back-yard gardens have been in the news lately. |
|
Top 5 Urban Design Greenifications Nothing says “give us back our space” like some unexpected greenification amidst the pavement-and-concrete dullness of the city. So we’ve picked the top 5 ideas that bring a tasty bite-sized bit of green to our urban stew of gray. |
|
An Average American Consumer's Spending Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gathers 84,000 prices in about 200 categories — like gasoline, bananas, dresses and garbage collection — to form the Consumer Price Index, one measure of inflation. |
|
Capital holds its breath as all powerful Mayor is deposed... After an extremely tight contest the London populous voted for Conservative candidate Boris Johnson as Mayor over long-serving Ken Livingstone on Thursday.The decision could have a major impact on the future shape of the capital. |
|
MIT's work on a zero-carbon city Imagine if the city of Boston were able to emit no carbon and no waste. |
|
In praise of the lost art of strolling It was the French who first grasped the cultural significance of walking. The time was the 1800s, the era when Baron Haussmann was reinventing Paris as a city of wide avenues, arcades and, above all, of light. |
|
A River Runs Through It Rivers are still the lifelines of American cities, but in a new age of urbanization, once-crowded waterways boast a greener complexion. |
|
Life on the ground key to new high-rise area If San Francisco planners have their way, a whole new neighborhood will grow up - literally - south of the traditional Financial District. And here's the punch line: It could feel a lot like midtown Manhattan. |
|
UCLA study links poor health to fast-food neighbors Higher rates of diabetes, obesity occur in areas where fast-food restaurants and convenience stores greatly outnumber grocery stores, researchers say. |
Monday, May 5, 2008
|
Poultry in motion: Chickens adopting urban lifestyle It's an idyllic scene in a sunny backyard in North Toronto. The forsythia is bright as springtime, and Sally, Heidi and Clucky wander by contentedly. They are plump, vigorous, egg-laying hens that, despite their beauty and utility, are illegal in Toronto. |
Friday, May 2, 2008
|
For love of L.A. taco trucks Some residents have launched an Internet fight against an L.A. County law curbing how long the vehicles can remain parked as they sell their wares. |
|
No easy access to fresh groceries in many parts of Seattle With two new supermarkets anchoring planned condo buildings, industry standards would say West Seattle has reached a saturation point for grocery stores. Tell that to Maggieh Rathbun. To buy fresh food, the carless Delridge resident has to spend hours on the bus or climb hills as steep as ski jumps. |
|
The Incredible Shrinking City When the mills shut down in the 1970s and ’80s, the smokestacks and foundries that symbolized steel belt manufacturing cities gave way to factory shells and rust. First unemployed, workers then began to move away for good. Unlike former steel powerhouses, such as Pittsburgh and Allentown, that have tried to attract new industry and grow their way back to prosperity, Youngstown, Ohio, is hitching its future to a strategy of creative shrinkage. |
|
Transbay plan would sprout new S.F. skyline A cluster of skyscrapers rivaling the Transamerica Pyramid would rise around the West Coast's tallest tower under an ambitious proposal that would shift the heart of San Francisco's downtown south of Market Street. |
Thursday, May 1, 2008
|
Once it was only God, now we're all 'creators' 'Creativity" is a word much bandied about in our babble of culturespeak. Like "community", it has a warm glow around it, and we rarely give it much further thought. |
|
Which side are you on? Today’s buildings have all the hallmarks of being designed by a profession happier to serve its paymasters than the environment or the public |
|
Repairing the Local Food System West Oakland is a community with limited access to healthy food. My work for People’s Grocery, a local nonprofit, will help the neighborhood and the nearby agricultural community work together to repair the local food system. |
[Archives]
Search entries: