Urbanism News
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
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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. |
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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
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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
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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
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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
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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.” |
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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. |
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Water lily plan for solar power Large lily-shaped discs which harness solar power could soon be seen floating on the River Clyde. |
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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. |
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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. |
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London as Venice This is lovely. It's London re-imagined in 1899 as La Serenissima-upon-Thames. Go see. |
Friday, May 9, 2008
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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
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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. |
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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
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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. |
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Why Airlines Might Abandon Your City Airlines are bailing out of certain cities and routes. Your city could be next. |
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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. |
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Join the urban guerrillas for clandestine night-time gardening Meet 8-ish on the Lambeth Road,” the text read. “Tree pit as yet undecided.” |
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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." |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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? |
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Against Planners No profession has done more harm to the American city than urban planners. |
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
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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. |
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San Francisco sculpted in cookware Beijing-based artist Zhan Wang sculpted the San Francisco cityscape out of pots, pans, graters, and other kitchenware. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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MIT's work on a zero-carbon city Imagine if the city of Boston were able to emit no carbon and no waste. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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
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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
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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