Urbanism News
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
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London: Next City of the Sky? "Earth has not anything to show more fair," Wordsworth wrote of London two centuries ago. But the "ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples" that he admired from Westminster Bridge have long since given way to a more tawdry view, shaped as much by postwar bad taste as by wartime bombing. Now, with a panache rarely seen here, London has concluded that it is time to repair its battered skyline. |
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Chicago's look, feel inspire planners Nearly 1,400 planners, architects, developers and designers from around the world descended on Chicago with one goal in mind: to change radically the way our world looks, feels and works. |
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Park Marks Chicago Bid to Revive Architectural Glory After decades of mediocrity in a city known for its elegant skyscrapers, Chicago hopes to stage an architectural renaissance with a new $475 million park featuring a swirling steel band shell designed by Frank Gehry. |
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
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War? Terrorists? No, Here's What's Really Scary. Four decades after she fought to save Washington Square Park and wrote "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," a seminal book that has reshaped urban planning to this day, Jane Jacobs sits on her weather-beaten front porch here, contemplating the untended meadow that is her front yard and waving to neighbors as they walk by. |
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More sorry than safe 'If everything we did had to be absolutely safe, risk-free, proven to have no adverse outcomes for anyone or anything, we'd never get anywhere. Buildings wouldn't go up, planes wouldn't get off the ground, medical breakthrough would come to a standstill, science would be stifled…. Shall I go on?' |
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Detroit exodus shows no indication of slowing down The stream of moving vans leaving Detroit appears to have speeded up, suggesting tougher times ahead for the city’s struggling public schools, its derelict neighborhoods and a government already in financial crisis. |
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Pittsburgh proves arts can invigorate city "You can go to any city in American and find an arts organization creating vitality in every neighborhood. And leaders still don't get it. Arts and culture is the genesis of the revitalization of communities." |
Monday, June 28, 2004
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Tempe staff can pedal to work on free wheels
Tempe offers free bicycles to employees who promise to ride them to work. |
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Pedestrians write for their fight We may talk the talk, but do we walk the walk? |
Saturday, June 26, 2004
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The Anti-Burb Arcosanti, a struggling community in the Arizona desert, preaches the virtues of close quarters. |
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The Civic Center's Traffic Stopper The statutory purpose of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is, of course, to facilitate transportation, which mostly means keep traffic flowing on freeways and major arterial streets. That entails insuring the roadways are in good repair and minimizing distractions, such as billboards. |
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Landscapes of the mind Thought-provoking designs have builtMartha Schwartz's reputation overseas. But she's virtually unknown in her own backyard. |
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Nimbys become Imbys British people are not Nimbys who will rebel against the government's plans to build thousands of new homes, according to two key consultations that emerged this week. |
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The Shipping News Shipping containers are everywhere—literally. Anne Guiney investigates why some architects consider them the perfect building block. |
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Moving billboards Downtown: an ordinance that worked Outdoor advertising companies have removed more than 217 billboards from Minneapolis neighborhoods in the past decade, swapping them for fewer but more visible locations Downtown and along freeway corridors. |
Friday, June 25, 2004
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My tower is bigger than yours Our cities are being overrun by Jack-the-lad architecture, with the blessing of the media and politicians. |
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Moving the mall outdoors Malls, the bastions of merchandising that for decades relied on fashion and food courts to entice shoppers, are losing their lids.
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Thursday, June 24, 2004
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Folkestone revisited What happens when a millionaire businessman fills a decaying town with art? |
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THE END OF SUBURBIA: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years, so too the suburban way of life has become embedded in the American consciousness. |
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Detroit Population Drops by Nearly 40,000 Detroit is still home to a big chunk of the U.S. automobile industry and now the NBA champion Pistons, but not so many people any more. |
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Bovine and beige go bold in Toronto Toronto, as local architect Greg Woods puts it, is "aggressively bland in its architecture. It's a very beige city. Canadians are known as peacemakers and that manifests itself in their architecture." |
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Show Da City Sum Luv Sidewalks, not highways, are Detroit’s path to prosperity. |
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Cherry Creek North development makes room for bikes Commuters who prefer a bicycle path instead of a highway to get to Cherry Creek North can work through the day knowing their two-wheeler is safely tucked away at The Bike Rack, the city's first, free "bicycle day-care center." |
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But the Air Was Clean Sure, it disrupted the lives of millions and cost the North American economy billions, but last summer's blackout had one benefit, University of Maryland scientists say. Briefly, at least, the shutdown of more than 100 power plants cleaned up the air. |
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Bicycles own as much of road as cars do in Copenhagen Everywhere you turn, people are riding bikes. Morning and evening rush hours include two-wheeled vehicles as much as four. It helps that this city of half a million is so flat, but there's more to it than that. In fact, Copenhagen has a history of cycling that goes back to the beginning of the last century. |
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New Directions: Branding Spaces with Graphics - Hillier Environmental Graphics Studio
Cities and institutions like libraries and colleges are increasingly relying on environmental graphic design to brand and market themselves. |
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
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Out with the old in with the new One evening last summer I spent an hour or two dialling and redialling the same telephone number in order to cast a vote for the conservation of a building I had never seen. It was a fruitless exercise. Mavisbank House, in Loanhead, near Edinburgh, one of the finalists in the BBC 2 Restoration series, was eliminated - my feverish dialling got it nowhere. |
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Art for the masses in transit Chances are there is a new exhibition opening near you - somewhere between check-in and baggage claim. In an effort to humanize terminals and entertain waiting passengers, airports have woken up to the power of art and design. |
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The Philadelphia Story: East Coast city can teach Phoenix Both claim almost 1.5 million residents. At least this week. Both are concerned about their downtowns and about immigration. Both love their sports. Both begin with "Ph." But that's about all Philadelphia and Phoenix have in common: two cities seemingly moving in opposite directions, captured in transition. |
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Top green car motors into the UK The world's best-selling electric car, the Gem made by Daimler Chrysler, has had its UK premiere at this year's Mobility Roadshow. |
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
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'People jam' solution required London is suffering from overcrowded pavements and needs to tackle the problem of "people jams", according to a report published today. |
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Buildings that breathe Santiago Calatrava, the architect chosen for lower Manhattan's transit hub, engineers landmarks for life. |
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Airport art & public spaces Compared to Detroit, Toronto provides more works to admire. |
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What does the future hold? Answers on a postcard... Will Alsop looks forward to a week of debate that could change design for ever. |
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Architect Rogers Aims to Revive New York's East Side Waterfront British architect Richard Rogers is working on a plan to bury part of the highway along New York's East River and create a waterfront from the lower East Side to the southern tip of Manhattan. |
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Growth vs. History The struggle between the old and the new in China -- a tug of war affecting family life, the economy and the whole society -- comes into focus in the office of Du Guo-Ling, the vice mayor of this city and keeper of its cultural heritage. |
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Laureate takes issue with dark view of cities As one of the world's greatest living economists, winner of a Nobel Prize and leader in the newest thinking on how and why economies grow, Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago is not only smarter than the average bear; he also turns down more speaking engagements. But he did make time yesterday for a lightning trip to Toronto to rescue one of his favourite economic theoreticians, octogenarian writer Jane Jacobs, from the error of her newest ideas. |
Monday, June 21, 2004
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Planet of Slums Sometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this epochal transition may already have occurred. [via] |
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Twisting tower will be London's highest Forget the Erotic Gherkin: here comes the Vortex. Plans for a £200m startlingly novel tower for the City of London have been unveiled by Ken Shuttleworth, the architect who defected from Norman Foster and Partners six months ago. |
Sunday, June 20, 2004
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Mayor Daley’s Green Crusade The longtime Chicago mayor has vowed to make his city the greenest in the nation. |
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What the Victorians can teach us about city life The way the Victorians did things more than a century ago could be making a comeback - not in the way Margaret Thatcher intended, but in the way we live modern urban life. |
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Cities will swelter on summer nights Summer nights are going to get stickier - especially in the city. |
Friday, June 18, 2004
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Architect Johnson sought to create a visual thrill for visitors 'Pseudo danger' became real with drownings in Fort Worth. |
Thursday, June 17, 2004
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Defining Sprawl: From A to Z Conceived as a dictionary encompassing 51 species, from alligator to zoomburb (a city in the suburbs growing faster than a boomburb) the guide may well establish Ms. Hayden as the Roger Tory Peterson of sprawl. |
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The individual fantasy Dutch photographer Bas Princen was schooled in design, not in photography. Perhaps that is why he looks at the surrounding landscape, of Holland in particular, differently. Artificial Arcadia, his 40-photo-thick debut novel, deals with that landscape and its use. |
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Environmental radicals shift target to streets Members of the extremist Earth Liberation Front, who once waged their war to protect the environment by spiking trees and sabotaging logging equipment, are moving out of the forests and into the streets. |
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
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Residents fear being 'eaten alive' With three small children, the holidays were a busy, busy time for Judy Ogalla. The Monee resident barely had time to check the answering machine Dec. 23, 2002, but when she did, an unseasonable greeting stopped her short. It was the engineering firm hired by the state of Illinois to buy land for the proposed Peotone airport. The message provoked an unusual silence in the bustling kitchen. This is your last chance to negotiate with the state, a voice said. Otherwise, we'll take your farm by eminent domain. |
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As Economy Grows, Chinese Hit The Gas Nothing says ''auto show'' quite like a young woman clad in a gold, skin-tight mermaid costume. |
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M-Preis - Telfs, Austria The opaque surfaces in Telfs are the most important part of the store's design. |
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Cost of culture is small price to pay THE attack on Scottish Opera is an attack on excellence. It is suffering from its own success. Now it is being told to drop its standards, and to drop out of the international league. |
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Two men hold promise of city's culture The odd couple came to the Meyerson last week, Norm and Rem, a lord and a renegade, elegant modernist and defiant anti-modernist, the epitome of cool detachment and the apostle of total immersion. |
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Burning Man Gets Zoned Black Rock City may be the wildest art party on earth, but it still needs infrastructure, roads and enlightened planning. |
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Alsop, Gehry, Libeskind, Diamond, Kuwabara and Honest Ed: Toronto's cultural buildings renaissance gathers pace. Whatever happened to Canadian understatement? People are friendly in Toronto. They talk to you spontaneously in the street. "Interesting place, huh?" is a typical opening gambit when I am caught pointing my camera at Will Alsop's new Walking-City extension to the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). |
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Inventor plans 'invisible walls' The inventor of an "invisibility" cloak has said that his next project will be to develop the technology to allow people to see through walls. |
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Big cats seek place to prowl in urban areas Nothing strikes fear in Silicon Valley these days like the threat of curbing stock options or losing high-tech jobs overseas. Except maybe mountain lions. |
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Video games,art and architecture collide Montreal artist Thomas Soetens and architect Kora Van den Bulcke build worlds. Literally. |
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
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Congestion Won't Be Eased Easily Nothing short of fully regionalized responses will make much headway in reducing the nation's rampant traffic congestion, writes Anthony Downs in his powerful new book, Still Stuck in Traffic. Among other things, this completely revised new edition of Downs' earlier classic insists that the nation must move beyond transportation-only solutions to deal with this chronic metropolitan problem. |
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Escalator to heaven The revamped Peter Jones has all the style of Blade Runner - and all the comfort of a nice cup of tea. |
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Regents miss the point of Cal project Today's architecture lesson: Don't judge a building by how it looks on paper. |
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It's Britain's finest new building, but is it worth £400m of anyone's money? The Parliament designed for Scotland by a Catalan is now complete. And despite its inflated price tag it is one of the best pieces of British architecture for half a century. |
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The Stealth Designers For years, avant-garde darlings Diller + Scofidio have kept fresh with art projects, technologically innovative media installations, and paper architecture. However, writes Andrew Yang, what’s propelling the firm—now with partner Charles Renfro—are two major urban planning projects that may transform the face of New York City. |
Monday, June 14, 2004
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Baffled by the Mall
You hardly ever see the M-word anymore, as if retailers thought "mall" had unseemly connotations. That isn't entirely true, said the mall -- er, the concentrated retail center -- experts I spoke with. It's more that those four little letters are too small to contain the wonderfulness which the modern American shopping experience has become. |
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Seeking to unravel mysteries like traffic jams and tailgating Most of us hate traffic jams. Even the sight of a congested freeway brings up memories of breathing exhaust fumes as you bake in the sun, slowly going nowhere. |
Sunday, June 13, 2004
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TV News Cameraman Killed On Job in Omaha An Omaha news photographer was killed Thursday when he was hit by a vehicle while filming a story about a dangerous intersection in west Omaha. |
Saturday, June 12, 2004
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Share don't buy. Drivers embrace car-based transport solution. Clubs that organise joint use of vehicles are finally taking off. |
Friday, June 11, 2004
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Poorer areas hungry for supermarkets Large chains, which generally offer higher quality food at cheaper prices than mom-and-pop stores, tend to favor expansion in affluent neighborhoods. |
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These guys are fearless. Parkour – or freerunning – is something akin to track and field, except not nearly as neat and orderly. Instead of evenly spaced hurdles and raked-sand broad jump pit, the runners pound pell mell through urban obstacle courses, leaping over handrails, springboarding from ledges, and vaulting the gaps between buildings. |
Thursday, June 10, 2004
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Living Tomorrow The "Living Tomorrow" pavilion in Amsterdam takes a look at the home, living and working in the future. The project, conceived as an interface between industry and consumers, is aimed at creating a multi-discplinary forum for the future by the end of 2008. |
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Ban SUVs? Paris might just do it. City government would impose tighter pollution limits. |
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Where's the wow factor? Few places have resisted prettiness as determinedly as King's Cross. Ever since it stopped being open countryside in the 18th century, it has been an area of brutality and squalor: the site first of a smallpox hospital, brick fields and giant dustheaps, and of Agar Town (or "Ague Town"), a slum which one historian called "a byword for urban squalor and disease". Another called King's Cross the "haunt of thieves and murderers". |
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Storage condos curb clutter Storage condos are like adding a detached garage to your house — except it's so detached it's not even on your property. |
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An ancient city's demise holds lesson for today After resisting Siamese invaders for years, Cambodia's greatest city and civilization, temple-studded Angkor, was dealt a death blow with its final sacking in 1431. So say the history books. But an international research team now thinks its demise was set much earlier, by something that is the bane of many modern urban societies -- ecological failure and infrastructure breakdown. |
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Tower envy: Boys need something to look up to The desire to touch the sky is not approved by the gods. |
Wednesday, June 9, 2004
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Urban sprawl is killing koalas The Australian Koala Foundation warns that koalas on the east coast could be extinct within 15 years unless action is taken to curb development. |
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
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New design cities What is a design metropolis? How does a city become one? This international symposium casts a critical eye over the policies and programs of new or aspiring design cities, and compares them with established international design capitals. This symposium also aims to discuss different positioning and (re)development strategies through design used by such cities as Antwerp, Glasgow, Lisbon, Montreal, New York, Saint-Étienne and Stockholm. |
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Empire of the Free David Brooks describes himself as a "comic sociologist." That is enough to make him almost unique. It is hard to find any intended comedy by sociologists, though the unintended kind often sneaks through.
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Ahhh, the smell of fresh polyethylene in the morning About three months ago, fed up with constantly watering and weeding his hand-sown lawn, the Dover Heights cosmetic physician tore it up and laid a fake one. |
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The 3-D City Proposals for multilevel cities are back in fashion. Can skyway systems in places like Minneapolis and Calgary offer lessons for architects? |
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Designer ecosystems are now in vogue We have designer clothes and designer perfumes. Now we need designer ecosystems — at least according to a group of scientists writing a report in the journal Science. |
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A tour of immaculate suburbia Follow Patio Dad and Realtor Mom into their blissful mini-McMansion. |
Monday, June 7, 2004
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Smart-growth advocate receives death threat The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office confirmed Friday that it is investigating a recent telephone death threat against George Hopkins Jr. of Covington, an advocate of smart growth in St. Tammany Parish. |
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Bulldozer rampage in Colorado A man reportedly angry about a zoning decision drove a large bulldozer fortified with steel plates through Granby, Colorado, Friday afternoon, demolishing parts of the town center and exchanging gunfire with authorities, officials said. |
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Urban planner is slain City commission official beaten in S. Dallas loft; man seen running away. |
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How to build a model community Two reports have tried to provide assembly instructions for the ideal sustainable community. We find out if they work |
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Provence resists invasion of Jean de Florette's scrubland A beauty spot immortalised by film and novel faces an influx of concrete and car fumes, says John Lichfield. The fight is on. |
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Tel Aviv dresses up for World Heritage recognition The relatively young city of Tel Aviv is often skipped by tourists to the Holy Land, but today the city becomes one of the few in the world to be declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO. |
Saturday, June 5, 2004
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Folding Landscapes – defining a new language of surface? he result is a circuit of activities: artificial surfaces woven through natural surfaces to produce a landscape rich in section as surfaces fold and perforate constantly and a network of different sport and leisure activities. |
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The Greening of NYC, as Seen by A Designer You were probably surprised to see New York City included under the heading of Sustainable Cities. Our image and our reality still has a long way to go until the Big Apple ripens into the Green Apple, but we're definitely on our way. Since I'm wearing my green eyeglasses, I won't be talking about our problems, instead, I'll tell you about some of the most positive efforts towards the City's sustainability. |
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Thinking outside the big box Can retail giants scale down for the urban niche? |
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A ban on notes from underground For a twitchy city like New York, where's the line between caution and paranoia? |
Friday, June 4, 2004
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Some shun horsepower for foot power
Walking: They're few, those who commute on foot in the metro area, but they're fit and frugal. |
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Explore the great outdoors Once seen merely as residual space to be decorated, the public realm is now regarded as a vital part of any development – and a great break for architects. |
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Subterranean Modernity The last place you’d expect to find good design is the subway. |
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Massive Markets
In an effort to thwart neighborhood opposition, Wal-Mart is employing some of the same tricks used by real estate developers. [via] |
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Building the Greenest City in America Chicago is sprinting into the 21st Century as the model urban habitat. With an Administration full of Green Initiatives, including a Department of the Environment and the city's first "Green Czars", the city has ceased its long standing war with nature and embraced the concepts of sustainability. |
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Urban sprawl, middle-age spread People who live within walking distance of shops weigh an average of 10 pounds less than suburban dwellers, a new study finds. |
Thursday, June 3, 2004
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Manhattan shows its flair for survival
There are too many people and too many buildings. Too much noise and waaay too much traffic. Neighborhoods crash against each other; towers rise like individual triumphs and then are swallowed by 10 more. |
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Game Theories On-line fantasy games have booming economies and citizens who love their political systems. Are these virtual worlds the best place to study the real one? |
Wednesday, June 2, 2004
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Money can't buy LOVE Park Fans of skateboarding in JFK Plaza have long argued that the sport was of economic value to Philadelphia.
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Shanghai surprise ... a new town in ye olde English style In a small corner of the giant construction site that is China, something rather quaint is happening: modern skyscrapers are giving way to Georgian terraces, concrete squares are being discarded in favour of English village greens, and instead of the usual eight-lane superhighways there are winding cobbled lanes. |
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How to recapture cities' civic pride
Historian throws down gauntlet on need for regional centres to regain their heritage. |
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When dereliction is better: despite Rogers, Farrell and Grimshaw, West London reinvents itself as a pale shadow of Berlin. There's a lot to be said for poignant dereliction. I love it: the old, now silent, factories and wharfs, the rusting railway sidings, the buddleia sprouting from the walls and the birches shouldering through the pavements. For me, London's Docklands were at their best in the hiatus between the ships leaving in the 1970s and the real-estate developers arriving in the 1980s. Briefly, they were a magical, forgotten domain. Now I have to face up to the removal of another rich patch of dereliction. This time, it's Paddington. |
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Lisbon to try sustainable living An ambitious experiment in sustainable living has been started by green groups near the Portuguese capital, Lisbon. |
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Models for building an Ecotopia Huck Finn has left the territories and headed for the Netherlands. That must be him in the photograph, that boy on a wooden raft, polling his way down a stream-like canal with banks of reeds and willows in Morra Park, an ecovillage in the city of Drachten. |
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New Standard of Living Blossoms at 'EcoVillage' Not far from the newly sprouted subdivisions of Loudoun County, a gravel path winds through tall grasses toward a cluster of homes where life is lived differently than in most places. |
Tuesday, June 1, 2004
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Fight against fat a matter of design As concern deepens over the nation's rising obesity rate, the battle of the bulge is becoming more than just a duel between diets and workout regimens. Now it's an environmental issue. |
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Learning from Jane Jacobs An urban-design expert offers words of caution and inspiration for a city many are trying to emulate . |
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