Urbanism News
Friday, June 29, 2007
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Throwing Yourself Against the Wall To demonstrate the move, known as the Kong jump, Mr. Kravit’s fellow traceurs flew at the wall, and just when it looked as if they would snap a shin, rib or collarbone, slapped their hands on the far edge of the top of the wall and whipped their legs through like gorillas hurtling a pommel horse. They went over in succession, each landing beyond the wall and segueing fluidly into a roll on the grass. Silverton Nguyen, 21, the last to go, dispensed with the wall-slap altogether, diving gracefully over headfirst, as if the patch of grass were a swimming pool, and landing in midroll. |
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Toll Brothers eyes China home market "We've discovered that we are known in China without ever having been there, which came as a complete surprise, but it's there," Chief Executive Robert Toll said at the Reuters Real Estate Summit in New York. "I can envision Toll suburbia, I can envision golf course communities, I can envision high-rise." |
Thursday, June 28, 2007
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Cargo bicycles to reduce pollution A new transportation plan aims to reduce fine particle and NO2 emissions by 15%. One of the proposed measures is to promote the use of bicycles for inner city distribution, a plan inspired by a pilot in Nijmegen. |
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Students plunge into city design Urban design students have come up with radical ideas to transform parts of central Melbourne. |
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Everything is Somewhere: Christopher Alexander, Genius of Space Christopher Alexander is a genius of space, best known as the principal author of A Pattern Language, a book of architectural theory that vigorously insists that architecture-- the built world--must serve humans, must strengthen and enrich the `life' of a place. |
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Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World A career in cartography used to be the prerogative of well-funded adventurers — men like Rennell or Lewis and Clark — with full government backup. Even after the advent of commercial satellite and aerial photography, the ability to make maps remained largely in the hands of specialists. Now, suddenly, mapmaking power is within the grasp of a 12-year-old. In the past two years, map providers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have created tools that let anyone with an Internet connection layer their own geographic obsessions on top of ever-more-detailed road maps and satellite images. |
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Critics of 'suburban' cities long for the old urbanity -- or chaos Most of 2007 lies ahead, but here's a wager: This year's best book on contemporary San Francisco already is in print. And I'll stick to that wager even though the title is "The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World's Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?" |
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
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It's a town, but not as we know it The first of 9,500 homes in Britain's first new town of the 21st century are expected to be built in two years' time. he housing will be "not as we now know it", according to developers Gallagher and the national regeneration agency English Partnerships, with new designs to the latest eco-friendly specification, its own heat and energy supplies and a neutral carbon footprint. |
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Some Subways Found Packed Past Capacity They are just lines on a graph, but for many subway riders they will provide unique insight into one of the great aggravations of life underground: why trains on some lines are so often both crowded and late, while on other lines the trains seem to cruise along on schedule with almost no one on board. |
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The duplex distinction The duplex is back, and this time the look is sleek, smart and unequivocally modern. But these homes showcase more than contemporary style. They reflect the changing way some Southern Californians live. |
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End of the Line If condos don’t destroy Coney Island, the master-planned amusements will. |
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Colleges a growth tactic Forget about sports arenas. The latest strategy to break up farmland for development has developers teaming up with colleges and universities, using them as potential anchors for massive new subdivisions. |
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Be prepared to pay for new trees Torontonians will have to pay if they want a greener city in the future. A report to city council's parks and environment committee says the city can plant 10,000 more trees a year, but it will cost taxpayers more than $4 million per year. |
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Mr. Boh's Neighborhood Baltimore's new master plan looks to the future with one eye. |
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
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Their Reward for Imagining What New York City Can Be In 1958, a promising but obscure writer for an architectural magazine applied to the Rockefeller Foundation for a research grant. “Most city planning and rebuilding today is based, fundamentally, on rejection of the city,” she wrote. “I am convinced that any good that is going to come of planning for the city is going to have to foster the city’s diversity instead of obstructing it.” The grant was approved, and ultimately grew to $18,000. The research helped produce Jane Jacobs’s landmark book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” |
Monday, June 25, 2007
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Emotional Rescue If we're serious about building a society that makes scientifically informed decisions, then science needs to figure out a way to get its message across effectively. |
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Simulated cities, sedated living Shopping malls simulate the buzz of city centres and create an atmosphere appropriate for consuming. Everything is planned in advanced and controlled; appropriation or adaptation of the space by passers-by is both impossible and forbidden. This rebounds on city centres: prettified, scrubbed, and tidied, they increasingly adopt the mall aesthetic. And in a final twist, malls have begun building reconstructions of city streets. |
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Paying for VIP Treatment in a Traffic Jam Ann Johnson used to have no idea how long it would take to get to work in downtown Minneapolis on clogged Interstate 394. "I felt like a prisoner of the highways," she says. That changed when state officials started in 2005 letting drivers pay tolls to use lanes previously limited to carpools, buses and motorcycles. The catch: Tolls range from 25 cents to $8, varying with the amount of congestion in order to keep drivers zipping along at close to 55 miles an hour. |
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Squalor sits on prime real estate in MumbaiSqualor sits on prime real estate in Mumbai Architect Mukesh Mehta has a bold, some say foolhardy, scheme for clearing Asia's biggest slum: sell it. |
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Toronto schools to power up rooftops School board could sell electricity generated from solar panels, windmills to power grid. |
Saturday, June 23, 2007
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Smart sprawl? Are New Urbanist or Smart Growth plans just a stalking horse for increased development? Author Robert Bruegmann and activist Gloria Ohland conclude their debate on the shape of America's cities. |
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Tower of London under siege from skyscrapers It has withstood assaults from renegade barons, rampaging peasants, and Nazi bombers, but the Tower of London, one of Britain's top tourists attractions, is once again under siege. |
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Bogota's urban happiness movement A radical campaign to return streets from cars to people in Columbia's largest city is now a model for the world. |
Friday, June 22, 2007
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Is it smart to grow off the grid? Does Smart Growth make any sense in a filled-in grid city like L.A., or only in older, hub-style cities? All this week, author Robert Bruegmann and activist Gloria Ohland debate the shape of America's cities. |
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Brawl over sprawl Are objections to urban sprawl legitimate public policy concerns or just aesthetic snobbery? All week, author Robert Bruegmann and activist Gloria Ohland debate the shape of America's cities. |
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World's most expensive cities Moscow wins again, with London as runner up. New York drops five places to No. 15, while San Francisco plunges 20 places to No. 54, according to Mercer's 2007 survey. |
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Boston commuters' feet are first Boston commuters are the likeliest in the nation to walk to work, but they are next to last in carpooling, according to new data from the US Census Bureau. |
Thursday, June 21, 2007
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Cartography New York is a food city and a street city, and so it is a street-food city. For as long as Germans and Jews, Indians and Chinese have been flocking to this town, they’ve been bringing hot dogs and knishes, dosas and cheung fun noodles with them—and selling them on the sidewalk. In recent years, gourmet and specialty carts have begun springing up, offering everything from world-class barbecue (Daisy May’s midtown carts) to Mario Batali’s frozen treats (Otto’s Washington Square Park gelato cart). Last year saw a celebrated art movie about outdoor food and the men who hawk it (Man Push Cart). Earlier this month, vendors, cart-loving citizens—and Chuck Schumer, of course—rose up to fight proposed restrictions that threatened the vending haven known as the Red Hook ball fields. Locals line up half a block deep for jerk chicken in midtown at lunchtime or for late-night arepas in Queens. Tourists still consider a New York hot dog or pretzel (or both) a must. |
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Urban Manifesto: Factors that make a city great What do you really want out of a city? And what can you do without? With the environment top of the agenda in mayors' offices around the world, Monocle looks beyond the recycling bins and congestion charges to see what makes for a liveable city. Tolerance, punctual transit, plenty of sunshine and the ability to get a drink in the wee hours all count for something. |
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25 Examples of Good Urban Design It's not necessarily the billion-euro development, star-architect-designed gallery or shiny new ferris wheel that makes locals feel good about their town. Monocle believes that the measure of a city is more about everyday wonders - pavements, well-designed schools, punctual transport - rather than one-off, grand projets. Here's our list of the top 25 urban elements that make the city. |
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Global Cities Global Cities looks at changes in the social and built forms of ten large, dynamic, international cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo. Drawing on data originally assembled for the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale, the exhibition features both visual art and architectural responses to explore these cities through five thematic lenses: speed, size, density, diversity and form. This exhibition in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern incorporates a range of existing art works that explore conditions in each of the focus cities, with many of the international artists presenting their work in the UK for the first time. |
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How children lost the right to roam in four generations When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere. It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision. Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas's eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom. |
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A Vision for Midtown's East River Waterfront is Unveiled A group of six leading landscape architects united for a day of brainstorming and collaborative synergy in early June to develop a bold vision for Midtown’s inaccessible East River waterfront, and three days later they presented the resulting concepts and images to a crowd of more than 200 interested New Yorkers. |
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Two Billion Slum Dwellers Forget about Utopia or even the dystopian Los Angeles depicted in Blade Runner. The future of the city is a vast Third World slum. |
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Competing Visions for Governors Island In the four years since the federal government sold Governors Island to the state and city for $1, government officials have been baffled over what to do with this isolated but magically haunting place. |
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
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Beyond the Garden Landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander discusses her ahead-of-the-curve career in sustainability. |
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Vertical farming in the big Apple Downtown Manhattan is hardly a place you would associate with agriculture. Rather, with its countless restaurants, cafes, shops and supermarkets this is a place of consumption. |
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The shining city at the world's end "The continent has not seen a transformation like Detroit's since the last days of the Maya," urban archeologist Rebecca Solnit writes in her cheery "Letter from Michigan," which appears in the July issue of Harper's magazine. |
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Hong Kong Mid-Level Escalators 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. |
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
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Daley's city not so 'green'
Mayor Richard Daley vowed six years ago to make Chicago a leader in emerging efforts to fight global warming, but city government is churning out more heat-trapping pollution every year. |
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Sold down the river The Thames Gateway is a place of rich history and eerie beauty. But 120,000 homes are being plonked down on it as if it were a cultureless wasteland. |
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Three billion careful owners A century ago, nine in 10 people lived in the country. Now, almost half the planet's population jostles for space in fast-growing, congested cities. |
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High Anxiety Tall buildings are rewriting the iconography of the Upper West Side above 96th Street. |
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Feeling the pinch of compact cities High density "compact cities" are the favoured model for sustainable living in the 21st Century. But there are drawbacks, says Richard Fuller, because losing urban green spaces will reduce people's quality of life and drive out wildlife that have also made their homes in cities. |
Monday, June 18, 2007
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London's cool new courtyards There was a time when developers would call a property finished if it had a few yards of turf and a couple of bushes. Today, however, discerning buyers expect outside spaces to be as stylish as the interiors of their new homes. |
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At risk in Hong Kong: A slice of hawkers' magic Fair enough, it is hard to match the Rue de Buci in central Paris when it comes to open-air markets. Union Square in New York is a contender, and there is always Covent Garden, albeit in a reincarnation that is not at Covent Garden anymore. But if you think of the sheer magic of the marketplace - of the hustle, bustle and satisfaction at the heart of a deal for, say, dried mushrooms, mandarin oranges or a nice, handsome fish head - you simply cannot leave Graham Street in central Hong Kong out of the equation. |
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Paris and the bicycle: an unlikely affair Bare bums on bikes? Cops were torn between gawking and guiding as thousands of nude bike-riders swirled through more than 60 cities on World Naked Bike Ride Day (June 9) to protest dangerous, polluting motor vehicles in urban areas. Fantasy and irony for the French: They claim they invented the car (Etienne Lenoir, 1862), and now, with Paris choking with particulates, many want to ban it. |
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Chicago feels retail boom Follow the trail of retail dollars in the city and this is where it leads you: to newly arrived big-box chain stores including Target and Wal-Mart, to bars and restaurants bustling with locals and tourists, and to neighborhoods brimming with independent boutiques. |
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In 5-story Dutch garage, bikes easier lost than found The Netherlands has more bicycles than people: an estimated 20 million bikes and just over 16 million humans. There are three times as many bicycles as cars. |
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More Commuters Driving to Work Alone More people than ever are driving alone to work as the nation's commuters balk at carpools and mass transit. Regardless of fuel prices, housing and work patterns make it hard for suburban commuters to change their gas-guzzling ways. |
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Casting call for the city Last Wednesday afternoon, as my wife and I strolled through the majestic main concourse of Grand Central Terminal, I took her in my arms and we began to dance. |
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Reflections on Dublin's waterfront revival Here I am in Dublin, one of my favourite cities on earth. I'm attending the Dublin Writers Festival and have a slightly unusual, slightly intimidating assignment: to write about my relationship with the Vancouver waterfront and make some comparison to Dublin's relationship with its own. |
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Bike activists going guerrilla Cycling `repair squad' takes to the streets over slow expansion of bike lane program. |
Friday, June 15, 2007
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Visionary Power 2 The second day of the Visionary Power conference began with a provocative story from Elia Zenghelis. After head curator of the IABR Vedran Mimica had announced that the emphasis of the day would be on the dark side of the city, Zenghelis spoke of an architecture in crisis. |
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Central Park South Choosing the best design for a new park on New York's Governors Island. |
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Where do solar cells fit on a Victorian building? Spare a thought for Regent House in Wrexham. It’s an unloved government building from the early 1970s which looks just like scores of other unloved government buildings of its age around Britain. |
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Dr. Des Voeux and the invention of smog A rumination on the origins of a surprisingly longstanding urban affliction. |
Thursday, June 14, 2007
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Living Glass and River Glow: Developing Responsive Architecture David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang are both architects, but to call their company, Living, an architecture firm doesn't come anywhere near to explaining what they do. |
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Paris gears up to peddle bicycles Paris is gearing up for a transport revolution next month when a fleet of 10,000 self-service bicycles rolls out across the city, as part of an ambitious bid to coax urbanites from their cars. |
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The Little Engine That Could In dozens of cities -- from Charlotte, N.C., to Denver to Portland, Ore. -- the hottest redevelopment project is happening next to the local train station. Aging transit hubs and stops along new and expanded train lines are being transformed into multi-use developments that offer housing, retailing, restaurants and offices. |
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Are pigeons an urban liability? Have pigeons, once deemed to be reliable couriers of messages across hundreds of miles, turned enemies of humankind? |
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
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Snitchtown The 12-story Hotel Torni was the tallest building in central Helsinki during the Soviet occupation of Finland, making it a natural choice to serve as KGB headquarters. Today, it bears a plaque testifying to its checkered past, and also noting the curious fact that the Finns pulled 40 kilometers of wiretap cable out of the walls after the KGB left. The wire was solid evidence of each operative's mistrustful surveillance of his fellow agents. |
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Two Billion Slum Dwellers Forget about Utopia or even the dystopian Los Angeles depicted in Blade Runner. The future of the city is a vast Third World slum. |
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In Defense Of Sprawl If you really want to see urban sprawl, take a look at London. Yes, it's true that Britain has some of the toughest anti-sprawl measures in the world today. But I mean 19th-century London--the miles and miles of brick row houses in Camberwell and Islington. If sprawl is the outward spread of settlement at constantly lower densities without any overall plan, then London in the 19th century sprawled outward at a rate not surpassed since then by any American city. |
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Megacities Of The Future Paging Thomas Malthus: Your nightmare finally has arrived. Malthus, a British economist, famously predicted in 1798 that population growth eventually would outpace food production, resulting in mass starvation. Ever since his time, the phrase "Malthusian nightmare" has been applied to dystopian scenarios predicated on demographic doom and gloom. For the most part, these predictions--including Malthus's--have turned out to be overly pessimistic. But now, the spectacular growth of Third World megacities holds the depressing possibility that Malthus may turn out to be right after all. |
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Ghost Cities Of 2100 For 900 years, Moenjodaro, a city in what is now Pakistan, was the urban hub of a thriving civilization, the New York or London of its day. Around 1700 B.C., residents suddenly abandoned the Indus Valley city, and it was lost in the sands of time until archaeologists began excavating it in the 1920s. Today, visitors can wander for hundreds of acres among its deserted streets and homes. |
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Want to build something? Fine. But please read this first. In my ideal architectural world, each new building would glow with timeless grace. The materials, the proportions, the craftsmanship and details -- all would be just so, whatever the architectural style. As opposed to the real world, where too much of what goes up has all the presence of papier-mache. |
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A Browner Shade of Green: The New Water Rules and the Next Chapter of Sprawl Stormwater mitigation rules are supposed to help protect the environment, but the current regulations also end up encouraging sprawl over urban redevelopment. |
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Designing Public Consensus Urban designer and executive vice president of EDAW discusses the trials, tribulations - and rewards of building public consensus. |
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Cities Take Lead On Environment As Debate Drags At Federal Level To the long list of evils being blamed on global warming -- hurricanes, heat waves, melting ice caps -- tack on the smaller interior of Steve Benesoczky's cab. Inside, his passengers can already feel the squeeze of climate change in their knees. |
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Breaking Free of Suburbia's Stranglehold Jennifer McNelley's life felt like one big errand -- an endless series of Target runs and school drop-offs and commuting to two jobs from her Loudoun County home. McNelley, a single mother of a 6-year-old, was feeling "overwhelmed and hopeless" when a flier appeared in her mailbox announcing a sermon series at her church called "Death by Suburb." The congregation would spend five weeks talking about the suburban lifestyle -- the consumerism and the overcaffeinated schedules, and how it all can choke the life out of you if you're not careful. |
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Visionary Power 1 The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam kicked off on Friday May 25 with the two-day conference Visionary Power. The aim was to determine if and in what way architects can make a meaningful contribution to cities at the mercy of the unrestrained forces of tourism, the informal and even (world) politics. |
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Rotterdam showcases urban landscape Walking out of Rotterdam's central rail station, you have to weave your way through a giant building site just to catch a tram or reach a cafe. |
Monday, June 11, 2007
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'GREEN WALL OF CHINA' Officials in Inner Mongolia say they have established a living barrier of trees, grass and shrubs wide enough to hold back the Gobi desert and to curb the sandstorms blowing over northeast Asia and hitting the United States. |
Friday, June 8, 2007
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The Ooze Ten million gallons of toxic gunk trapped in the Brooklyn aquifer is starting to creep toward the surface. How scary is that? |
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In Germany, Villages Begin Producing own Power A handful of villages in Germany are already securing their heating needs by means of bio-energy. Now more boroughs want to set up their own grids of self-produced energy. |
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Planning For The Afterlife Most cities and planners seem unprepared to deal with the land use issues surrounding the nation's burgeoning cemeteries. |
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Graves to be re-used for burials Graves filled at least 100 years ago can be re-used under government plans to ease pressure on cemeteries. |
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Young 'not allowed out to play' Many parents are denying their children the same freedom to go out unsupervised as they enjoyed, because of fears for youngsters' safety, a survey suggests. |
Thursday, June 7, 2007
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Bringing green to the concrete under our feet
Problem: Too little room for trees to grow in downtown Toronto. |
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
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Tokyo, Living Lab of Possible Futures Glimpsing the future in Japan isn't just about first sightings of cool gadgets. It's also about seeing a city change -- fast -- as if photographed in time lapse. The city is shockingly unstable. Buildings disappear, replaced by new ones. Entire districts come and go, seemingly overnight. Roppongi is the hot district just now, with a new art museum and the massive Tokyo Midtown complex drawing people to the formerly sleazy neighborhood. Other districts, like Odaiba, rise spectrally and speculatively from Tokyo Bay on artificial land. |
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What bike-friendly looks like If bicyclists are given their own pathways, as pedestrians have with sidewalks, this healthy, efficient mode of transportation can take off as it has in Europe. |
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Can an indigenous culture survive in a jungle petropolis? The effects of oil on the Ecuadorian landscape have been profound. On the one hand, oil has fueled a boom economy which, especially in the go-go 1970s and ’80s, generated much middle- and upper-class prosperity and government investment in public infrastructure. |
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Google Transit 2.0 Google Transit was already the best thing that ever happened to online public transit trip planning, and now it's grown to a whole new level. |
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Scenario Based Transport Planning Peak Oil and Climate Change are unprecedented global challenges that are creating an entirely new context for global development. |
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The vicious cycle The war between pedestrians and bike riders flares up every summer in Chicago. This year, that war has escalated with an ordinance aiming to keep cyclists off the sidewalks. |
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Fixing Toronto Some of the city's most creative designers were asked to fix their eyes on the future without breaking the bank. |
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
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The Dirty Water Underground Laura Allen's modest gray house in the Oakland flatlands would give a building inspector nightmares. Jerry-built pipes protrude at odd angles from the back and sides of the nearly century-old house, running into a cascading series of bathtubs filled with gravel and cattails. White PVC pipe, buckets, milk crates and hoses are strewn about the lot. Inside, there is mysterious — and illegal — plumbing in every room. Ms. Allen, 30, is one of the Greywater Guerrillas, a team focused on promoting and installing clandestine plumbing systems that recycle gray water — the effluent of sinks, showers and washing machines — to flush toilets or irrigate gardens. |
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Want to design a bus shelter? Well, get in line. There's a competition going on right now that could change San Francisco's physical landscape -- and it has nothing to do with iconic towers in the sky. |
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Google Zooms In Too Close for Some Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment. |
Monday, June 4, 2007
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Comfortable urban canyons Europe's cities are growing, but land alongside busy roads is often unused because of traffic noise. In the Netherlands alone this is a significant problem since the "Randstad" area between Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague is gradually filling up with urban sprawl. A Dutch researcher says we should embrace the situation and make these spaces habitable by creating "urban canyons". |
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Heart of Phila. near standstill Traffic congestion in the city's most thriving commercial districts, particularly around Rittenhouse Square, is bad. Very bad. Think the matted fur behind a golden retriever's ears. Or Dick Cheney's arteries. Or Sonny Adedeji's taxicab. |
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Power of graffiti lies in giving kids focus Graffiti workshop offers kids artistic outlet, direction and focus in life. |
Sunday, June 3, 2007
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Ridgemont Typologies With his new series, the Ridgemont Typologies, photographer Mark Luthringer presents to us a reflection of our own subconscious filing system; an uncanny catalog of the American suburban landscape. |
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Ideal City - Real Projects The Shanghai “One City Nine Towns” initiative includes two urban structures designed by German architecture firms: Anting New Town in Jiading district and Lingang Harbour City in Pudong’s Nanhui district. Both have a very German touch to them, but the structural order could not be more different. |
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A Man of the Street Rick Caruso got us walking and communing at the Grove. Why has his Disney-esque vision proven so successful? |
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There's something in the air in Rome: cocaine Scientists have discovered particles of cocaine and marijuana, as well as caffeine and tobacco, in the air of Italy's capital, they said on Thursday. |
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The 60-storey house for just one family This 60-storey house is for just one family. India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is planning a palace in the heart of Mumbai with helipad, health club, hanging gardens and six floors of car parking. |
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Will Alsop's west-side recipe: planning anarchy! Will Alsop's confection of coloured geometry, with buildings growing out of the landscape - and seemingly each other - is what might happen, he suggests, if Toronto were to fling off its corset of planners, politicians and bureaucrats and live a little, removing all the planning rules and letting residents and developers rebuild at their pleasure. The fanciful picture sends the message that organic growth is more interesting than urban planning. In Mr. Alsop's words, "A carefully planned place usually lacks soul and results in people behaving badly." |
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Can Shanghai turn green and grow? Shanghai has been transformed into a global city - but its rapid growth has produced pollution, traffic jams and overcrowding. |
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The book on Toronto For every corner of the city there are layers of stories. An expert panel peeled some back this week, showing how writers reflect Toronto to itself. |
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U. of C. picks design for arts skyscraper Chicago is about to get an innovative new skyscraper, one that stretches a ground-hugging arts center into the sky and comes complete with a retractable roof and maybe even a yoga and napping room. |
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Give the ROM's Crystal a chance - but demand the best Toronto will get its biggest architectural celebration of the year tomorrow night, when the Governor-General snips the ribbon on the Royal Ontario Museum's $250-million Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. At last, the public will get to see the contentious building that architects, critics and many other Torontonians have been heatedly arguing about for months. |
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Eco-Architecture Takes Hold in Asia Mention Pattaya, and most people think of the Thai resort town's seedy nightlife, drag-queen shows and bedraggled beachfront. But Bruno Pingel, a German real-estate developer, wants to change the landscape with Thailand's first environmentally friendly high-rise. |
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