Urbanism News
Saturday, June 28, 2008
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Rome launches bicycle-sharing scheme Visitors and residents to Rome are being asked to embrace efforts to reduce congestion and pollution with a new bicycle-sharing scheme. |
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In new condo villages, fitting in is job one Residents break the ice on the Internet.
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Parent network aims to create urban village It's a dream of young Toronto parents to live within a five-minute walk of everything they require, including the grocery store, good local schools, parks, work, the lake and cafes. |
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High-Cost Condos, Low-Cost Laborand Threats of Violence to Union Organizers In this age of housing gluttony, high-rise builders sink to new lows. |
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The Best U.S. Cities, by Design Architectural firm RMJM Hillier weighed sustainability, awards, and both expert and residents' opinions in its list of top 10 U.S. cities for design. |
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A4 to sink to reconnect Hammersmith to the Thames A group of architects has got together in London to propose a series of schemes to reconnect Hammersmith with the river, including sinking the A4 below ground from the Hogarth roundabout to Hammersmith Town Centre. |
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Battersea Power Plan -- is Rafael Violy a menace or a sustainable design hero? Architect Rafael Violys plan to redevelop the Battersea Power Station site, is certainly causing a stir. The proposal sees the iconic power station, which has loomed over the south bank of the River Thames since 1939 (and which memorably featured on Pink Floyds 1977 Animals album cover) recast as a vast mixed use complex, with the eight million square foot plan including residential, retail, hotel and office space as well as an open-air park and an extension to the Northern line on the underground. |
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Curitiba's Urban Experiment Thirty years ago, Curitiba, Brazil unveiled a master plan to address urban issues with environmentally-friendly public transit and social programs. |
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Taken for a Ride Although quiet and convenient, escalators unfortunately cost more money to install, operate and maintain than raising a child. |
Friday, June 27, 2008
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Chelsea Gets a Thicket The designers of the High Line revealed a scheme for the parks second section today that channels the wisdom of a certain pop song: Beauty is where you find it. |
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Who Owns Central Park? How Frederick Law Olmsteds 843 acres of civilizing wilderness became a type-A battleground. |
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
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Life on the fringes of U.S. suburbia becomes untenable with rising gas costs Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the outer edges of metropolitan areas. |
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At $5 a gallon, we'll start telling stories again Eighty-six percent of the American people believe the price of gasoline will climb to five bucks a gallon this year, a big shift in public opinion from a year ago when most people felt that oil prices were spiking high and would soon return to normal - which is 35 cents a gallon, same as a pack of smokes - and we'd be able to head west in our Winnegabo motor home for a nice summer vacation. |
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Exodus of S.F.'s middle class It's urban flight flipped on its head: The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city's exorbitant housing costs. |
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Bristol named first cycling city Bristol has become England's first "cycling city" in a £100m government scheme aimed at encouraging cycling. |
Monday, June 23, 2008
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Forbidden Cities Beijings great new architecture is a mixed blessing for the city. |
Saturday, June 21, 2008
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Spaced Out A new book on 60s architecture provides surprisingly fresh lessons for todays designers. |
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This icon of 60s New Brutalism has its champions. So let them restore it. The heritage minister, Margaret Hodge, must decide next week on the fate of a twin-slab estate of flats in east London called Robin Hood Gardens. It is grimly sandwiched between a main road and the approach to the Blackwall tunnel and has an ironic title. Never have the rich been robbed to dump so much concrete ugliness on the heads of the poor. The tenants and Tower Hamlets council want the place down, and now. |
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Kobenhavn cool - Socially sustainable Danish architecture Danish architecture’s love of light and openness encourages a high level of spatial and social interaction. |
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'Feel-good' towers not wanted, form-fit is Libeskind's Ascent is out of place, but van Berkel's Five Franklin borrows from its neighbours and hits the right note. |
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Sharp Rise in Shopping Center Vacancies The number of shuttered box stores and empty strip malls has expanded dramatically over the last six months, according to data compiled by commercial real estate brokers and investment advisors. And the situation is likely to get much worse. |
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Farming at the Museum Urban stretches of gravel and gray concrete may not be the typical platform for produce, but, as of today, P.S.1 will prove the exception to the rule as "P.F.1 (Public Farm One)," a new installation, conquers its courtyard. The winning design of the museum's annual Young Architects Program, "P.F.1" consists of two slanting sheets of cardboard tubes, the highest of which sit 35 feet in the air, that angle downward and meet in the middle of the courtyard. In each tube lie orderly bunches of adolescent vegetables, flowers, and vines, which will dangle down to the ground by summer's end. |
Thursday, June 19, 2008
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Jeanne Gang: The Art of Nesting Whether it’s a condo tower or community center, Jeanne Gang’s approach to materials and construction remains bold and ingenious. |
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Urban explorer pays for his hobby with his life Man dies from injuries after three-storey fall inside decommissioned power station. |
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Boris Johnson to revive London’s lost rivers Forgotten tributaries of the Thames, long buried under London’s concrete, may be raised to the surface under plans by advisers to Boris Johnson, the mayor, who want to revitalise the city with more water features and open spaces. |
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Copenhagen's Coffee Chariot Ole Skram has begun tempting the pedestrians and cyclists of Denmark's capital city in recent weeks with the smell of freshly brewed coffee from his coffee "chariot"—an espresso machine mounted onto a three-wheeled carrier cycle with a specially designed frame. |
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On 3 Days in August, City Will Try No-Car Zone It has been a long-held dream of New Yorkers of a certain (greenish) stripe: the streets of Manhattan free of cars. Now, for a few hours, on a few streets, on a few weekends this summer, that dream will become reality. |
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This Sunday, it's no cars allowed in North Portland Motorists weary of paying $4 a gallon for gas may have recently fantasized about this: A city without cars. |
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Google Earth gatecrashers Would-be revellers are using satellite images on the internet to find houses with swimming pools - and then turning up uninvited for an impromptu dip. The craze involves using the Google Earth programme, which provides high-quality aerial photos of Britain and other countries. Once a target is chosen, the organisers use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo to arrange to meet, say police. |
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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The Benefits of Reinventing Streets as Places Growing reams of research show that communities with conveniently walkable streets and less dependence on autos for all their transportation needs see a host of other benefits. |
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Bold Uses on Classic Streets The great cities of the world, both large and small, are known for their great streets- -whether grand boulevards or narrow, winding streets. They function as an urban bloodstream, pumping life through the city and connecting the most important destinations. Today’s best streets go above and beyond traditional uses. With a focus on pedestrians and meaningful interactions, the best streets meet the social needs of modern communities. |
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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Cities for Living Antimodernist Léon Krier designs urban environments to human scale. |
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Park life As the fallout from the property correction continues and house values fall, park homes are taking an ever larger share of the market as buyers from the UK, the US and the continent come to view them as a cheap and safe option. The market is worth £1bn in the UK alone, while in the US more than 22m people now live in one. So popular are they becoming that the prefabricated residences, often seen as a form of caravan, are also beginning to lose their “trailer trash” image, especially as more people realise that they are built to high standards. Indeed, the name “park home” – derived from the fact they are often sited on park-like estates – was coined by Princess Margaret while visiting a caravan exhibition. They have had upward aspirations ever since. |
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Setting Up Shop in the Apocalypse What sets the South China Mall apart from [other dead malls], besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came on board. The mall entered the world pre-ruined, as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay. It is a spectacular real-estate failure – but it is also, as I saw when I spent two days exploring the site in May, a strangely beautiful monument to the big dreams that China inspires. |
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UN Studio and OMA present projects for Rotterdam centre Last week the city of Rotterdam presented a series of plans for the city centre. The most striking of them concerns the conversion of the former main post office into a shopping paradise by UN Studio. Today OMA presented the design for what amounts to much more than a second ‘Koopgoot’. |
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Is America's suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare? Suburban neighborhoods are becoming refuges for those outpriced in gentrifying inner-cities. |
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Last Call, Bohemia Every successful society needs its Bohemia, a haven for the artists, exiles, and misfits who regenerate the culture. With the heart of New York’s West Village threatened by developers, London, Paris, and San Francisco have a message for Manhattan: Don’t do it! |
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Is it greener to build new or renovate? In many ways, Chevron's new headquarters on the north shore is the apotheosis of progressive building. Its windows transmit abundant natural light to reduce dependence on electricity, and its cutting-edge ventilation system circulates fresh air and allows employees to control the temperature at their own desks. For its judicious use of energy, the new office building became the first in the state to receive gold certification from the federal Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program -- the ultimate green credential. But is it really green? |
Monday, June 16, 2008
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Life is solitary in unfinished subdivisions Every so often, William Saunders snatches up a golf club and steps behind his Smyrna townhouse to whack balls down a line of neighboring lots. He never hits another home and never hears complaints from neighbors. But that's an easy accomplishment. Most of Saunders' neighborhood is a ghost town, another fallout of metro Atlanta's housing market horrors. |
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Sheltering the creative mind Private entrepreneurs in Birmingham, England and Toronto are stepping in to fill roles as leaders in innovative ideas for social and economic development in their cities. |
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Starbucks and the British high street For many people, Starbucks is a coffee lover's paradise: welcoming, reliable and relaxing. Yet its opponents see nothing cosy in a business which they say is destroying the character of the British high street |
Sunday, June 15, 2008
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ECO-BRIDGE: Chicago’s New Harborside Green Space Chicago’s full throttle sustainability initiatives have given us plenty of reason to think that the “Windy City” may soon upgrade its nickname to the “Greenest City.” Citywide moves like an unprecedented green roof program and a green alley project had already brought much deserved kudos to the lakeside metropolis. Now, Chicago is moving towards their new moniker with another sustainable initiative, the Eco-Bridge, adding yet one more reason for other urban leaders to follow in its lighter footsteps. The proposed Eco-Bridge will serve as a breakwater in the Monroe Harbor and create recreational space for residents and visitors. |
Saturday, June 14, 2008
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Erector Set Skyscraper at Rockefeller Center Is Adult Fantasy There's a new skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, and it's built entirely of Erector Set pieces. One- time shock artist Chris Burden's gleaming 65-foot-tall, temporary building at Rockefeller Center is a sweet, old-fashioned tribute to boyhood optimism. |
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Seeking Truth, Not Always Beauty The exhibition “Sprawl” at the Jersey City Museum does not set out to prove that parts of the New Jersey landscape are ugly. But it is hard to escape that conclusion after seeing the show. |
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Cycling: bad for the economy? You'd have to be insane to want to own a bicycle in urban North America. |
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North Oaks tells Google Maps: Keep out - we mean it The St. Paul suburb with private roads may be the first U.S. city to ask that street images be removed. |
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Confessions of a suburbia lover Here's a confession: I have a crush on suburbia. I speak of the accidental suburbia of overgrown fields, strip malls, car lots and burger joints that speckles Yonge Street in Richmond Hill. |
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EcoDensity here to stay
For the past two years, EcoDensity has been ridiculed as a marketing ploy, an empty phrase for self-promotion by now-deposed Mayor Sam Sullivan, a giveaway to developers, and a recycled version of existing Vancouver policy. |
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Homesteading on Amsterdam's outback Adventurous residents create an eccentric `Wild West' of architecture on artificial islands. |
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Want a new urban model? Go west In a world obsessed with starchitects and celebrity designers, Vancouver is one of few cities to have grasped that the important issue isn't architecture, but planning. It's not so much buildings as the space between them that differentiates one city from another, that makes one city attractive, another unappealing. |
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
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Jampacked transit systems running on fumes Underfunded buses, subways, trains strand some passengers by the wayside. |
Monday, June 9, 2008
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I am a property-porn addict There I am, naked but for my Marks & Spencer Y-fronts, lights off in the study, late at night, furtively surfing the internet. My wife’s asleep in the bedroom - if I’m quiet, she’ll be none the wiser. I find a particularly naughty website, type in a few of my favourite fetishes and, bang, up pops a filthy little number in north Wales. What I’m offered for my money is staggering. I didn’t think it could ever be that cheap, the saucy little Welsh minx. That’s how I like it: cheap and dilapidated. |
Saturday, June 7, 2008
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NYC stunt spotlights dangers of urban climbing The spectacle of two climbers scaling the 52-story New York Times tower within hours raised questions about the building's security and how to deter future daredevils. |
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My Building Has Every Convenience David Byrne attempts to turn a derelict ferry terminal into one immense musical instrument. |
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Learning from Lerner The former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil is carrying his message of sustainability to the world’s burgeoning cities. Lesson one: get rid of your car. |
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The automobile and freedom In America since the 1950's, the car has joined the bald eagle as one of our primary emblems of freedom. That open road through the desert has been imprinted into our imagination through scores of books, songs, and movies. Libertarians such as Frank Lloyd Wright hailed the advent of the automobile as a way to reorient the city around individual liberty. |
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Tube drinks party sparks mayhem Six London Underground stations were closed as trouble flared when thousands of people marked the banning of alcohol on London transport with a party. |
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The Exigent City It starts with a plastic tarp, a woven polyethylene sheet, blue on one side and white on the other, about 200 feet square. Propped up on sticks or simply draped over whatever can be found, this becomes a dwelling; generally, four to six people are expected to live there. |
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Mexico City smog hurting people's sense of smell Chronic pollution in Mexico City, which stains the sky yellow and can trigger government warnings to stay indoors, could be killing off residents' sense of smell, scientists say. |
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The New, New City “Don’t tell anyone,” Rem Koolhaas said to me several years ago as we headed down the F.D.R. Drive in New York, “but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.” Koolhaas’s viewpoint is widely shared by close observers of the evolution of cities. But not even Koolhaas, it seems, was completely prepared for what would come next. |
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The ‘College City,’ Defined The quintessential college town is lush and lined with quaint boulevards. It’s Ann Arbor, Mich., Charlottesville, Va., and Boulder, Colo. It’s dive bars and bookstores and movie theaters that still charge less than a meal. |
Friday, June 6, 2008
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South Florida cities narrow roads to make them people friendly The incredulous callers don't hold back when they ask the Delray Beach city engineer about the seaside municipality's yearlong experiment reducing Federal Highway to two lanes from three between Southeast 10th Street and George Bush Boulevard |
Thursday, June 5, 2008
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Best Cities for Innovation You can see it in their stats and in their cityscapes: These 12 Fast Cities around the globe are thriving. We'll be watching these nodes of creativity and innovation this year and beyond -- we're expecting big business and big things. |
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Global City of the Year: London Where one of every eight works in a creative industry. |
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U.S. City of the Year: Chicago Skyscrapers, green roofs, and house music -- a very American metropolis. |
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Fast Cities 2008 The great urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote about cities of "exuberant diversity," and in our 2008 Cities of the Year, Chicago and London, we have two stellar examples. They -- and our 12 cities to watch -- are no utopias (we're still looking). But amid economic uncertainty, they're vibrant, creative, and growing. These hot spots, these Fast Cities, are full of life and bursting with diversity -- in race, in culture, and in business. Join us for a tour. |
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Cut your high grass or face jail time
Canton City Council has unanimously approved toughening the city's high-grass and weeds law, making it possible for repeat violators to get jail time. |
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Scrap old cars and you get cash, bicycles: Canada Canadians will be offered bicycles, public transit passes or cash if they agree to scrap their old gas-guzzling vehicles, the government said on Wednesday. |
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Rich and poor both be global The following is an excerpt of a dialogue between our staff writer Wu Jiayin and two leading professors of sociology - Saskia Sassen and Chen Xiangming - on what it means to be a global city. |
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
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High gas prices lead to surge in mass transit It's standing-room-only on many commuter buses from Washington's suburbs. Rail systems from Boston to Los Angeles are begging passengers to shift their travel to non-peak hours. And some seats have been removed from San Francisco's subway cars to allow more people to cram in. |
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Big Vehicles Stagger Under the Weight of $4 Gas A fully loaded Ford F-250 pickup truck is a whole lot of vehicle. It can tow a horse trailer with multiple horses. It comes with a DVD-based navigation system for the driver as well as a DVD player for passengers who are sitting in the extended cab. And how much does an F-250 set you back these days? Try $100,000. |
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Dutch architect Koolhaas - designing for change in China A leading Dutch architect under fire for designing official buildings in China believes his work there is an expression of support for change. |
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
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In Escondido: Buy one (house), get one free. In a sign of how difficult it is to sell new homes in Southern California right now, a San Diego developer is offering a "buy one, get one free" deal, pairing million-dollar homes with less expensive homes. "We thought, 'Why does it just have to be on Pop Tarts and restaurants? Why not buy one home, get one free,'" |
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Los Angeles' carbon footprint is a light one -- sort of A study says the metropolitan area ranks second-greenest in the U.S., allowing for certain caveats. |
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Wenchuan as Eco-City A devastating earthquake leveled the Chinese town of Wenchuan, leaving in its wake over 60,000 dead and five million homeless throughout Sichuan Province. It will take years to heal the damage of this tragedy. Nevertheless, even as aid organizations and local government scramble to erect temporary housing and supply drinking water, it's important to step back and consider how the international community can properly contribute long after the last rescue crew has left. |
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An age of transformation America's suburbs are coming to resemble its city centres. That is both good news and bad. |
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The World's Most Impressive Subways Subways are as much a part of big-city living as high-rises and gridlock, and they get about as much love. For many people, subways are crowded, noisy places only marginally better than being stuck in traffic -- and most of them are. But the best of them are not only efficient, they reflect the character of the cities they serve and the people they carry. |
Monday, June 2, 2008
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Developers accused of pursuing gadgetry instead of saving planet Architects and developers are ignoring the threat of climate change and failing to address concerns over sustainability, according to the government's watchdog on urban planning and design. |
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This is the modern world The real Britain we are building is a harsh landscape of distribution centres and out-of-town mega-stores and of pylons and masts, of exurban residential and industrial estates, of big bland office blocks and little bland houses. And this is what we have been doing for about half a century, to the point where the early examples are on the verge of becoming heritage. |
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Plastic hen coop brings fresh eggs to masses Chicken chic has taken off. Championed by chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hen-keeping has, it seems, grown from the preserve of a small rural flock into a booming urban pastime. |
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Woman found living in closet It's fair to say that the people of Kasuya, a sleepy town in western Japan, had never given much thought to Japan's homeless problem. But that all changed this week when one of its residents noticed that food had been mysteriously disappearing from his fridge. |
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Pie in the sky: The world's first edible high-rise The potential of city-based farming could be vastly expanded if we extend upwards as well as using ground-level plots. |
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The urban farmer: One man's crusade to plough up the inner city Fritz Haeg isn't perhaps the obvious representative of a revolution in global farming. As an architecture and design academic and practitioner, the American has had his work exhibited at Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has taught fine art at several US universities. Yet it is last year's community-collaborative project on an inner-city council estate in south London that best showcases his current passion: the urban farm. |
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University of Michigan prof predicts death of some suburbs by 2025 It's an old story in real estate. A stable neighborhood has middling property values until a few residents move away or some homes deteriorate as the aging residents can no longer afford upkeep. Soon a few For Sale signs crop up, and other residents fear values will fall and a bad element will move in, so they also leave. Realtor signs litter the street, prices plummet and the fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy. |
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