Urbanism News
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
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Record heatwave fans urban design fears Rapid urbanization has been partly blamed for the current heatwave that set a record yesterday with the very hot weather warning already in force for more than 131 hours. With temperatures hovering around 34 degrees Celsius, the very hot weather warning, issued by the Hong Kong Observatory at 2.20pm last Tuesday, broke the record yesterday morning when it passed the 131-hour mark. |
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Great neighborhoods It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes the vision and determination of its residents to make that village. Residents in Kalamazoo's neighborhoods are working hard to make life safe, enjoyable and beautiful for all -- and they are doing it through their own initiative, as Jay Walljasper suggests in his book, "The Great Neighborhood Book." |
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How to save the real L.A.? First, you find it We all think we know what Los Angeles isn't — those tip-of-the-tongue platitudes: "Not a real city"; "Not a place with history"; "Not a place easily summed up in a sentence — or sound bite." What we don't know precisely, however, is just what Los Angeles is. |
Monday, July 30, 2007
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This New House In 1932, The New York Times Magazine published an article by Le Corbusier proposing the ideal city of the future: a vision of skyscrapers planted like trees in parklike settings. Piffle, snorted Frank Lloyd Wright, in a rejoinder published a few months later. Wright protested that the urban future, at least our American urban future, would in all likelihood spread out horizontally, not vertically, formed by what he saw as the utterly modern trend of decentralization in just about everything: transportation, communication and technology. “Broadacre City,” he called his vision, later amplified in a treatise titled “The Disappearing City.” He wrote of “giant roads” separating and uniting the farm and factory “units” with the “dwelling places,” which would be acre-square plots of house and cultivated ground, and of a “city” with no edge, one that went on forever. |
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How Do New McMansions Affect The Value of Neighboring Homes? Our neighborhood is changing. A number of homes are undergoing major renovations that will double their sizes, and new homes are being built that are much larger than existing homes in the community. Our three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, 2,400-sq.-ft. home, once among the largest in the neighborhood, will soon be among the smallest. |
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Commuting's next small thing While gridlock and gas prices pound car owners, moto scooter fans smile knowingly. |
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How to deal with a falling population Worries about a population explosion have been replaced by fears of decline. |
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`Sustainable' parking: A 21st-century oxymoron? In another first for our great neighbours to the south, America's first "sustainable solar-powered parking structure" opened recently in Santa Monica. The $29 million (U.S.) building, which stands six storeys tall, is as unlikely a piece of construction as you're ever going to see in that country or this. |
Sunday, July 29, 2007
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Grand Vision Mayor Mike’s plan for a more sustainable city is surprisingly comprehensive. |
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The Ageing of Aquarius Retiring baby boomers see the house as an asset, rather than a symbol of identity. And they are about to exert considerable influence on housing. |
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Move It Outdoors When San Francisco’s Southern Exposure gallery vacated its long-time Mission District warehouse space during seismic retrofitting last fall, the arts organization took an unusual approach to relocation. “We knew that we were going and we wanted to do something really creative in response to that,” says director Courtney Fink. The result is SoEx Off-Site, a year-long series of participatory exhibitions – or, perhaps more accurately, experiences – occurring on San Francisco’s streets, in its plazas, across its airwaves, and even in its virtual environs. |
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Going Dutch As North Americans demonstrate their desire to pedal to work, bike manufacturers take inspiration from the Netherlands. |
Saturday, July 28, 2007
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Stacking Fear There is a massive new real estate project quietly rooting itself along the U.S./Mexico border just south of San Ysidro where San Diego and Tijuana officially share a border crossing – the busiest in the world, by the way. While it is not exactly a border fence its ultimate effect I imagine going on to serve just as much the same once it is completed and persists in its lifetime. It is I think a wall by another means, if you'll excuse my skepticism. |
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With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos. |
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Bringing ‘Ugly’ Back Why an architectural free-for-all no longer works in a dense, gridlocked city. |
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Le Corbusier's Marseilles masterpiece lives on It was called "Unité d'Habitation," but this massive apartment block overlooking the lavender-strewn hills of Provence and the glinting Mediterranean does not prompt a unity of opinion, even sixty years after it first opened — least of all amongst its own inhabitants. |
Friday, July 27, 2007
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Someone’s Watching Your House In its most basic form, house stalking might simply mean driving past a favored house from time to time and craning one’s neck to see its architectural details or the way it sits on its perfectly manicured grounds. But like many intense attractions, the level of interest can escalate, and people often turn from casual admirers or failed bidders to near-obsessives who may stop and stare longingly, or even amateur detectives — snapping photos, talking to neighbors and tracking down property records. |
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Fare-Free Public Transit Could Be Headed to a City Near You It's time to give people a free ride on public transit. And here's proof it works. |
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The World With Us The World Without Us, Alan Wiseman's new book, explores what would happen if humanity suddenly vanished. How long would it take for humankind's works to be undone? How long would our cities last? Our tools? The chemicals and plastics we've left behind? |
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I Love Paris on a Bus, a Bike, a Train and in Anything but a Car Now that Michael Moore has broken a taboo by holding up France as a model for national health care, maybe it’s safe to point out other things France seems to do right. Like how Paris is trying to manage traffic and auto pollution. |
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Design for the middle ground The small residential building — bigger than a house, not so grand as a tower — is an important tool in the patching and repair of old cities, but it rarely gets the notice it deserves. |
Thursday, July 26, 2007
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New Towns on the Cold War Frontier How modern urban planning was exported as an instrument in the battle for the developing world. |
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The Climate-Neutral City: An Idea Whose Time has Come Here's the reality: we in the U.S., Canada, Australia and (to a lesser extent) Europe need to move very quickly to make deep cuts in our climate emissions if we hope for any chance of making big enough global cuts to avoid generating catastrophic global warming. In other words, we need radical change if we want to avoid cooking the planet. |
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Accidents Halved As Street is Stripped of 'Safety' Features Accident levels have almost halved in a London street where "safety" equipment such as guard rails, white lines and signposts were stripped out. The redesign of Kensington High Street has been such a success that the "naked road" concept is set to be rolled out to other cities in Britain and around the world. |
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Torre Bicentenario in Mexico City by OMA Office for Metropolitan Architecture has designed what will be the tallest tower in Latin America, to be built in the centre of Mexico City. |
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Torre Bicentenario in Mexico City by OMA Office for Metropolitan Architecture has designed what will be the tallest tower in Latin America, to be built in the centre of Mexico City. |
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Mayor of Medellín brings architecture to the people The Mayor of Medellín hired renowned architects to design an assemblage of luxurious libraries and other public buildings in the most desperate slums of this city. Their eccentric shapes - one resembles an immense blackened loaf of bread sliced in half - occupy areas where foot soldiers in the Colombian cocaine wars once died by the thousands each year. But several years ago, residents here say, a tenuous peace was imposed by paramilitary drug traffickers who outfought their rivals. |
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Family-friendly eco-towns to cut carbon footprint Town halls and developers have been asked to bid cash for five new eco-towns where all infrastructure and houses will be carbon neutral. |
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
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Walk Score™ Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. |
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California dreamin' 2020 We won't hit our greenhouse gas goals without curbing our car culture. |
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An L.A. big enough for tiny apartments Planners propose units as small as 250 square feet. After all, New York and Paris have them. |
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
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Businesses welcome bike parking spaces In Belmont and the Pearl District, stores and cafes invite bike corrals to take the place of prime car parking spots. |
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Downtown Chicago’s Street Furniture We’re always fascinated with the garbage cans of other cities, and like most civilized places, Chicago has chosen to keep its waste collection bins ad-free and designed them to be attractive and functional. Mind you, there were very few recycling bins to be found on sidewalks, though a few were scattered around Millennium Park. |
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Train Time Alarm Clock An alarm clock that visualizes the actual status of the major Tokyo rail lines. the clock is updated wirelessly in real-time with the position of trains on each line, so one knows exactly when to catch the subway. |
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Re-urbanizing the Homeless Recent obsessions with the border have made me neglect so many other layers of what I think make up the composite of a Subtopian landscape. One of which is homelessness - global urban homelessness. In fact, it was my early concern with the homeless issue here in San Francisco that got me to rethink my interests in architecture again a few years ago, searching to relate social policy and spatial practice through a type of architectural activism. |
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'Ghetto tour' showcases Chicago projects For the woman with the microphone, the "Ghetto Bus Tour" is the last gasp in a crusade to tell a different story about Chicago's notorious housing projects, something other than well-known tales about gang violence so fierce that residents slept in their bathtubs to avoid bullets. |
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Architecture as an alternative "If you're an artist it's OK to do 'Piss Christ,' " says Shamp, referring to the work by Andres Serrano. "But architects are really shaping the built world, and if you want the built world to be a better place, you have to be an activist. It can't all be about style." |
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Changing skyline Bangalore has the comfort of being a background city, wrote Prem Chandavakar, an architect practising in the city for more than 20 years. Reflecting on its architecture, Prem felt the city never had to face the pressure of either being the metropolis like Mumbai or suffer the angst of a national city like Delhi. This was about 20 years ago. A tectonic shift has occurred in the urban landscape since then. Bangalore is no more the idyllic pensioner’s paradise or the bucolic garden city. Pushed to the forefront, it has emerged as the newfound capital of the India Inc and is widely perceived as the symbol of contemporary India. Architecture makes this shift more visible. |
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Beware conformity in the march of McGuggenheims Travelling for the first time to Sydney from New York, I am struck by great likeness as well as contrast between our cities' cultural landscapes. We both have iconic structures in our harbour. Bars in Sydney are named after New York precincts where I live and work. New performance spaces pop up in warehouses along the waterfront. And in the Queen Victoria Building I find a branch shop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. |
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15 Green Cities These metropolises aren't literally the greenest places on earth -- they're not necessarily dense with foliage, for one, and some still have a long way to go down the path to sustainability. But all of the cities on this list deserve recognition for making impressive strides toward eco-friendliness, helping their many millions of residents live better, greener lives. |
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Book Review - Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City Municipal Mind pulls the veil of official-dom off the face of the Creative City and reminds us that civic creativity is at its best when it's a human creation: "Where there is a disconnect between the civic dream and the market hunger, there is an area called the creative city that rejoins the project of dreaming and the project of building." Extended to concepts of beauty in the city, Di Cicco writes "the beautiful is not landscape, or cityscape or architectonic; the beautiful is what people have built in the spaces between each other - a reciprocity, an exchange of ideals and a shared vision." |
Monday, July 23, 2007
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Associative Design @ Berlage Presentations of the associative design 2nd year at the Berlage research studio synthetic vernacular. The class investigated traditional chinese building typologies. The principles found in the analysis were used to create a set of rules to create a framework to parametrically derive urban structure and architecture of an exemplary plot in Shanghai: Deus ex Machina. |
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The Death Of The American Mall Enclosed malls are fast becoming relics, but new generation centers just look different. |
Saturday, July 21, 2007
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The fragile state of the global middle class
Economic optimists hail the advent of a ‘new middle class' in countries such as India and China, but critics say that for every group that rises, others sink as income gaps widen. |
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A tale of terrible cities An astonishing 80 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases come from activities in energy-hungry urban centres. Thus, the solutions to climate change reside with the world's cities. As city dwellers, we have the most to lose if we fail. The extreme weather caused by climate change threatens our urban "lifelines": transportation systems to move people and goods, communications systems, water, food and energy distribution, sewers and waste-removal systems. |
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Richard Florida on Toronto: "A spectacular urban centre" Once a “third-tier” city at the same level as Minneapolis, Toronto is now “one of North America’s top five or 10 cities,” among the ranks of “second-tier” cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, Mr. Florida said in an interview this morning. |
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The Silent Radicals In terms of pure creative energy, few periods of the 20th century can match the architectural ferment that began with the dizzying upheavals of Russia’s 1917 revolution and ended in 1932, crushed under Stalin’s heel. |
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Ken Yeang interview CNN spoke to Ken Yeang, an architect and ecologist, and the principle of the UK practice of Llweleyn Davis Yeang about his work to combine high rise architecture and environmental awareness. |
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Does London need more skyscrapers?
It seems the sky's the limit for London's supertowers, but will this new spurt of buildings wreck the capital's skyline? |
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From concrete desert to liveable space in 20 years? Like most urban centres, Austria's capital Vienna is bursting at the seams. |
Friday, July 20, 2007
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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. |
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‘We want more women designing towns’ Putting women in charge of designing our towns and cities would make them more practical and user-friendly, a new study has claimed. |
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Large-scale housing, done with panache Large housing complexes built all at once generally get a bad rap: "Soul-less," we are told; "Inhuman in scale," others complain; "Without neighbourhood texture," cry the Jane-Jacobsians. Not necessarily so. The central French city of Lyons shows how crafting high density zones for living on formerly marginal urban sites can be done with both finesse and panache, to use a couple useful French words. With the fearless city-making found in its new museums, theatres, train stations, and now housing estates, Lyons has recently developed a reputation for something other than andouillettes à la sauce moutarde. |
Thursday, July 19, 2007
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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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Architecture Sells Out Branding can be dismissed as laboring over logos and aesthetics — visual representations that are easily recognizable and symbolic. These days, however, it has come to mean a total identity package; a name is attached to an entire lifestyle, not just a single product. In this way, architecture may be a powerful instrument in orchestrating the experiential aspects of brands. The question, then, is what this involvement with branding could mean for our urban environments. |
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Plan for growth — or get swamped Will Planet Earth be able to handle the mega-surge of people pouring into the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America? |
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
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The aging problem of suburbia As the number of seniors in Canada swells, they face a challenge: the suburbs weren't built for grandma. |
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A saint in the saddle? There was a time when riding a bike was about getting from A to B - not any more. For some it's become a moral and environmental crusade, but are cyclists getting too big for their boots? |
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Bicycle messengers are pedaling uphill against the Internet Bicycle messengers are not quite an endangered species, but their business is certainly going downhill, yet another victim of the Internet. |
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Big boxes in small towns The wave of national controversy regarding big-box retailers has been around for decades. In the Blue Ridge Region's small towns, the saga continues. Big box retailers like Wal-Mart, K Mart, Lowe's, Home Depot and Target started evolving in 1962. Using similar strategies, the discount merchandisers set out on a relentless campaign for our retail dollars. And today, despite the plethora of reasons not to, consumers continue to swarm over the low prices and convenience. |
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When in Rome The city is a powerful and direct manifestation, for better or worse, of the values, aspirations, needs and ethics of its citizens. How do we think of and use our city and the public spaces in it? The streets, squares, parks and public institutions that make up our public realm? |
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'Culture shift' takes skyline higher Vancouver, pressed by condo and office demand, builds up -- and the 'burbs imitate city's blueprint. |
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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10 Steps to Good Urban Planning These are the basic building blocks of sound urban planning. They put people first. It's the city's job to establish the street grid, create parks and open spaces, and lay down rules that the development community follows. |
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Let's start thinking outside the box How can we build Gordon Brown's 3 million new homes and still have a green and pleasant land? The answer, says our architecture critic Stephen Bayley, is to avoid the hideous mistakes of the past and replace dogma with design |
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DiCaprio, Discovery team up for Eco-Town Actor Leonardo DiCaprio has teamed up with Discovery for a reality TV series chronicling the eco-friendly rebuilding of a Kansas town destroyed by a tornado. |
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Region's Parks Are a Source of Pride, but Can There Be There Too Much Green? There is no better time to appreciate the extraordinary greenness of Washington than the week of the Fourth of July, when our thousands of acres of public parks are the site for countless picnics, cookouts and outdoor games. |
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Is this what you mean, Gordon? Ironically, it is known as the New Islington Project - but it has nothing to do with Tony Blair's former stamping ground. No, this New Islington is up in Manchester and if Gordon Brown's fledgling government is as committed to shaking up social housing as he claims, it should take a train up to Manchester en masse, where the New Islington Project is showing what can be achieved if design quality and liveability are given proper weight. |
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Climate change plan backed One of the most ambitious climate change plans in North America has been adopted unanimously by Toronto City Council. |
Monday, July 16, 2007
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Moored in Amsterdam ‘The future for living on water looks very good indeed.’ Those were the optimistic words with which Jan Wolff opened the exhibition about living on water at the ARCAM gallery. |
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For towers, good design is high priority Suburbs spread out. Cities, where buildable land is at a premium, go vertical. But where planners and developers see taller buildings and density as signs of urban vitality - expanded tax base, cultural diversity, a market for new restaurants and shops - others detect threats to neighborhood character. |
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Coming soon to a club near you: 'eco-chic' It's 2 a.m. on a Saturday, where clubgoers will dance their cares away to fluorescent lights and the pulse of techno music. Most blissfully unaware that their favorite night spot consumes 140 times the energy of an average household, experts say. An ironic pastime for a generation driving hybrid cars and crusading against global warming; and perhaps the reason environmentally friendly dance clubs are the latest green trend. The most eco-chic clubs offer everything from dance floors that generate electricity to stationary bikes that power the DJ booth. The rest have barely tapped the keg, using recycled goods and energy efficient lighting. |
Saturday, July 14, 2007
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NYC Is Changing! I took a long Saturday bike ride to do some research on how some NYC DOT projects are progressing. I am very happy to report things are very much happenin’! |
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We'd all be living in dams I've found myself in an ongoing thought experiment for the last few months, trying to imagine what would it would look like if theoretically non-domestic architectural styles were used to build the houses, or cities, of the future.
There are some obvious examples – designing houses like football stadiums, Gothic cathedrals, military bunkers, or nuclear missile silos – or even like Taco Bells, for that matter, or air traffic control towers – but there are also some less obvious, and far more interesting, possibilities out there. |
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Why we bike — or don't A new study detailing where, why and how often Portlanders ride their bikes may be a useful planning tool in plotting the future of bike infrastructure in the city. It’s also sure to prompt a discussion about how bikes and other vehicles share the road. |
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For Parking Space, the Price Is Right at $225,000 In Houston, $225,000 will buy a three-bedroom house with a game room, den, in-ground pool and hot tub. In Manhattan, it will buy a parking space. No windows, no view. No walls. |
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Why parks are important No longer considered frills, green spaces are integral to intellectual and physical growth. |
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Population pressure: can Britain learn to live with Hong Kong-style housing? Developments are being built that cram 2,500 homes into a hectare, and more are on the way. A team of architects has reported on how we can manage the social strains that arise in such ‘superdense’ schemes. |
Friday, July 13, 2007
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CABE calls to remove signs and barriers from England's streets The forest of signs and barriers presented to both motorists and pedestrians on England's streets gives an illusion of safety but, in reality, could actually be making them more dangerous. |
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Incredible Shrinking Flats Vancouverites are downsizing their condos as nowhere else on the continent. Yaletown studio apartments can be readily sold with living areas under 500 square feet, and it is just a matter of time until the 400 square foot barrier is breached, especially for well-conceived apartments with lots of built-ins. These dimensions – need I remind Lower Mainlanders who don't get out much – are about the same as a Texas closet or a Saskatchewan mud room. |
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City set for UK’s highest homes A spectacular £130m skyscraper planned for Liverpool’s waterfront will contain the highest living space in the UK. The structure will soar 54 storeys and 170 metres into the Merseyside skyline and will comprise 412 apartments, 25,000 sq ft of commercial office space and a combination of 7,500 sq ft retail and leisure space. |
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'Green' Lawns Spur Neighborhood Wars Finally the grass is greener on my side of the fence. I've spent the past year converting my lawn to organic care. After some early setbacks, my lawn looks pretty great, and the only herbicide I've used is an all-natural corn substance that's safe enough for my dog to eat. |
Thursday, July 12, 2007
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Urban farmers help people reconnect with food Remember when you first realized those little brown kernels inside an apple make more apples? Kate Jacobs, 2-½, made that connection a few weeks back. Thing is, she now thinks all food comes from seeds. When will the noodles grow, she wondered aloud as she toddled through her newly planted vegetable garden. Where did the garden guys plant those seeds? |
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Pedestrians Gain a Leg Up in Rome Although Rome is no longer the head of an empire, plenty of roads still lead to it. Many of its streets are now getting swept up in a radical redesign of the city’s urban fabric. As cars and scooters are slowly exorcised from the city’s center, tire-friendly asphalt is replacing the historic sanpietrini, or cobblestones, on major traffic arteries. The old sanpietrini will be used to resurface streets and piazzas that will be handed over to pedestrians at the project’s end. |
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International urban whiz would ban cars in Times Square Mayor Bloomberg is trying to recruit a world-renowned Danish architect who wants to ban most cars from Times Square - and raise the price of street parking. |
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60 million Californians by mid-century Over the next half-century, California's population will explode by nearly 75%, and Riverside will surpass its bigger neighbors to become the second most populous county after Los Angeles, according to state Department of Finance projections released Monday. |
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Home-Front Ecology In the 1940s, Americans simultaneously battled fascism overseas and waste at home. My parents, their neighbors, and millions of others left cars at home to ride bikes to work, tore up their front yards to plant cabbage, recycled toothpaste tubes and cooking grease, volunteered at daycare centers and USOs, shared their houses and dinners with strangers, and conscientiously attempted to reduce unnecessary consumption and waste. The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history. |
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'Stars aligned' for urban guru's move Richard Florida, one of the era's most influential urban thinkers, will be leading a new initiative at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management that will allow him to expand his research on how human creativity drives a city's economic success, a source says. |
Monday, July 9, 2007
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For Paris, the Newest Look Is a Canopy When it comes to renovating Les Halles — the troubled neighborhood, nicknamed the belly of Paris, which for generations supplied the city with food — the appropriate motto might well be: If at first you fail, keep trying. |
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Zaha Superstar! And the relentless growth of global architectural branding. I am staring, in quiet desperation, at the welter of statistics and oh-so-atmospheric videos and slightly feeble art installations to be found in Tate Modern's "Global Cities" exhibition. It's a version of last year's Venice architecture Biennale centrepiece, and I'm thinking of doing a runner before I die of boredom. No doubt this shows on my face, because a TateMod PR person homes in on me. "As you see," she purrs, focusing my gaze with a flick of her elegant fingers, "we have Frank Gehry here." |
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The Vacant Building Syndrome
Demolition as a planning tool is back in vogue. Not since the discredited postwar urban renewal policies of the 1970s have political leaders embraced so wholeheartedly the idea of bulldozing vast tracks of vacant residential structures—and consequently, demolishing existing urban fabric, undermining local initiative, derailing organic regeneration, and displacing longtime residents and local businesses. When no productive policy exists, demolition is the easiest way to look like the problem is being addressed. The vacant building syndrome is simply planning by default. |
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The guru of the creative city plans a move to Toronto In his bestselling 2005 book The Flight of the Creative Class, the influential economist argued that diverse international cities rich in culture would deprive America of its artists, scientists and intellectuals. Now, Toronto stands to benefit from the realization of Prof. Florida's prophecy. |
Friday, July 6, 2007
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Urban design impacts physical activity levels An Auckland University of Technology (AUT) study has found that New Zealanders exercise more if their neighbourhood urban design encourages physical activity. Attractive neighbourhoods that are short distances from parks, open space or coastlines provide opportunities for physical activity, while neighbourhoods designed around cul-de-sacs present a barrier to exercise, the study shows. |
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Beijing to ban a million cars in clean air test Beijing is planning to ban a million cars from the city's streets for two weeks next month as a test-run to ensure clean air at next year's Olympics, officials said here Wednesday. |
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Councils urged to declutter England's streets A national campaign to "declutter" England's streets of thousands of bewildering signs and barriers was launched today by the government's adviser on architecture, urban design and public space. |
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Brazil launches slum reform drive The Brazilian government has pledged $1.7bn (£850m) to improve conditions in Rio de Janeiro's shantytowns and counter the grip of the drugs gangs. |
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Uneven Metropolitan Development Waves of idealism and market fatalism succeed one another in rapid tempo in urban development. The question which cities we want – and therefore which people we want to be – can only be answered by reconsidering the most important problem of historical capitalism: the ‘capital surplus disposal problem’. |
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Houston needs more than slugfest of slogans As the Houston region continues to sprawl into the hinterlands, Houstonians are beginning to realize, (as documented in the 2007 Houston Area Survey), that the by-products of haphazard growth — namely traffic congestion, flooding, air pollution and neighborhood disruption — are no longer tenable. They are increasingly concerned about the loss of green space, growing poverty and crime, failing schools, public health, and a general decline in our quality of life. |
Thursday, July 5, 2007
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Pollution kills 460,000 a year in China, World Bank says About 460,000 Chinese die prematurely each year from breathing polluted air and drinking dirty water, according to a World Bank study. |
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Breaking ground on eco-cities Near Shanghai On an island at the mouth of the Yangtze River near Shanghai, developers are set to break ground on a project that will use the latest concepts in renewable energy and efficient urban design on an unprecedented scale. |
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Near the rails but still on the road Research casts doubt on the region's strategy of pushing transit-oriented residential projects to get people out of cars. |
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
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Clear Up the Congestion-Pricing Gridlock The New York State Assembly ended its session on June 22 without reaching a consensus on Manhattan’s congestion pricing proposal — a delay that may cost New York City some $500 million in federal transportation money. Assembly members have voiced concerns about the economic impact of the program, the effect on traffic outside Manhattan and even the effectiveness of the idea itself. |
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
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Driving Sustainable Design Despite all the talk of the "power of design" to drive sales, C-suite executives and industrial designers often butt heads when working together. Business leaders complain that designers don't have any idea what it takes to run a successful company; designers promptly counter that those same leaders don't have a clue how to commission or champion the design process. Then there are the environmentalists, getting more air time of late, who fear that neither group is concerning itself with asking the correct questions [is a product really necessary?] or trying to solve the right problems [is a product sustainable?]. |
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Leading by example The mayors who gathered in a Los Angeles hotel for their annual chin-wag last weekend did their best to appear unimportant. They debated pointless resolutions, including one to eliminate nuclear, biological and chemical warfare throughout the world. They complained that the federal government wasn't giving them enough money. They applauded Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner in the 2008 presidential campaign, when she told them that “cities and their mayors have been invisible to Washington”. |
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Miracle of Ledbury How a quaint medieval market town became an architectural trail-blazer. |
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Global warming: Just what overcrowded, polluted India didn't need... the $3,000 car India's economy is booming but its roads are a throwback to pre-industrial times. That is about to change when a flood of cheap vehicles come on the market. |
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Urban boom may improve health for billions To most of us, old newspapers, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles and aluminium cans are simply garbage. But to Elizabeth Pinheiro, a mother of five in the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba in the state of Paraná, they are an escape route from poverty. Rising at 6 am daily, she loads her cart with garbage and returns home to her favela of Vila Torres to sell any recyclable material, earning around $6 per day. The efforts of people like Pinheiro help the city recycle 3200 tonnes of garbage a day, 22 per cent of its total output. |
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The Sun, the Grid, and the City As it happens, then, Manhattan's mathematically rational street grid is actually rotated 29º off the north-south axis – and this angle has interesting astronomical side-effects. |
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Straw Men In A Sprawl World Smart growth isn't an attack on the middle class, and those who argue as such are simply misrepresenting facts to distract from the real issues that planners are trying to mitigate. |
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How many funky galleries fit in a Wal-Mart? 2,461 This is a story about a neighbourhood worth celebrating. Where the stores are small and unspectacular, the sidewalks are broken, and there's an exuberance for the mingling of ideas and people. Eccentricity rules. |
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