Urbanism News
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
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The days of urban sprawl are over - but not for the reasons you think One of the few things increasing as fast as the price of oil lately has been the amount of commentary linking higher energy costs to the death of suburbia. Clearly, higher gas prices have affected where people want - or can afford - to live. Just as the demand for SUVs plummets and consumers have finally begun to see the point of hybrids, people are turning away from sprawling exurbs toward urban neighbourhoods and inner suburbs. |
Friday, July 11, 2008
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Drivers Feeling Shunned by D.C The District is escalating what some suburban commuters are calling its war against workers who drive into the city. |
Thursday, July 10, 2008
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A Realization in Fairfax About Traffic and Housing "Workforce housing" is not just a faddish vocabulary change. It expresses today's reality: Housing affordability is not a challenge faced only by the poor, the minimally employed or the unemployable. Middle-class, middle-income workers increasingly struggle to find homes they can afford within, or close to, employment-rich jurisdictions such as Fairfax County. |
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Paris mayor proposes high-rise changes to city skyline The mayor of Paris yesterday launched a controversial plan to overturn a ban on high-rise buildings and construct six towers in the capital. |
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A dizzying cycle: As drivers shift to transit, prospective fares rise Now that thousands of Twin Cities drivers are responding to high fuel prices by switching to buses and trains, Metro Transit is proposing the next logical step: raising fares because of — you guessed it — high fuel prices. |
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The shape of things to come Beijing has rebuilt itself faster than any city on earth, turning from a warren of alleys into a capital fit for a superpower. No wonder the world's top architects - from Foster to Koolhaas - have flocked to make their mark on it. |
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Getting stuffed For critics of America's shopaholic culture, there's no starker symbol of materialism run amok than the ubiquitous self-storage locker. Concrete and steel bunkers, crammed to the hilt with TVs, couches and other sundry accumulations, have sprung up on just about every spare patch of dirt in recent years. "We've had our home size in the U.S. go up 50 per cent in the last few decades, and yet we still don't have enough space for all of our stuff," bemoaned James Speth, the dean of Yale's School of Environmental Studies, in a recent speech. When online news site AlterNet looked at the rise of self-storage last week, it was moved to ask: "What does it mean for the soul?" |
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Boris calls on designers London Mayor Boris Johnson is calling on designers and architects for their views in shaping policy for London’s city planning. |
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New York City Will Explore Broad Bike-Sharing Plan The city took a tentative step this week toward fulfilling the dream of a certain kind of urban idealist, saying that it will explore the possibility of creating a bike-sharing program that could make hundreds or even thousands of bicycles available for public use. |
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"Looptopia" is sign of downtown revival in Chicago Bustling with office workers during the day, Chicago's downtown Loop -- a square mile ringed by elevated train tracks -- was deserted at night and on weekends. At least until recently. Now, new restaurants and shops stay open past the evening exodus, catering to tens of thousands of new residents who are contributing to a downtown renaissance. |
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Public housing limbo Thousands of families displaced. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent. Years behind schedule. What went wrong with Chicago's grand experiment. |
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Build a Wiffle Ball Field and Lawyers Will Come It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present. |
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America's love affair fades as the car becomes burden of suburbia The nation of road movies, freeway freedom and dreams of endless horizons is waking up to the reality of soaring fuel prices. Paul Harris in Riverside, California, reports that people are leaving their gas guzzlers in the garage. |
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Creating car-free cities If you can convince 40 strangers to dig up a parking lot on a scorching day, perhaps the car-free city isn't that far away. Maybe it will come one parking space at a time. |
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Study: Highways Don’t Pay for Themselves As debate over the merit of congestion pricing rages on throughout LA County, a new report by the Texas Department of Transportation, hardly a hotbed of anti-car radicalism, throws cold water on one of the leading arguments against road pricing: that the roads where Metro wishes to place variable tolls are already paid for by gas taxes. |
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
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Suburbia's not dead yet Some believe high gas prices will force a migration back to cities. Don't bet on it. |
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Look ma, no gasoline. More parents are finding that bicycles are a great way to get themselves and their kids around town. |
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From freeway to greenway as workers dust off bikes Rush hour hits the bike lanes as high gas prices push people to pedal to work. |
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Berlin's Social Housing Gets World Heritage Status Berlin exported its modernist aesthetic of the 1920s around the world but its own examples of Bauhaus-style social housing had long gone unrecognized. Until now. On Monday UNESCO gave six properties in Berlin the World Heritage seal of approval. |
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The Short, Happy Life of Street Posters On the surface, postering might seem like a topic unworthy of discussion: take some paper, write or draw a message and slap the paper up where someone will see it. It seems harmless. But the simple act of postering has so much more meaning and significance than it would initially appear. Postering is (quite literally) a messy, troublesome, and often fickle business. This fact makes postering both an exciting medium and inherently problematic. |
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20 Abandoned Cities from Around the World There are many reasons why cities are abandoned; some, like the ghost towns of the American West, have become tourist destinations while others have been condemned or simply forgotten. These 20 abandoned cities of the world share an eerie, haunted quality that is part of what makes them so fascinating. |
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Can city dwellers be more self-sufficient? We may dream of quitting the rat race and moving to the countryside, but the reality is that we are overwhelmingly an urban population. In the UK more than 80 per cent of us live in urban areas. Globally, it's the same story, with the UN estimating that, by the end of this year, more than half the world's population will be living in towns and cities. |
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Eco-ads offer cash for public space Governments see money from messages, but some worry about road clutter. |
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Families seek the high life again As energy prices soar, an increasing number of couples with kids are fleeing the suburbs and looking for homes in downtown highrises. |
Friday, July 4, 2008
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Air France eyes move to railways =Air France is holding talks on a joint venture that could lead to it offering high-speed rail travel. |
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Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways With its towering furnaces and clanging conveyer belts carrying crushed rock, Taiheiyo Cement’s factory looks like an Industrial Revolution relic. But it is actually a model of modern energy efficiency, harnessing its waste heat to generate much of its own electricity. |
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Bowling Alone in Urbanistaville Much has been written in recent years about the negative impacts of “sprawl.” It is said to increase traffic congestion, commute time, and air pollution. It gobbles up agricultural lands and open space. It is also said to have serious social implications like bowling alone. |
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City housing should work for middle class, too San Francisco has a huge problem with getting people into housing. But not in the way you think. The homeless guy living under the freeway underpass? We know about him. The city, prompted by an outcry from the progressive community, has taken steps to get that person - the extremely poor, unemployed, impoverished homeless camper - into some kind of housing. |
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Foster + Partners reveals Rimini waterfront design Architect unites town centre and seafront in historic Italian city celebrating tradition of green boulevards. |
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Star architects bid to design new center for South Korean capital as 21st century model city An all-star group of international architects bidding for the chance to design a new urban center for the South Korean capital said Tuesday the vast site offered a rare chance to create a model for 21st century cities. |
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Time to call a halt to stop signs? Several communities in Europe and the U.S. have removed signs, sidewalks, traffic lights. The result? A 40 per cent decline in pedestrian fatalities. |
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The architecture of Vancouverism A London exhibition showcases Vancouver's celebrated architecture. Modernist, sustainable and performative, is this a model for the future city? |
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Bike sales soar as drivers trade four wheels for two =There have always been a few hardy commuters willing to forgo the comfort and safety of a car in favour of a bicycle, but in the face of ballooning gas prices their numbers are growing dramatically and that has proven a boon for manufacturers and retailers. |
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Board of Regents The wheatpaste of Fathima Fahmy was the first to go up just over a month ago. Two stories tall, it stands on the side of a newly-vacant apartment building slated for demolition in the heart of Regent Park. Since then, ten other larger-than-life portraits of other residents like her—those living in the fleet of low-rise buildings that are to be torn down and built on top of as part of Toronto Community Housing's $1 billion Regent Park Revitalization project—have been installed, all eleven of them photographed, constructed, and put up by Dan Bergeron (Fauxreel). |
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The backyard as holiday getaway A North Toronto couple with a yen for Zen didn't have a crystal ball when they spent $250,000 to turn their backyard into a Japanese paradise almost 20 years ago. They didn't divine today's snarled weekend traffic and high gas prices — they just worked long hours and had no time to travel to cottage country. |
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Eco-Luxury is the New Black Nothing is more American in spirit than the latest trend in mashups - eco-luxury. The idea, of course, is that you can still have your lavish lifestyle of excess without the guilty conscience. Or simply put, you can have your cake and eat it too. |
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Concerns deflate city’s bike rental proposal Portland’s plan for a European-style fleet of rental bicycles has been parked back in the rack. |
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Google faces 'Street View block' Google's plans to launch a mapping tool in the UK could be referred to the Information Commissioner. |
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America's Most Fuel-Efficient Neighborhoods With the national average price of gasoline topping $4 a gallon, it's a propitious time to make the case for gas-sipping neighborhoods. Indeed, Americans coping with soaring energy costs are choosing to spend their economic stimulus checks at the gas pump and reduce their driving habits by billions of miles. |
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BANKSIDE Urban Forest by Witherford Watson Mann The Bankside Urban Forest framework aims to highlight the relationship between the less intensively developed urban interior and its active, increasingly corporate, edges. By recognising the capacity of the public realm to be shared by each, the framework identifies improvements to open spaces and connecting routes, to support interaction between residents, workers, visitors, local institutions and organisations. Existing projects are drawn together with our proposed ones to help to negotiate, informally influence and direct emerging projects and to secure additional funding for enhancing the public realm.” |
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Development needs to reflect new social fabric Ethnic groups are coming up with unique uses for public spaces, says the curator of a new design exhibit. |
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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Survival of the swiftest "You're No. 1 when you're driving. You're No. 1 when you're walking," Ms. Lake says. "It's all your own point of view." |
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