Urbanism News
Friday, August 31, 2007
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Architects want to move closer to the centers of power Architects are increasingly chafing at what they see as the political limitations of their profession. At ground zero in New York, in post-Katrina New Orleans and in traffic-choked Los Angeles, they are realizing that however much celebrity they may enjoy, it hasn't helped them become real players in shaping the future of cities. |
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Commuters offered unclaimed bikes Bikes handed into the police and have remained unclaimed are to be offered to commuters so they can cycle the last leg of their journey to work. |
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New Evidence: Urbanization Did Not Originate With Centralized Political Power Ancient cities arose not by decree from a centralized political power, as was previously widely believed, but as the outgrowth of decisions made by smaller groups or individuals, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh. |
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Scientist Call for Earth 'Backup' on Moon Scientists hope to put a library of human civilization on the moon in case of a cataclysmic, civilization-annihilating event. It would protect against the wholesale loss of human achievement. |
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Book review: Domesticity at War In the postwar, cold war years, there emerges a new type of modern architecture that represents a fundamental transformation from only five decades prior. In Domesticity at War, Beatriz Colomina presents domesticity as a new, and very potent weapon in a changed architectural battlefield. |
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Charter 'The City of the Future' Many factors determine the future of the city. The aim of the new PerfectCity project is to develop with your help a Charter “City of the Future”. The Charter deals with the question of how the city of the future should be developed and what it should look like. |
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Driving Economic Growth - Mobility for Development Mobility is key to economic development. Businesses need road, rail, shipping and air networks to transport goods and services to markets, while people need them to get to jobs and use basic services. Mobility is not solely about vehicles; it is also about infrastructure, communications technology, access to resources and energy, facilitation of trade and simplifying burdensome bureaucracy. |
Thursday, August 30, 2007
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The Atelier Bow-Wow Architecture studio Atelier Bow-Wow is celebrated for research that defines new urban and architectural typologies in Tokyo, where otherwise unrelated elements of the built environment are combined and adapted for utilitarian purposes. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto interprets urban space in Tokyo as a causal chain of responses to flux - natural phenomena such as earthquakes and typhoons that pose a constant threat to the city, and increases in population, traffic and waste. |
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
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Guide to walking - one step at a time Complaint Pedestrians forget what it's like to be a driver -- they walk as slowly as possible on a crosswalk when cars are waiting to make a turn or linger in the crosswalk after the ongoing traffic has been given the green light. |
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Towards an age of abundance Ignore the critics of economic growth who claim that prosperity makes us unhappy. We need to win the war against scarcity once and for all, so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of longer, healthier and wealthier lives. |
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Nakheel launches Al Furjan Nakheel, one of the world's largest privately-held property developers, today announced the launch of Al Furjan - a new approach to a family oriented community development located in the heart of new Dubai. |
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The end of traffic jams? A remarkable study into the way millions of people will travel in the future reveals a world where cars drive themselves, people could be tagged so they are constantly monitored, and nearly all modes of transport can be run by computers rather than people. |
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Taiwan falls for Tudor England Lewis & Hickey designs for the Royal Mount development in Taipei will feature 50 Tudor-style mansions. |
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RIBA plans new role as watchdog The RIBA is to take a leaf out of Cabe’s book with plans for a design review panel of 20 leading architects to advise incoming president Sunand Prasad. In a radical change of policy, the panel, due to be assembled in the next few months, will inform the president and allow him to comment directly on the merits of “live’’ projects — giving advice to local authorities, developers and organisations like English Heritage on request or where the RIBA wishes to intervene. |
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Beijing's Pollution Rises in 4-Day Test Of Restricted Driving Despite a move by authorities to slash the number of motorists in Beijing by more than a million during a pre-Olympics pollution test, the city's skies remained a hazy white Monday evening and pollution levels showed a slight increase over the four-day trial period, Beijing's Environmental Protection Bureau said. |
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Wake up, Manhattan New York’s skyline is one of the most distinctive in the world. But the city should stop trading on past glories. |
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Delight of London’s far-out pavilions London’s latest pavilion in the park opens on Friday. The appearance of an ambitious, radical building next to the Serpentine Gallery in the city’s poshest park, Kensington Gardens, has become one of the most eagerly awaited fixtures in the art year. But it is not alone. The city is seeing a flourishing of sculptural, architectural booths, kiosks and pavilions. |
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Two Infusions of Vision to Bolster New Orleans In the two years since Hurricane Katrina, what has the rebuilding effort produced? No grand designs. No inspired vision for the future of New Orleans. There have been only a handful of earnest, grass-roots proposals to preserve what’s left of the historic fabric. |
Monday, August 27, 2007
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Single Hauz Like an inhabitable billboard, the Single Hauz – by Poland's front architects – proposes cantilevering domestic living space from a central mast. The house can then be installed above a variety of ground conditions, from the middle of a meadow to an urban core. |
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Shanghai leads a transit boom in China In 1990, Shanghai was a poor, decaying postcolonial metropolis shaking off decades of economic stagnation. Its streets were congested, too — with bicycles. But Shanghai decided to build a subway system, and today, the city is on its way to owning the largest urban rail mass-transit system in the world. |
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Urban design to save lives The impact of sedentary lifestyles is the cause of killer health problems, two of Louisiana’s top researchers in the field say, and failure to build sidewalks and walkable neighborhoods is a huge factor in America’s failure to get off the couch. |
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Postcard: Philadelphia One good thing about being stuck in a traffic jam in Philadelphia is that there's a fine chance you can spend your time looking at a mural. There are over 2,500 murals throughout the city--more than in any other place in the world. |
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Welcome to the future Any self-respecting world city now needs outlandish buildings, but what about the past? |
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Does your neighbourhood pass the Popsicle test? For a neighbourhood to be considered friendly to pedestrians, planners in the new urbanist school believe, it must pass the "Popsicle test." Essentially, a neighbourhood must be planned so that an eight-year-old can walk to a corner store without crossing major roads, buy a Popsicle and get back home before it melts. |
Saturday, August 25, 2007
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What's in store for Raleigh's City Plaza? Who knew it was even called City Plaza? The empty space in front of the old Civic Center in Raleigh was used occasionally for rock concerts or for a Carolina Hurricanes celebration. But it was only when the Civic Center came down and Fayetteville Street was reopened that the idea dawned about this desolate spot becoming a true center-city gathering place. |
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Uptown...Midtown...Downtown...Overtown? Due to the recent fires at Griffith Park and the ongoing threat of earthquakes and even tsunamis, city developers have been planning the next phase of urban expansion with safety in mind. “We’re going to zone the skies above Los Angeles for floating buildings,” said city planning spokesperson Z. Rowe Gees. “These structures, called Strat-Houses, will be modeled after the old dirigibles, over a thousand feet long. Unlike zeppelins such as the Hindenburg, they will not be carried aloft by explosive hydrogen. The Strat-Houses will be supported by nacelles filled with helium.” |
Friday, August 24, 2007
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The City of Toronto has recruited daring designers for up to 20,000 new homes, combining social conscience with visionary forms With 58,000 units of housing under its management — making the corporation one of North America's biggest residential landlords — TCHC is forging ahead on all fronts. The $1-billion redevelopment of the Regent Park social housing complex is speeding forward. Plans are afoot to perform the same kind of sweeping revamp on the Lawrence Heights housing project, which straddles the W.R. Allen expressway near Yorkdale plaza. And between 15,000 and 20,000 new units are proposed or on the drawing board for sites across Toronto. |
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Vancouver tapped as world's most 'livable' city Vancouver has been selected as the world's most “livable city” and Toronto the fifth most livable in a survey of 132 cities by the Economist magazine. |
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A new design flair warms Nordic hearts Copenhagen kept foreign architects at bay for 250 years. Now, a flurry of building has drawn the world's best and roused local talent. |
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Glass Towers on the Rise Outside of Manhattan Glass towers are rising outside Manhattan, as big-name developers reappropriate the design sensibility that reshaped the New York skyline in order to take advantage of the panorama they created. |
Thursday, August 23, 2007
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Pitt urges New Orleans to 'build something smarter' Brad Pitt is putting his money toward turning New Orleans green, but he's seeing red over the slow pace of reconstruction in the city's poorest neighbourhoods. |
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
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Hiking by Transit Many of us would love to get rid of our cars (or at least cut down on the number of cars our family owns), if we could find a sensible alternative. That time may not be far off; increasingly a combination of good urban planning, new technology and more flexible models of ownership is making car-free life not only possible, but alluring. And add on well-built density, walkshed technologies and car sharing, and we already have a pretty good model for not only getting access to things we want, but saving money and protecting the environment while we're at it... as long as we stay in the parts of your city which are similarly served. |
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China Eco-Cities Update In 2005, green architect William McDonough and British engineering firm Arup separately announced plans to build ambitious eco-cities housing up to 500,000 inhabitants on the mainland. For a few months following these announcements, coverage was enthusiastic. Much of this coverage was deserved. Designers are, after all, devising solutions to what promises to be one of the largest rural-to-urban migrations in history. |
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Tracking Cyclists, Avid and Otherwise How important are bike lanes to avid bikers, leisure cyclists and occasional bike commuters, respectively? Are dedicated pathways crucial, or is it more important that people feel safe on the street itself? What's more helpful: segregation of bicycles from cars or pavement markings and other wayfinding signals that help bikers navigate the same right-of-way as drivers? |
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The Extreme Boulevardier There must have been someplace, somewhere, at some time, that was a better, richer environment to walk in than New York today. Constantinople in the year A.D. 1200 comes to mind, or Venice a few centuries later. But in this country right now, it’s hard to imagine a place that surpasses New York, particularly Manhattan. Its buildings and streets, built at a greater intensity than anywhere else in the United States, offer a lode of sensory information. |
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Envisioning City Life Along the Rivers In the hottest days of summer, Paris becomes the Riviera, when it transforms two miles of the Seine into a beach with cabana boys by day and concerts at night. Every July, Venetians crowd the canals on boats and gondolas to celebrate the marriage of the city to the sea. For a month every fall, the Baltic archipelago city of Stockholm sets a waterfront stage for an international jazz festival. And in Washington, perhaps the world capital of festivals and celebrations, one of the more heralded annual events that focuses a spotlight directly on its waterfronts is . . . a cleanup project. Earlier this year, the Capital River Relief project plucked 50 tons of garbage from the Anacostia and Potomac rivers. |
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Rome, virtually Computer experts have created a digital reproduction of ancient Rome as it appeared at the peak of its power in AD 320 - calling it the largest and most complete simulation of a historic city ever created. |
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For museums, architects work miracles A majestic white winged addition designed by famed architect Santiago Calatrava can do wonders for business. The Milwaukee Art Museum has pulled itself out of $30 million in debt, increased attendance, and attracted acclaimed exhibits since the internationally known Calatrava finished the structure on Milwaukee's lakefront in 2001. It was his first project in the United States. |
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State of Cycling Even in packed subways, high gasoline costs and concerns about health, less than 1 percent of all New Yorkers regularly use their bicycles to commute to work. At the same time,18 percent of all New York City adults still smoke cigarettes. |
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Moving the homeless out of shelters, into homes Two weeks ago, Moises and Jennifer Cedano expected to spend the next four to six months in a homeless shelter while they saved enough money for a deposit to rent an apartment. Today they watch two of their three children, Timothy and Francisco, jump with joy on a new bed in a new apartment. |
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Speculative Surrealism It's customary for the historic architect to make a grandiose declaration of their bequest to history. Hence the declaration in Christopher Wren's St Pauls that 'if you seek my monument, look around'. Norman Foster was once asked what he thought his legacy would be. 'The extension of the airport typology' was his reply. |
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
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Architects aren't ready for an urbanized planet The world is racing to the city, and the one group of professionals capable of housing and sheltering the massive human influx to the urban centers - the architects and the planners - freely acknowledge that they are ill-equipped to cope. |
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How to build today's supertalls Elegance, not machismo, is behind Chicago's unprecedented reach for the sky. |
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Beijing releases plan to regulate future urban development The plan, released by the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning and Design incorporates eight districts and covers an area of more than 1,000 square kilometers, divided into 33 parts according to major roads and rivers, the paper reported. |
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Beware of Urbanphobia Just when it seems Downtown at last is slowly beginning to fulfill the promise of a place to live, work, shop and play, and give Southern California an urbane alternative to its pervasive sprawl, a condition I label "urbanphobia" has emerged in the debate over the city's future. |
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How to Forecast Traffic Jams Days in Advance Turns out, all you have to do to avoid traffic jams is embed wire sensors in the roads. That, combined with data from the past, allows German traffic experts to forecast up to 90 percent of all traffic jams. |
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Developers sell their strolls Builders talk the talk; will residents walk the walk? |
Monday, August 20, 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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Green wave for cyclists When the municipality announced it wants to introduce a green wave for cyclists, some responded in disbelief. However, Copenhagen has proven the concept is feasible. |
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The forbidding city In Beijing the past is not so much a foreign country—it’s another planet. From the window of my hotel, peering through the hazy smog and a jungle of high-rises, many of them still rising, I can see, about half a mile away, a corner of a building I used to live in. Almost everything in between has gone up since I left in 1991. In the other direction two of the towers still climbing are leaning towards each other, as if two Japanese giants had recognised each other. This, apparently, is to be the new headquarters of Chinese state television. Somebody who expects to work there tells me it is known as “trouser legs”. |
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Five of the best neighborhoods in North America From a Kansas City shopping center to a small town Main Street, these success stories can inspire great things in your community. |
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Home Is Where The Airport Is An "aerotropolis" has formed around the runways of Dallas/Fort Worth as executives see the benefits of life near a hub |
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Bicycles for rent ahead of Olympics Beijing has kicked off an ambitious plan to put 50,000 brand new bicycles for rent ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games to curb pollution and ease congestion. |
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Our finite planet: planning for a decline in our oil bounty In my local supermarket in Prospect there is a wonderful photo from the early 1900’s. A tram is rolling down the centre of an uncrowded Prospect Road. When I see this image it makes me reflect on how much Adelaide’s transport has changed. Since World War II Adelaide has become almost entirely dependent on cars for transport. Why? |
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Ready, Set, Design: Work as a Contest Charles Gwathmey refuses to take part in architectural competitions these days. They cost too much money and divert energy from other projects, he says. Renzo Piano no longer competes because he doesn’t need to; he always has plenty of projects under way and can easily get jobs without entering a horse race. Peter Eisenman, on the other hand, says that he must compete to stay busy and that he relishes the challenge. And Richard Meier says no to most competitions but admits that some of his most important projects came about through such contests, like the Jubilee Church in Rome. And some are too compelling to resist, he says, like a current competition for the tallest building in Warsaw. |
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Denser than thou A cool new website called WalkScore gives you an instant score for the walkability in your neighborhood. Walkability, in turn, has become a far more huggable notion than density to make the case for healthier, more compact communities. |
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Beijing curbs cars to improve air quality Shuts down 1.3 million vehicles in experiment to reduce pollution before Olympics. |
Saturday, August 18, 2007
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The Future of Governors Island Governors Island is presently the subject of an exhibition and development competition that offers New Yorkers the opportunity to reflect upon the future function and significance of the islands that dot the New York harbor. Titled The Park at the Center of the World: Five Visions for Governors Island , the show, sponsored by the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC), features the work of five finalists that explore a range of possible uses for the site. Entries were chosen on the basis of the promise they showed as schematic designs, as concepts or ideas, and are still subject to revision. |
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Here today, gone tomorrow Space-age cubes, rooftop pods, giant caravan cities and garden sheds you can practically live in and the rise of portable architecture |
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São Paulo: A City Without Ads In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil’s most important city, São Paulo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known on one hand for being the country’s slick commercial capital and on the other for its extreme gang violence and crushing poverty, São Paulo’s “Lei Cidade Limpa” or Clean City Law was an unexpected success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab. |
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Is Bigger Better? This year, for the first time in human history, more people live in urban areas than do not. As this trend increases, it raises a question: What kind of city is better for the environment? |
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Report Says Green Still Doesn't Drive Building Cost Based on an analysis of the budgets for 221 projects, of which 86 were pursuing some level of LEED certification, the report concludes that “buildings cannot be budgeted based on averages,” leaving open the question of whether, for any given building, a green agenda affects its cost. |
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238 New Developments from U.S. and Abroad Join Pioneering LEED for Neighborhood Development Pilot A total of 238 developments have signed up to participate in the pilot program, which will be the first national certification system for sustainable neighborhood design and development. LEED for Neighborhood Development will integrate the principles of smart growth, new urbanism, and green building into the design and development of communities, moving beyond the single green building approach. |
Friday, August 17, 2007
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How effective will today's 'green' systems be? Great strides have been made in energy-efficient features for housing, but it may not be enough to solve the planet's problems. |
Thursday, August 16, 2007
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The 11th Hour Generation "Gets to Completely Change This World" The film’s title might suggest it paints a bleak picture. And it does. The filmmakers don’t pull any punches in stating that every natural system on Earth is deteriorating evermore rapidly and that the confluence of all these pressures has brought us to the brink of environmental disaster. But the overall message of the film is one of hope. It calls directly on the viewers to be the generation that saves us all. And this challenge is presented as a huge opportunity for those lucky enough to be alive right now. “This generation gets to completely change this world,” says Paul Hawken in the film. |
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A Brooklyn Parking Lot Becomes a Neighborhood “Living Room” StreetFilms has some excellent video coverage of the Dept. of Transportation's launch of its Public Plaza Initiative in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood last week. The before-and-after images are particularly compelling. |
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The future of china on 1000 square meters If you are interested what China will look like in five years, all you need to do is visit Shanghai’s architectural modeling companies. |
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Get Lost Get Lost is a collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one international artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw a map of downtown New York, uncovering a territory that is both real and imaginary. |
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Artists Love Eastside Tokyo The old quarters of many major cities have strong connections with art and the people living there. Obvious ones would be New York’s SoHo, London’s East End or Berlin-Mitte. But what did you know about the more or less similar scene on the east side of Tokyo? In the Mukoujima and Kyojima districts of Sumida ward, you won’t find many skyscrapers, giant TV screens or kids dressed like they just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. Instead, you’ll meet real people who renovate houses to open galleries and cafés, thus living and creating works at their own pace. PingMag takes you on a tour to the east side to explore its charms! |
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Why New Yorkers Last Longer This city, once known as a capital of vice and self-destruction, is now a capital of longevity. What happened? |
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A Grass-Roots Effort to Grow Old at Home On a bluff overlooking the Potomac River, George and Anne Allen, both 82, struggle to remain in their beloved three-story house and neighborhood, despite the frailty, danger and isolation of old age. |
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Kings of the road ESS supplies structures to rock stars and Urban Salon is fascinated by temporary architecture. When they collaborate, it’s quite a double act. |
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Masterplanner chosen for £10bn Birmingham regeneration A consortium led by leading UK urban designers, Urban Initiatives, has been unveiled as the winning bidder chosen to create and shape Birmingham City Council’s groundbreaking City Centre Masterplan |
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Chinese eco-city heralds revolution in urban living On an island off the coast of the Chinese city of Shanghai, architects, engineers and contractors are preparing to build a new city later this year. In itself, this is nothing special one would think. |
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Flocking Downtown: Developers Increasingly Taking on Urban Infill As the availability of suitable, greenfield development sites in metropolitan areas become increasingly hard to come by, retail developers are turning to alternative sites and becoming more creative. This is perhaps best represented by urban infill developments underway across the country. |
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World's Slum Dwellers: More Like Us Than We Think UN-HABITAT suggests that within the next 30 years, one in every three inhabitants of our globe will live in the "slums" of the world's exploding cities, most located in Africa, Asia and Latin America. |
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Urbanism in the 21st Century The City Everywhere: Urbanism in the 21st Century with Joel Kotkin speaking at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival. |
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Stories from runners and cyclists in the home of the brave Hurled milkshakes, heated confrontations, serious accidents -- they're all a part of hitting the road for many cyclists and runners. In these tales from the front lines, L.A.-area riders and runners talk about their worst encounters with motorists. |
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Greening the Neighborhoods Perhaps you long for a greener, more cosmopolitan lifestyle; say, a diverse urban setting where you can shop, play, eat and even work within short distances of your home. Fewer trips in the car. An energy efficient home. A community that values sound environmental practices. In a movement called “Green Urbanism”, greening whole neighborhoods is catching on in cities such as Portland and Denver—and now, Pittsburgh. A LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) pilot project is about to certify master-planned neighborhoods that define sustainable living and two projects in Pittsburgh have qualified for it. |
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Seniors shoved aside by condo conversions For a while there, the friends in 5D had a nice rhythm going. Dan Lewis, 71, cooked the meals. Robin Kissel, 61, did the laundry. Jack Mize, 68, paid for the cable. They made the rent on time, every month, for 15 years, using money from Social Security and minimum-wage jobs. No one was living in luxury. But no one was heading into old age alone. Then came the announcement: A developer planned to turn their tired, three-bedroom Federal Way apartment into something better — a $208,000 condominium they could never afford. |
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Upnext Upnext.com is a virtual cityscape that allows you to explore Manhattan’s shops, restaurants, and venues in 3-D. The site, similar to other city guide sites like Citysearch and Yelp, allows members to rate and review destinations and socialize with other users, but it also includes several additional features its predecessors don’t. |
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Upnext Upnext.com is a virtual cityscape that allows you to explore Manhattan’s shops, restaurants, and venues in 3-D. The site, similar to other city guide sites like Citysearch and Yelp, allows members to rate and review destinations and socialize with other users, but it also includes several additional features its predecessors don’t. |
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Going the extra mile to make mass transit more personal For too long, too much of the discussion about urban mobility and its relationship to sustainability has been locked into an increasingly sterile debate between proponents of public transit and advocates of the automobile. Both sides ignore some inconvenient truths. |
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
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Customized City Approaching a billboard with ladders and razors, London collective Cutup peels off large panels of the print and slices them into small squares, reducing the vast imagery into hundreds of physical pixels that are then re-assembled. |
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Ancient urban sprawl Archaeologists have published a new map showing an extensive ancient settlement surrounding Cambodia's Angkor Wat that supported large numbers of inhabitants before and after the famous temple was built. |
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Good news, bad news Remember the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the king who was cursed in the afterlife to roll a boulder up a hill forever? Well, being a historic preservationist in Chicago, the city that works (and wrecks), can be positively Sisyphean. |
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When bikes rule the road, motorists fume Critical Mass has taken over city streets at random for almost 15 years. Supporters say it's harmless fun. Detractors say the rides have spun out of control. |
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Buoyant housing market Global warming causes flood of Dutch interest in 'floating villas'. |
Monday, August 13, 2007
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Transbay Terminal tower designs have chance to redefine San Francisco The competition to build a new transit center and skyscraper on Mission Street isn't a beauty contest. It's a gamble in city-making that could redefine San Francisco in the sky and on the ground. |
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Montreal's champion on two wheels 'was like Joan of Arc on a bicycle' For decades, she served as the impassioned co-leader of an organization dedicated to putting more bikes on city streets, and then helped send 20,000 old bicycles to the developing world. |
Saturday, August 11, 2007
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Toronto as Muse Will Alsop discusses his methodology for painting and urban planning. |
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Chicago's first Silver LEED Certified all residential building At 62 stories, 340 on the Park is the tallest all-residential building in Chicago and the first residential high rise to achieve a silver LEED rating from the USGBC. |
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Parisian-style hire bicycles to beat London traffic jams The distinctive white bicycles that have become a familiar sight on the streets of Paris in recent weeks, helping to cut congestion and pollution, may soon be seen weaving through London's traffic. |
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An architect's playground A magnet for building buffs, the city with everything from a leaning tower to swanky homes is best seen by bike. |
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Changing the World One Block at a Time The neighborhood is a powerful--but often overlooked--tool for social improvement. |
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Beijing to take 1.3 million cars off streets More than a million cars will be taken off the streets of China's capital for four days this month, state media said on Thursday, amid mounting concern over air pollution during next year's Beijing Olympics. |
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'Complete streets' program gives more room for pedestrians, cyclists A growing number of states and local governments are rejecting a half-century of transportation practice and demanding that streets accommodate all types of travel, not just automobiles. |
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Hanoi seeks some big answers to its ongoing skinny house problem Skinny Hanoi buildings are set for the chop. Nguyen Khac Tho, deputy director of Hanoi’s Department for Construction, said the strategy to wipe out all street facing houses less than 15 square metres wide must be added to the city’s urban design plan. |
Friday, August 10, 2007
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Street Training Manual Street training is the art of constantly training our bodies and minds, both collectively and individually to develop awareness on the streets. It's commonly understood that our surroundings have a powerful effect on us. Street training teaches us that we can have an equally powerful effect on our surroundings both with our thoughts and our behavior. The regular practice of exploring ourselves and our locality safely and joyfully helps Street Trainers to make positive changes in both. |
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Market v. Meaning On June 10, internationally renowned architects Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman shared their often-conflicting opinions on what they consider to be the most pressing issue in architecture today, during a discussion entitled "Urgency" at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montréal. |
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Rotten Neighbors We are the first real estate search engine of its kind that helps you find bad neighbors before you move so you don't regret the purchase of your new house, home, condo or apartment. |
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Officials see red over “green” Olympics It is meant to be the Formula One of athletics, the best of the best, but less than one year before China’s prestigious Olympic Games are set so commence, Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said that Beijing’s pollution problems are so severe that that some events may have to be cancelled. The Beijing Olympic organising officials refused to comment. The quality of air is probably the most vital element for the Games and questions are being asked if it will be “fit for purpose”. |
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The high-rise hang-up By 2020, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region is estimated to have 28.5 million people, more than even Tokyo. By 2050, it may have as many as 40 million. Unfortunately, Mumbai’s architects and urban planners are obsessed with building taller and faster, not with the footprint of cities, or open spaces and partnerships between classes and communities. |
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What is a green neighborhood? The neighborhood design program synthesizes concepts from the U.S. Green Building Council, the National Resources Defense Council and the Congress for New Urbanism. To achieve the standard, a neighborhood development must score points in three areas: smart location and linkage, neighborhood pattern and design, and green construction and technology. |
Thursday, August 9, 2007
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A global property boom Russian style In Russia's booming commercial property market, old meets new, as developers balance architectural style against the drive for profits. |
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Mere nostalgia, imitation won't keep the city vital So what is the architectural essence of San Francisco? It's a grandiose question, to be sure, and an absurd one at that. But it sticks in my mind after a dinner last week on Russian Hill followed by a stroll on Union Street, then Columbus Avenue and then Montgomery Street to BART. |
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Touch the sky High-rise housing has a rich history that embraces the very top and the very bottom of the social pile, serving paradoxically as the preserve of both the super-rich in their glamorous skyscrapers and the poor in their tenements and concrete slabs. It is the ultimate dream of the modernist architect, offering up the minimalist visions of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe as well as the extravagantly sculptural forms of the latest blockbuster buildings. It is a form that fascinates and seduces planners, developers, designers and homebuyers. And this has never been more true than today. |
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What drives the runaway growth in the Seattle area? Much of the growth comes from external factors we cannot control. But not all of it is beyond local political control. An urban geographer sorts out the unusual concentration of growth hormones that hit the area and looks at the dilemmas of rapid growth. |
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
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We should care about good design A bad building can stink for decades, fouling its surroundings and lowering the bar for everything that comes after. |
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House builders urged to cater for wildlife There was a time when planning decisions were about whose view you couldn't block or whether your new tower block was a monstrous carbuncle. Now there are quite different demands. Increasingly the planning authorities are considering the impact a development has on wildlife. |
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No such thing as a free ride This November, Seattle voters will face the largest road and transit funding package put before them in 50 years, which, through increased license fees and taxes, will cost households an average of $218 more a year. Yet even if approved — a matter that’s far from certain — funding won’t be nearly enough to cover needed improvements to the region’s roads and bridges, not to mention future expansion of public transit. |
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Setting the Stage for More Katrinas Hurricane Katrina was a manmade disaster, attributable almost entirely to the Corps. It should have been a teachable moment. But in Congress there's still rabid bipartisan support for the status quo — as long as all 535 members can bring home their pet water projects. |
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
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Urbanintell Urbanintell provides access to digital video focusing on urbanism. Urbanism is the study and development of cities, from the physical form of buildings, infrastructure and open space, to the culture, the politics and economy. The aim is to take theory and practice out of the box with contributors explaining their projects and ideas, making these accessible and inspirational. |
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Asia's biggest slum set to turn into India's Madison Avenue Developers will pocket $1.2bn as bulldozers raze Dharavi, but it will mean new houses and schools for locals. So why are workers so set against it? |
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The downside of diversity A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth? |
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Bring beauty, people back to architecture What makes some public spaces lively and some devoid of life? Many architects have only minimal interest in such questions, and judging by the projects they turn out, it’s as if they believe contemporary architecture is above such concerns. |
Sunday, August 5, 2007
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Dislocate Christian Nold opened the Dislocate symposium with a fairly critical assessment of location-based art. His project Biomapping has been around for about 3,5 years now – a lot of time to reflect on this kind of work and why it makes sense or not in different contexts. To really understand location-based works, one has to know that many of the ideas of today's media-related art go back to the late 19th century when also the idea of biometrics was envisioned by the British, primarily to track people in India which then still was a colony. |
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New York, XL Not since the days of Robert Moses has New York been in the process of such a radical physical transformation and at such a breakneck pace. Here, in words and images, is bird's-eye view of some of the projects that will change the way you think about the city. |
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Iran hosts 1st Urban Design Olympiad Iran will host the first World Olympiad of Urban Design which aims to enhance the quality of urban spaces in the cities of the world. |
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Famed Danish Urbanist Jan Gehl in Town to Consult on PlaNYC Jan Gehl, the famed Danish urbanist, is in New York City this week where, sources say, he has been hired as a consultant for Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC program. |
Friday, August 3, 2007
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Ant Urbanism Future Australians perplexed by the design of their cities might have ants to blame: "The movement of ants could help solve traffic jams and crowd congestion, Australian scientists say, and the findings could be used in future town planning systems." |
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NIMBY Notebook: Habitat For Hypocrisy Housing advocates say Marin County's Bill Duane exemplifies a vexing irony: People support affordable housing with their labor, money, and votes—just so long as it's nowhere near them. |
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Buying Culture By luring Western institutions like the Louvre and Yale, Abu Dhabi aims to become a global arts center. |
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Learning what a tree can give When assessing the value of a tree, it helps to take a step back. On a blistering day in Etobicoke this week, that one step - into the cool, shady respite of a green ash outside John G. Althouse Middle School - was particularly effective at demonstrating one of the unheralded favours trees do for us all the time. |
Thursday, August 2, 2007
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A Car-Free Future? There are few possessions to which people are more attached than their cars. Surveys have consistently shown that between a quarter an a third of all Americans bestow names on their cars. One survey found that 84 percent of all people say they “love” their cars, and more than half keep photos of their cars on hand. |
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A City as a Work of Art In a lifetime of studying the potential, realized or otherwise, of cities around the globe, Charles Landry has seen a world of evidence of what’s possible. And as he travels from city to city, he maintains an unrelenting, intense curiosity about what makes a city tick. Or not. |
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In The Name Of 'Community' When it comes to redevelopment, many architects, planners and developers like to talk creating a sense of 'community'. But glossy plans and new buildings generally do little to strengthen an area's 'social' fabric -- rather, it often can cause the reverse. |
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
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People-powered 'Crowd Farm?' Plan Would Harvest Energy Of Human Movement Two graduate students at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning want to harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings, like commuters in a train station or fans at a concert... |
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Reducing cities to a statistical sprawl The Global Cities exhibition at Tate Modern – all warnings about overpopulation and eco-doom – shows architects have lost their ‘utopian drive’. |
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Forget the high-rise slums of the past. Building upwards not outwards is the way ahead. Towers supply the most prestigious accommodation in the world. People who could live anywhere they choose queue up to buy apartments in the towers that are springing up in every great metropolis. An apartment in the 54-storey Trump World Tower in United Nations Plaza in New York will set you back anything from $7m to $15m and rising. A private spa and health club, a 60ft swimming pool, a gourmet restaurant, a wine cellar, everything you might expect in a luxury hotel, is only an elevator ride away, plus utterly spectacular views of Manhattan in what is still one of the most exciting cityscapes anywhere on earth. |
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Trading places As the affluent go downtown, the working poor are tripling up to buy homes in the 'burbs. |
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The 30 Fastest Cities In The World. We scoured the globe in search of the perfect place to transplant yourself and your business. From Chicago to Shanghai, we selected 30 urban centers that are shaping our future. |
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Fast Cities 2007 You're smart, young, newly graduated from a university with the whole world before you. You could settle in a small town with well-tended lawns, pancake suppers, and life on a human scale. Or you could truck it to the big city, with all its din and dog-eat-dog lunacy. Your choice? |
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When Parallel Parking Was New and Meters Seemed Un-American Parking on city streets today is a cinch compared with the 1930s, when free, unlimited parking was considered every American's constitutional right. Just as their grandparents had tied their horses to the general store's rail, American drivers expected handy curb space for their cars when they went to town. By the 1930s, however, there were too many cars and too few curbs. |
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Alsop to Toronto: Hey, you, get into my cloud Alsop set up a Toronto office in 2005. Although this remains smaller than his offices in Shanghai, Singapore and London, Mr. Alsop said, “I like it here and I plan to plague Toronto with my buildings for as long as possible.” |
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