Urbanism News
Saturday, September 29, 2007
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'Wiki City' Creates Real-Time Maps While drivers are accustomed to using traffic reports to assess road conditions, pedestrians who navigate cities are typically left without aid to determine the best route. But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using wikis and the Semantic Web look to change the way people map and navigate their cities. |
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Big Box Stores and Urban Development The big box industry already dominates suburban and exurban commercial development. In their search for new markets to exploit, big box developers are looking at urban centres, which until now have resisted their block busting, sidewalk smashing designs. |
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Beyond wedding cakes and frippery The tallest towers are not always those that catch our imagination. |
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Where's My Free Wi-Fi? It's hard to dislike the idea of free municipal wireless Internet access. Imagine your town as an oversized Internet cafe, with invisible packets floating everywhere as free as the air we breathe. That fanciful vision inspired many cities to announce the creation of free wireless networks in recent years. This summer, reality hit—one city after another has either canceled deployments or offered a product that's hardly up to the hype. In Houston, Chicago, St. Louis, and even San Francisco, once-promising projects are in trouble. What happened—was the idea all wrong? |
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Supersize me, you, everyone Small, it seems, is no longer beautiful, at least in the world of high-end tourism. All around the world, resorts and hotels are competing to see who can build the biggest, tallest, most outrageous, most resource hogging developments. |
Friday, September 28, 2007
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Climate Findings Update Even if global greenhouse gas emissions were to stop increasing today, the climate would continue to warm. |
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Taking Transit: The Most Effective Route to Cutting Carbon The single most effective way to cut one's personal quotient of carbon dioxide pollution is switching from cars to public transit. |
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Vive la Vélorution! Outdoor advertising has become fiercely competitive and highly political. America's Clear Channel Outdoor and France's JCDecaux fought for months in negotiations with the office of the mayor of Paris, and in court, to snap up the contract for panneaux contre vélos—setting up a bicycle-rental scheme in Paris in exchange for exclusive rights to the French capital's 1,628 billboards. Although Clear Channel claims to have won “technically”, the French firm, whose founder, Jean-Claude Decaux, has close ties to the political establishment, emerged as the victor in practice this spring. JCDecaux set up the bike-rental system in record time and launched it on July 15th. |
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Scandinavian architects inspire British design for eco-living Architects from across the world will be invited to take part in a competition to design Britain’s ten new eco-towns, it will be announced today. Yvette Cooper, the Housing Minister, will ask the leading creative designers in urban and landscape architecture and transport planning to share their suggestions for the towns of up to 20,000 homes The first phase of the competition will focus on the overarching design principles of eco-towns, particularly innovative ideas for low and zero-carbon living. |
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MediaArchitecture - Media Urbanism Media Urbanism hosted by Mirjam Struppek was the second panel of the MediaArchitecture conference I recently attended. Mirjam began by highlighting the new challenges faced in urban design and planning caused by the use of media technologies, in particular, LED screens. The main focus was how these technologies have a social impact and how how cities have responded to these entering our public spaces. Along side the discussion on urbanism, individual projects were discussed by some of the panelists who are working in the field of interactive design and architecture. |
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The Gulf: Future of the City, Edition 2007? This summer Volume 12, Al Manakh landed on the doormats of subscribers. The special edition of Volume was compiled on the occasion of the International Design Forum Dubai held last May. Al Manakh is divided into three sections. The first two focus on recent developments in the Gulf region. Entitled Dubai Guide and edited by Moutamarat, a knowledge centre in the region, the first section features a number of interviews and essays about Dubai. |
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Asymptote Approaches (Carbon) Zero Asymptote has unveiled another major Asian project, extending the complexity and scope of their kinetic work with a 10.8-million-square-foot mixed-use, zero-carbon complex in Penang, Malaysia. In a statement, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi called the project, known as the Penang Global City, “a high-caliber development” that will serve as “a catalyst for the NCER and an important factor in the Malaysian economy as a whole.” The NCER is the Northern Corridor Economic Region, a recently created development zone along Malaysia’s northern border. |
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Amsterdam Dims the Red Lights If the city authorities have their way, the widely sold tourist T-shirt proclaiming that "Good boys go to heaven and bad boys go to Amsterdam" will become a relic. Indeed, those bad boys may soon struggle to find their way to the city's fabled red-light district of "storefront" prostitution. Last week one of the main entrepreneurs in the city's perfectly legal sex industry cashed in, selling his properties in the district. The buyer, for $35 million, was a not-for-profit organization backed by the city of Amsterdam. The plan is to convert the buildings in which prostitutes pose in the windows into apartments and more conventional commercial space. |
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
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Return to the bike? Hard sell in Beijing As Beijing marks car-free day for the first time, an entrepreneur pushes citywide rental scheme. |
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Jane Jacobs, Foe of Plans and Friend of City Life Nearly a half century ago, at the dawn of an era renowned for its utopian dreams and dystopian diagnoses, a journalist who loved the American city wrote an attack on all the professional planners and idealists who believed they could design the perfect urban habitat, the city beautiful, a metropolitan Eden |
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Why U2 still haven’t got what they’re looking for Seven years after it was first mooted, the proposed U2 tower for Dublin’s docklands remains strangled in red tape, design-related disagreements and planning squabbles. |
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Why we love sounds of the city jungle For some, living in a city is a loud, unpleasant babble of intrusive noise. For others it is a soundscape of calming, tones that lift the spirits and brighten the day. Now a Ł1m, three-year research project is building a database of noises that people say improve their environment. It will translate those findings into design principles to help architects create sweeter-sounding cities. |
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
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Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway New development in the Thames Gateway sees heritage as a way of maintaining continuity with a place's past. But where the demands of alien scales of development are irreconcilable with historical conditions, can that sense of continuity be fabricated? |
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Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben on Blessed Unrest and Deep Economics Creating sustainable systems means transforming how we think about the world and its different economies -- of money, nature, agriculture, and more. Essentially it means rethinking our priorities. But how do we create these new frameworks, and translate them into community action? |
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Happy Park(ing) Day! Some Park(ing) spaces in SOMA, visited on Park(ing) Day. |
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Shanghai Jinxian Road As most of Shanghai’s residents know better, spring and autumn typically passes so fast strictly speaking two seasons are left each year. Winter can only mean frozen fingers and bulky coats, so there really is no better time than summer to explore the streets in Shanghai, speaking of which, the Autumn winds are starting to blow this way already. |
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Up, Up, and Away “Everyone kept asking which direction north was, so we put that in,” landscape architect Ken Smith says wryly, gesturing down at a giant N built into the ground. Its right leg extends into an oversize directional arrow, pointing off to our left. We are 400 feet in the air, 40 miles south of Los Angeles, in a donut-shaped metal basket held aloft by a giant orange helium balloon. |
Sunday, September 23, 2007
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Beijing drivers ignore No Car Day China is holding a No Car Day in more than 100 cities as it tries to reduce smog ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics. |
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Sustainable society within reach, ecological designer says If the summer's crop of drought and wildfire headlines threatened to send you sliding into a sweaty, globally warmed pit of despair, you'll find the words of David Orr inspiring, albeit in a tough-love kind of way. According to Orr, a pioneer in ecological design and Paul Sears Distinguished Professor and chair of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College, we already have the technology and know-how to create a world where every individual alive today can live a fulfilling, sustainable life. But only - and here's our kick in the pants - if we act immediately to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. |
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Russia-shaped luxury island to be built in Black Sea Russian developers outlined plans on Saturday for a 350-hectare artificial island in the shape of Russia to be built off the Black Sea coast near the future Olympic venue Sochi. |
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Beautifying Kyoto, at last In early September, the Kyoto city government began enforcing regulations against ugliness in the city. Yes, ugliness. The mayor of Kyoto, Yorikane Masumoto, and his municipal government found the political will to think beyond the immediate concerns of day-to-day business demands, and to consider how Kyoto, once one of the world's most beautiful cities, could look a lot better. Hopefully, the rest of Japan's cities will follow suit. |
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Offices more polluting than cars Al Gore, the former vice-president of the United States and now a climate-change crusader, has warned that office towers produce more carbon dioxide than cars and says tougher regulations should be applied to building. |
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Ai Weiwei gives a street view of Beijing The iconic Chinese artist documents the city along a single street in the 10-hour 'Chang'an Boulevard.' |
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San Francisco to Go Dark, Save Energy The Golden Gate Bridge, City Hall, Alcatraz and other parts of the city will go almost completely dark for an hour next month as part of a campaign to conserve energy and fight global warming. |
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
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San Francisco's new Whole Foods The new Whole Foods Market in San Francisco shows with meticulous precision why upscale grocery stores are coveted by communities that want to see themselves as fully rounded or on the map. |
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Urban Design Compendium: updated, reprinted and free to all English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation have this week updated their Urban Design manual with a new 207-page supplement and an interactive website. |
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How do we create places where people want to work, live and play? Liveable neighbourhoods are based on new urbanism principles and have innovative design to improve residents’ lifestyles and building the community. They promote ‘nodal’ development; support the use of public transport, and walkable neighbourhood clustering. Transit-oriented development (TOD) is an important component, as are main street commercial and medium density residential developments. |
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
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Big Brother hitches a ride with a congestion-pricing scheme As part of his recently released plan for New York by the year 2030, entitled PLANYC: A Greener, Greater New York, Mayor Michael Blooomberg is actively promoting a scheme for congestion pricing in the busiest parts of Manhattan. Modeled on programs in Singapore, London, and Stockholm, the system is intended to curb vehicular traffic (and raise money for public transportation) by imposing charges ($8 for cars and $21 for trucks) to enter the borough below 96th Street. The proposal has the support of virtually every bien-pensant urbanist in town, although it has met some resistance, particularly from the outer boroughs and suburbs where car dependence is highest and public transport thinnest. And there are many who suggest that the burden of the charges will fall disproportionately on the poor. |
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Paris skyline may be open to development French President Nicolas Sarkozy, not normally seen as a patron of the arts, called for new ideas yesterday to develop Paris over the coming decades and pledged to encourage "bold" thinking by architects. |
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Giving Artists Space to Create A battered two-story warehouse in Northeast will soon undergo a conversion that could have come from the imagination of one of the artists who will live there. |
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Is Bath Britain's most backward city? When designer James Dyson offered to put up half the Ł25 million for a new school of design, he can't have imagined the bureaucrats of Bath would turn him down. But he's not the only one to have been left frustrated by a city with a virulent hatred of all things modern. |
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Vacant Houses, Scourge of a Beaten-Down Buffalo In this city beaten down by decades of factory closings and residential exodus, the razing of thousands of vacant houses is being touted as a sign of progress. |
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Urban Model for the Nation "Washington, D.C., and the region here is literally setting the pace for how we're building our metropolitan areas throughout the country," |
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When A McMansion Isn't Large Enough With Americans living in ever larger homes, the growth of the self storage industry demonstrates the irony of an American solution to an American problem -- overabundance. |
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Tremendous Symbiosis of Progress and Nature The Stockholm Metro, or Stockholms tunnelbana, is the metro system in Stockholm, Sweden. The system has three main lines and one hundred stations, 47 of which are subterranean and 53 are aboveground (surface and elevated) stations. |
Monday, September 17, 2007
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First We Kill the Architects I have been asked to help design a city. |
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Vandana Shiva Decries the "Outsourcing of Pollution to the Third World" India is one of the preferred spots for outsourcing of all the pollution and energy-intensive production of the world. We hear of outsourcing of jobs and informational technology sector. We don't often enough hear about the outsourcing of pollution to the third world. |
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'Ban cars in London' to cut CO2 London must become car-free if it is to substantially cut carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new report. |
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"Fenceland" (The Greatest Show On Earth!) Well, the “APEC Fenceland” has come and gone now after the world’s top geopolitical brass camped out in Sydney all last week. In light of the G8 Summit held in Germany earlier this year the movements and installations of these roving fortress productions sure are getting lots of practice and therefore I guess not surprisingly all the more streamlined, like “the efficient business of event management” as this article writes; dare I even say, elegant. |
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Plan touts 'no child left inside' Children's Outdoor Bill of Rights urges kids to discover nature. |
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A new London underground In the capital's increasingly overcrowded and overdeveloped landscape, the only way is down. |
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Tutti Frutti has room for all sorts The story goes that Will Alsop scribbled out the whole design for New Islington on a piece of paper with a glass of wine in one hand and a felt-tip pen in the other. |
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Săo Paulo removes big ads, revealing historic beauty In an effort to turn an urban ugly duckling into a swan, the Brazilian city banned billboards. |
Saturday, September 15, 2007
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The secret greening of Calgary Canada's oil capital may be damned as an eco-villain. But don't let that fool you: This boomtown isn't just tilting at windmills - it's harnessing wind power and making radical cuts in emissions to become 'the greenest city in the world' |
Friday, September 14, 2007
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Researcher links gas price, obesity High gasoline prices may prompt people to tighten their belts in more ways than one, a U.S. economics researcher has found. |
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Atlanta commute gets more 'extreme' New census estimates released Wednesday tell the sorry transportation tale. The year 2006 added 6,864 metro Atlantans who spend 90 minutes or more on their average commute, one way. That's a total of 88,023 "extreme commuters." |
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A Tale of Two Cities: Mixed-use Development in China With the emergence of China as a major force in the global market, only the most cloistered observer could retain an image of the country as a single geography or culture. However, the proliferation of photography and press of innumerable, singular intent, high-rise towers crowding the skylines of newly dense, Chinese mega-cities often suggests an undifferentiated approach to architecture and urban planning that is already creating enormous challenges – from pollution to traffic – for these burgeoning centers. |
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Liverpool ordered to safeguard waterfront A blueprint to protect Liverpool’s World Heritage Site is to be drawn up on the orders of Unesco, the body responsible for protecting iconic areas. |
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German Town Scraps Road Signs to Increase Safety You won't have to worry about getting a ticket for running a red light in the German town of Bohmte any more -- the town is abolishing all its road signs and traffic regulations. |
Thursday, September 13, 2007
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Limits proposed on fast-food restaurants Health concerns are cited for a proposed moratorium on such eateries in South L.A., which has the city's highest concentration of them. |
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Near Ground Zero, a Mixed-Use Revival Six years ago, in the aftershock of the terrorist attack that reduced the World Trade Center to a smoldering pile, local officials wondered whether people would want to live or work around the financial district again. Today, as new residents fill converted office buildings and jam the raucous block party that erupts nightly on Stone Street, the more likely curiosity about Lower Manhattan is: Where did all these people come from, and how can they afford to live here? |
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Turning the Ride to School Into a Walk The signs say “School Is Open, Drive Safely.” Of course, one should always drive safely, school or no school, and not only “when children are present,” as speed limit signs near schools often state. If only these signs reflected what health and safety experts hope will become a major change in how children get to and from school and after-school activities. |
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The Village Green In an effort to become England’s first carbon-neutral town, Ashton Hayes is using peer pressure as a renewable resource. |
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Parking spaces outnumber drivers 3-to-1, drive pollution and warming From suburban driveways to the sprawling lots that spring up around big retailers, Americans devote lots of space to parking spaces – a growing land-use trend that plays a role in heating up urban areas and adding to water pollution, according to a recent study. |
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
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Architect makes Scale Model of Housing Proposal in Lego Designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group is a 1:50 scale model of Lego Towers, a proposed housing development for Copenhagen — made of Lego. |
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Power Broken To build great cities, we need more citizen input - not another Robert Moses. |
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Big Houses Are Not Green: America's McMansion Problem The recent mansion boom produced millions of energy-wasting homes with thousands of square feet that Americans don't need -- not the behavior of a society that's thinking about a sustainable future. |
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The Rise of City-States In a recent lecture noted futurist and World Economic Forum advisor Paul Saffo described the decline of the nation-state will be increasingly replaced by city-states, using the US and Singapore as examples. He said, in a recent video, that "There's less than 50 percent chance that the United States will exist as a nation by the middle of this century. And that that is actually a good news." |
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London and New York in battle to be ... Capital of Cool There used to be only one winner: but now, after closing the gap as the world's financial hub, London will go head to head with its transatlantic rival in an autumn battle of culture. |
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
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"Resisting, Subverting and Destroying the Apparatus of Surveillance and Control": An Interview with Mike Davis There is nothing comparable at all in the U.S. to the apparatus of surveillance that exists in London. Even CCTV cameras are only recently becoming an issue in the U.S. |
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Study: Beijing beautiful, Hong Kong safe Beijing is the most beautiful city in China and Hong Kong the safest and second most beautiful, according to a study by the China Institute of City Competitiveness. |
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Walking guru rates SLC Mark Fenton, champion racewalker and national health advocate, scopes the corner of 900 South and 900 East in Salt Lake City wearing hiking gear and firing shots with his digital camera. He's hunting for signs of walkable design and looking for weaknesses. |
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Suck It Up, L.A. Twenty or so years ago, one of Los Angeles' more vocal consortiums was a citizen's group known as Not Yet New York. Though I shared the group's concern for community values and planning, I took exception to its implied negative name. |
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Developing a hotter L.A. High-density development can create 'urban heat islands' that may add to global warming. |
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Imitation of Life Since the days of Vitruvius, architects have turned to nature for inspiration, but today’s designers are thinking about the way a sea sponge behaves, not just the way it looks. Biomimicry, or the imitation of nature’s functions and systems, is helping push the boundaries of structure and sustainability |
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Microsoft giving workers free ride -- with its own bus service Windows, Office, Xbox, Zune -- and now, a regional bus system. |
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Splicing the DNA of sprawl could produce a better code First, it was "new urbanism" - a suspiciously suburban attempt to reintroduce front doors and sidewalks to mainstream America. It gained a lot of publicity but never escaped its shallow, theme-park inspiration, its greatest success being a private town in Florida developed by the Walt Disney Company. |
Monday, September 10, 2007
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Meet The Bloggers The ranks of small, independently published magazines that enlivened architectural discourse in the 1960s and 1970s have left few direct off spring in print. Instead, that culture of intrepid architectural commentary has reemerged online, in the form of blogs. |
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Social Networking Site It goes without saying that marketers sell image, not reality. But the interesting thing about the selling of “youth” condos is that even while projecting these images of buff, hypersexy, luxury-obsessed narcissists, marketers simultaneously work another message, one of sociability and connectedness that in many ways belies that stereotype of the unencumbered urban hipster. |
Saturday, September 8, 2007
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The next small thing Imagine a world in which no one covets another person's possessions, a world in which people don't buy things to impress other people, don't buy something just because Paris Hilton has one, a world in which no one cares to keep up with the Joneses. There are clues, some faint, some glaring, that the day is coming. |
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Leith Docks revamp plans lodged A huge regeneration of Leith Docks featuring 16,000 new homes has been unveiled in the largest planning application in Edinburgh's history. |
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Civic Virtue By Design In his earth day address, Mayor Bloomberg laid out PlaNYC a series of highly practical steps to improve our city in a period of rapid population growth against a backdrop of global warming. He outlined 127 programs that would work together to support an urban policy that would result in a city not just coping, but improving, through challenging times. The programs are diverse and technical, ranging from tree canopy guidelines to mass transit financing. However, if we step back a moment, we will recognize something else profoundly important in this speech: a new definition of civic virtue for the 21st century. |
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London prompts towering visions - and a dose of reality Of the 50 tallest buildings conceived for London's skyline, just five have been built |
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UK firms to masterplan war-torn Iraqi city British firms are to masterplan the redevelopment of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk. In the week that UK troops withdrew from Basra, it has emerged that architect Llewellyn Davies Yeang and engineer Pell Frischmann are to work with the US government and the Kirkuk provincial council to masterplan the war-torn northern Iraqi city. |
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Cool v. Uncool Cities: The Battle For The Soul Of Economic Development To succeed in the 21st Century, do cities really have to be cool, as Richard Florida argues? Or do they have to be uncool, as Joel Kotkin insists? Maybe they have to be both. |
Friday, September 7, 2007
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R. Buckminster Fuller “How can we make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?” —R. Buckminster Fuller |
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A muted conversation about city growth Cities are built with words as much as asphalt or steel. A vital metropolis has boulevards of talk, civic complexes of argument, soaring towers of financial reports, long commuter lines of bored babble, and un-expected mini-parks of poetry. The visuals - the architecture, the stuff that gets built or left out - is just the residue from streets shaped by talk. |
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Too bright for Vegas? Perhaps the Las Vegas Strip has gotten just too bright for its own good. Clark County officials are considering a law that could dim lights on Strip marquees and other signs that blind or dazzle motorists - once someone figures out when bright is too bright. |
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Student-Designed City, Meant For Construction, Unveiled Students in the College of Environmental Design showed off three-dimensional animated renderings of a virtual downtown at a presentation Wednesday, marking the completion of a summer-long project to design an entire self-sufficient city in northern India. |
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Scientists Compare U.S., China Pollution Los Angeles and Pittsburgh provide examples of what to do - and not to do - about China's severe air pollution in the face of surging energy use from rapid economic growth, U.S. and Chinese scientists say. |
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I never promised you a rose garden You say natural. I say neglected. A growing number of urban gardeners are facing off with their neighbours over how they tend their plots: wild and eco-friendly or manicured and weed-free. |
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Seuthopolis In the 1940s, archaeologists discovered the ancient city of Seuthopolis, the capital seat of the Odrysian Kingdom beginning in the 4th century BCE. Unfortunately, the discovery came too late, because under construction nearby was a reservoir dam, which would soon flood the valley and drown “the best preserved Thracian city in modern Bulgaria.” |
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Aspiring to be America's greenest city Green is the new black, and everyone wants to take a turn on the runway. Sacramento is no exception. Its municipal leaders aspire to create the nation's greenest city -- a title also being pursued by cities such as Chicago and San Francisco. |
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Buffalo's Potential for World-Class Waterfront Threatened Buffalo's Outer Harbor has immense potential to be redeveloped into valuable urban neighborhoods of lofts, restaurants, shops and parks -- but leaders need to act now to get the streets designed correctly. |
Thursday, September 6, 2007
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Place Matters Where you live says a lot about how you'll live. That's why more and more young people are settling in or near downtowns like Ann Arbor's – choosing their lifestyle first, then finding a job that will support it. |
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We Built this City on LEED-ND With the phrase “LEED-certified” creeping into eco-chic vernacular alongside the likes of “carbon footprint” and “renewable energy,” it’s clear that the nature of our living and working spaces is rapidly becoming as important to green America as our fossil fuel usage or how far our organic baby greens traveled from farm to table. |
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City to rate bird-friendly buildings The city of Toronto now has a rating system for measuring how "bird-friendly" buildings in the city are. |
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
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McMansions Turn 'McApartments,' Stirring Ire "Our concern with these McMansions is they are not single-family homes," LaVerne Williams of Lewisdale told a group of county planners and elected officials in Riverdale. "You are turning our communities into rooming communities." |
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A Ragtag Neighborhood’s Big, Blue Newcomer The high-design luxury residential towers marching across Manhattan pose a problem for an architecture critic. What if I should fancy one? Isn’t that just what its developer is hoping? A critic can’t help but feel a bit queasy, teetering on the edge of becoming a real estate promoter. Yet I can’t get the Blue Building out of my mind. Amid the old brick tenements of the Lower East Side, the glittering exterior of this structure, Bernard Tschumi’s latest building, will strike some as another step in downtown Manhattan’s relentless pace of gentrification. |
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Industrial revolution Some of Britain's ugliest industrial sites are being transformed into wildlife paradises, providing a haven not just for plants and animals, but also for the people who visit them. |
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Metro Cities Give Yellow Bikes Another Go Imagine walking out of a coffee shop and with the swipe of a card releasing a bike from a locked rack, hopping on, and then pedaling off to work. |
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Won’t You Be My Drinking Buddy Neighbor? How good neighborhood design can reduce drunk driving. |
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Planners denying reality `Smart-growth' ideologists' claims about less pollution, better quality of life unproven. |
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
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To Ease a City’s Traffic, Shifting From 4 Wheels to 2 On many mornings, as commuters pack themselves into subway trains and drivers squeeze onto the streets, Janette Sadik-Khan, the commissioner of the Department of Transportation, rides her bicycle to work. |
Monday, September 3, 2007
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Kensington Market AutoGarden I stumbled across this great Community Vehicular Reclamation Project last summer in the Kensington Market area of Toronto. A group of people towed in a car from the junkyard, filled it with soil, painted it up, planted it with herbs, flowers and a few vegetables, and parked it on the street. |
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The 1% Helps Do-Gooders Do More Than 1% When Public Architecture launched The 1% Solution in 2005, it tapped into the architecture community’s altruism: The San Francisco–based practice and public-service advocacy has since signed up 157 firms to pledge 1 percent of their time to nonprofit organizations that could not otherwise afford design direction. And yet Public Architecture executive director John Cary admits that some of those promises have been “more symbolic than anything.” A three-pronged initiative, to be unveiled September 4 along with a name change to simply “The 1%,” will help architects realize their best intentions. |
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'The Redevelopment of a City is an Art' Charles Landry, 58, is considered one of the world's leading urban researchers and is the author of "The Creative City." He talks to SPIEGEL about how cities can harness their inhabitants' skills so they show up on the international radar and the German tendency to make cities too neat and tidy. |
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Global food crisis looms as climate change and population growth strip fertile land Climate change and an increasing population could trigger a global food crisis in the next half century as countries struggle for fertile land to grow crops and rear animals, scientists warned yesterday. |
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The great clog of '07: Seattle met the challenge Listening to the news stories beforehand, it was supposed to be an absolute nightmare, with predictions ranging from "19 days of pain" to bumper-to-bumper gridlock extending all the way south to Tacoma. The conversation that dominated the water cooler was people's strategies for dealing with the Big Clog. Then, on the first Monday of the closures, Aug. 10, the commute came and ... nothing happened. Drivers heeded the warnings, and many stayed out of their cars, finding other ways to get to work, from the Sounder to water taxis to commuter buses to temporary work stations set up by far-sighted employers. In fact, not only was there no traffic disaster, it was, in the words of one commenter on The Seattle Times traffic blog, "The best commute ever." |
Saturday, September 1, 2007
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City Dwellers Live Longer, Save More by Driving Less New York City, long seen as a mecca of hedonism and self-destructive indulgence, has witnessed a startling transformation over the past few years: life expectancy has increased dramatically to 78.6 years, nine months longer than the life expectancy in the rest of the US. Even more surprisingly, New York City's life expectancy is increasing at a faster rate than in other parts of the country; in 2004 alone, New Yorkers gained five months of life on average, far outpacing the national average increase of a month or two a year. |
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The art of city-building It's helped Toronto make room for culture, and now Artscape is bringing its recipe to other cities. |
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What’s so good about British architecture? We will probably never see another building boom like the one we are in now. The last time anything happened on this scale was in the aftermath of the Blitz, a huge programme of post-War reconstruction that, in most aspects and except for a few brilliant and heroic schemes, failed. |
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'Wiki City Rome' to draw a map like no other Residents of Italy's capital will glimpse the future of urban mapmaking next month with the launch of "Wiki City Rome," a project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city's pulse in real time. |
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Wildflowers Find Favor With Highway Gardeners Meadow vistas stretch before the eye back when Delaware was a colony, and earlier. Now these regional plantings are increasingly favored by the country’s highway gardeners, who see themselves as heirs of an environmental Enlightenment. Their credo is, Get the mowers out of the 12 million acres of roadsides and median strips around the United States, and let the wildflowers and grasses grow. |
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More people, more concrete, and lots more heat in Phoenix An 'urban heat island' effect, fed by the city's growth, is trapping heat and making temperatures soar. |
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As an energy-saver, the clothesline makes a comeback A 'Right to Dry' movement is growing, with some states introducing legislation to override clothesline bans. |
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