Urbanism News
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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The Global Waterfront Renaissance We are seeing a dramatic rise of interest in waterfronts, as people everywhere seek great public spaces that can be enjoyed by the community as a whole. Eighteen months ago, PPS devoted an entire issue of our Making Places newsletter to waterfronts, showing their enormous potential for sparking city-wide revitalization. |
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How to Create a Vibrant Waterfront Throughout the world, cities are working to reinvigorate their waterfronts. A common challenge is how to revitalize places where the river, lake or sea has been cut off from the rest of town by wide roadways or hulking industrial facilities. Unfortunately, in a number of cities these past problems are being repeated today by a new kind of waterfront development devoted to a single use—only this time it's upscale housing instead of factories, warehouses or freeways. When waterfront revitalization is driven by developers or designers with little attention paid to the community's vision, the final results end up pleasing no one. The promise of both community enrichment and economic development is sadly lost. |
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Fred Kent on the New York Waterfront Despite significant effort and enormous spending, New York's waterfront remains in the Hall of Shame. |
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Food for thought on supermarkets After a long absence, the neighborhood supermarket is making a comeback in urban places like Philadelphia. Only the new arrivals don't look anything like the friendly local grocers we once knew. In quick succession, a gang of boxy, suburban-scaled cornucopias has moved into the thick of Philly's rowhouse neighborhoods. They've laid claim to whole blocks at 56th and Market, 52d and Parkside, Columbus Boulevard in Pennsport. And more are coming. |
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Teddy Cruz Estudio Teddy Cruz is a forward thinking architecture firm, more concerned with building communities than simply building. Teddy Cruz's practice is rooted in the social and economic conditions of the trans-border territory between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico. Artkrush editor Paul Laster recently spoke to Cruz about his social concerns and his projects currently on view from New York to Venice. |
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7 Steps to Green A City Is Your City Heading in a Sustainable Direction? |
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How do we become less dependent? With a peak oil conference in Sacramento this week and the 100th anniversary of the first mass-market automobile coming up, it's a perfect time to re-visit our relationship with that most ubiquitous icon of the American (and California) Dream: The Car. |
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Margot Gayle, Urban Preservationist and Crusader With Style, Dies at 100 Margot Gayle, who marshaled shrewdness, gentility and spunk to save the Victorian cast-iron buildings of New York — using a little magnet as a demonstration device — in a crusade that led to the preservation of historic SoHo, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 100. |
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Doug Farr, Sustainable Urbanism Superstar Doug Farr has built an impressive, green-tinged resume. For starters, he wrote the book on building green neighborhoods, literally. He is the author of the recent manual, Sustainable Urbanism: A Pattern Language for LEED Neighborhood Development, which is designed as a resource guide for anyone interested in learning about building sustainable cities, from practicing architects to members of city council to your neighbor next door. |
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Where architects bring fantasy to reality Think of modern-day Dubai and a number of images spring to mind: the Burj Al Arab hotel that is shaped like a large sail; or the Burj Dubai tower, now the world's tallest building and growing; or man-made islands shaped like palm trees that dot the Persian Gulf shoreline, creating much-needed land for a desert nation that has gone development crazy. |
Monday, September 29, 2008
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State of Suburbia The state of today's suburbs has become far more complicated since Levittown first was founded. With concerns about energy, urban planning and infrastructure, contemporary suburbanites have a lot more on their minds than just buying a home |
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Levittown Turns 50 This weekend, the residents of Willingboro, N.J. are throwing a semi-formal banquet to celebrate the town's 50th anniversary. But you might know Willingboro by its original name: Levittown. This was the third Levittown, after similar planned communities in New York and Pennsylvania. The name isn't the only thing that's changed. What started in 1958 as an all-white town on the edge of the Philadelphia suburbs is now a diverse community of people from all over the world. As Joel Rose reports, the transition wasn't always easy. |
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Office/MA: Black Urbanism Rarely do we allow much thought to seemingly generic labels such as "urban." Outside the cloistered world of architecture, "urban" has become a synonym for "Black and Latino" where it is used to describe things from fashion to music. Facing this reality is the explicit purview of The Office for Metropolitan Alternatives (Office/MA), a group founded by Paul Goodwin and John Oduroe to investigate how the aesthetics of Black Diasporic culture could influence and inspire architectural form making. |
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New York City, Tear Down These Walls Even the most majestic cities are pockmarked with horrors. The knowledge that every shade of architectural experience, from sublime to excruciating, can exist in such compressed space is part of a city’s seductive pull. Yet there are a handful of buildings in New York that fail to contribute even on these grounds. For them the best solution might be the wrecking ball. |
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Getting creative can halt decay of urban core After several years of baking cakes for customers in her Northeast area home, Elvira Arizmendi was getting so many orders that her business outgrew her kitchen. Now she owns a thriving bakery on Independence Avenue that employs six others and is packed with people craving her cakes, breads and other goodies. |
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Dharavi: India's Model Slum
Mumbai, India's Dharavi is one of the world's biggest slums -- and its most notorious. Look beyond the stereotype, however, and you'll find a successful settlement with a vibrant community and economy. But developers want to raze it all and redevelop. Urban development consultant Prakash M. Apte says Dharavi is a model that should be replicated, not redeveloped. |
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Long road back to walkable city To anyone who's ever spent hours lost in the cul de sacs of treeless new developments – with ironically arboreal monikers such as Elmtown or Cedar Valley – the idea that suburbs were utopian might shock. |
Sunday, September 28, 2008
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Green the Bailout Many things make me weep about the current economic crisis, but none more than this brief economic history: In the 19th century, America had a railroad boom, bubble and bust. Some people made money; many lost money. But even when that bubble burst, it left America with an infrastructure of railroads that made transcontinental travel and shipping dramatically easier and cheaper. |
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‘White Flight’ Has Reversed, Census Finds The proportion of New York City residents who are white and non-Hispanic rose slightly last year, reversing more than a half-century of so-called white flight from the city, according to census figures released on Tuesday. |
Saturday, September 27, 2008
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Creating an Authentic Place: Tales from Two Southern California Cities What makes a place “authentic”? In places we cherish, we look for something unique and tangible. But personal experience of a place is not merely a product of the landscape and “built environment.” It is also shaped by myths and perceptions. |
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Eco-Cities: Urban Planning for the Future Massive developments proposed for the U.S., China and Abu Dhabi aim to reduce or even eliminate the environmental cost of city living. |
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Trendy shops put a shine on home values You can call it the New Seasons Effect, or the Whole Foods Effect, but developers and city planners have talked about it for years. In short, nothing says you’ve arrived as a neighborhood quite so emphatically as a New Seasons specialty grocery store down the block. |
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Segway to happiness The Segway PT is a clean, quick, safe and simple solution to our transport problems. So why can't we use them on UK roads? |
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Beijing Considers Pollution-Control Measures City officials are considering new measures to keep the Chinese capital's air clean after two months of emergency steps for the Olympics raised public hopes for a permanent improvement. The steps could include increasing parking fees to discourage driving; charging people to drive in congested downtown areas, as London and some other cities do; and auctioning license plates to reduce the number of cars added to the roads. |
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Herzog & de Meuron pyramid to pierce Paris skyline Architect's 180m-tall Projet Triangle to be city's first new high-rise after council lifts tower ban. Paris council has unveiled plans for a 50-storey glass pyramid after voting to drop a ban on high-rise buildings. |
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When New York Branded Its Way Out of Crisis Since taking office in 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has named a chief marketing officer; pushed to attract huge events like the Republican National Convention; urged the construction of new sports stadiums in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and the West Side of Manhattan (with varying degrees of success); and tried to market the city under a new slogan, “The World’s Second Home.” |
Thursday, September 25, 2008
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Cities rethinking '50s-era parking standards Alice and Jeff Speck didn't have a car and didn't want one. But District of Columbia zoning regulations required them to carve out a place to park one at the house they were building. It would have eaten up precious space on their odd-shaped lot and marred the aesthetics of their neighborhood, dominated by historic row houses. The Specks succeeded in getting a waiver, even though it took nine months. |
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Croydon in the spring Le Grand Paris urgently needs reshaping. But is the south London super-suburb the right model? As soon as the morning news broke, camera crews could be seen flocking to Croydon to ask south Londoners what they thought of the French president's idea. Nicolas Sarkozy's vision is to make Paris more like Croydon. "Is this a joke?" asked a passerby. Not according to Richard Rogers' firm of British architects who have been chosen by the president to take part in an international brainstorming session about Le Grand Paris. |
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Broadway broadens pedestrian access Nancy Bielfeldt says it felt good to be outside, nibbling on pasta, grabbing a bit of sun. Never mind that a few months ago, the place where she was sitting was a traffic lane in the shadow of Times Square. "Definitely sitting here, I feel like I'm in the middle of the street," says Bielfeldt, 23, a designer for Calvin Klein Jeans. "I think it's kind of cool, being in the middle of things." |
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In the Penthouse, a True Garden Apartment Not every Manhattan penthouse dweller has to worry about a bathroom sink filling up with leaves. But if you live in an aerie that’s part home and part testing ground for how architecture and nature can interact, you learn to take the bad with the good. |
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
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Freeways Without Futures The “Freeways Without Futures” list recognizes the top-ten locations in North America where the opportunity is greatest to stimulate valuable revitalization by replacing aging urban highways with boulevards and other cost-saving urban alternatives. The list was generated from an open call for nominations and prioritized based on factors including the age of the structure, redevelopment potential, potential cost savings, ability to improve both overall mobility and local access, existence of pending infrastructure decisions, and local support. |
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Redesign Cities From Scratch Dressed in architect black and sporting dreadlocks, Mitchell Joachim isn't your average Whole Foods envirogeek. For one thing, he speaks in an intense staccato punctuated with words like peristaltic and epiphetic. And don't get him started on sustainability. "I don't like the term," he says. "It's not evocative enough. You don't want your marriage to be sustainable. You want to be evolving, nurturing, learning." Efficiency doesn't cut it, either: "It just means less bad." Even zero emissions falls short. "This table does zero damage," he says, thumping the one in his office. "No VOCs, no carbons. Whatever. It doesn't do anything positive." |
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America's Most Stressful Cities Record weekend rainfall isn't the only thing worrying Windy City residents. Chicago's rising unemployment rate, expensive gas, high population density and relatively poor air quality create a perfect storm of stress, according to measures we used to calculate the country's anxiety hot spots. |
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Urban Revival, Suburban Form and Divergent Innovation A thought's been bugging me lately, seeping up through the subconscious and nagging at me, and recently, as I do my horizon-scanning, I think I've started to figure out what it is: I think we're beginning to see a serious case of divergent innovation based on geography in the United States. |
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
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Urban farmer awarded 'genius' grant Will Allen started a farm in a city, hired teenagers to tend the crops and now distributes the produce to some of the poorest people and priciest restaurants in Chicago and Milwaukee. For his inventive work in local, urban agriculture, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation dubbed Allen a genius, awarding him $500,000 to use however he wishes through its prestigious fellowship program. |
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Portland, Ore., tops sustainable cities list What’s the greenest American city? According to the latest annual report from SustainLane, it’s Portland, Ore. Using criteria in 16 categories, including air and water quality, traffic congestion, access to public transportation, land use, green business activity, and environmental policies, SustainLane, an Internet company that focuses on health and environmental issues, ranks Portland as the greenest of the 50 largest US cities. The city, which was once known as “Stumptown” because of the way its land was quickly logged, has ranked first since the company began compiling the lists in 2005. |
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Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel. |
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New Subway Grates Add Aesthetics to Flood Protection
In the hope of preventing the kind of catastrophic flooding that crippled the subway system on Aug. 8, 2007, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has begun to install elevated sidewalk grates along Hillside Avenue, from the 140s through the 170s, which has been identified as the most flood-prone location in the system. |
Monday, September 22, 2008
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The Visionary Thinking of John Todd The winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge has a plan for Appalachia and it could be the design model of the future. |
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Out Of The Enclave: Latinos Adapt, And Adapt To, The American City Latinos in the U.S. may be at the forefront of the movement towards urbanism, particularly in their use of public space. Josh Stephens talks to James Rojas and other planners and thinkers on the effect of the Hispanic community on the built environment, and its effect on them. |
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Portland bicycle industry worth $63M A consulting firm hired by the City of Portland Office of Transportation just completed an economic analysis of Portland’s bicycle industry. The final numbers say that our bicycle-related industry is worth $63 million to Portland’s regional economy (which has a total value of $17 billion) and that bicycles account for 800 jobs. |
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Spectacular New West Side Story Here's the first look at designs for a spectacular new boulevard and park planned for Manhattan's far West Side, where Mayor Bloomberg wants to build a new business district more than twice the size of the World Trade Center complex. |
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In Italy, a Redesign of Nature to Clean It Designing nature might seem to be an oxymoron or an act of hubris. But instead of simply recommending that polluting farms and factories be shut, Professor Berger specializes in creating new ecosystems in severely damaged environments: redirecting water flow, moving hills, building islands and planting new species to absorb pollution, to create natural, though “artificial,” landscapes that can ultimately sustain themselves. |
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Rogers and Foster shun nuclear design framework Britain’s two most celebrated architects have rejected the opportunity to contribute designs to a new generation of nuclear power stations. |
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Architectural 'Rapture' A choreographer creates work to be performed on Frank Gehry buildings. |
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Growing 'tent cities' blamed on foreclosure crisis A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer. Then others appeared -- people who had lost their jobs to the ailing economy, or newcomers who had moved to Reno for work and discovered no one was hiring. Within weeks, more than 150 people were living in tents big and small, barely a foot apart in a patch of dirt slated to be a parking lot for a campus of shelters Reno is building for its homeless population. Like many other cities, Reno has found itself with a "tent city" -- an encampment of people who had nowhere else to go. |
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When history is no match for shopping Famed for its rooftop test track, a peerless, old building accommodates the future – as a mall. |
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Montreal rolls out bike-sharing plan
City launches first Canadian program to offer car-centric residents a different set of wheels. |
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Watershed urbanism This paper outlines the potential that the watershed, as a landscape area defined by the finite resource of water, has for providing such a framework for new urban settlements. |
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The Year of the Parking Space Today is New York’s second annual Park(ing) Day, where parking spaces became parks for a day with lawn chairs, sod, grass and trees. (See a video from last year and a list of 50 spots around the city.) Among the participants in the project, which runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., are Architecture for Humanity, Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. |
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Here comes $500 oil If Matt Simmons is right, the recent drop in crude prices is an illusion - and oil could be headed for the stratosphere. He's just hoping we can prevent civilization from imploding. |
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Supermarkets an endangered species in S.F. It was business as usual at the Cala Foods supermarket on Nob Hill this week. Customers lined up six deep at the cashiers and shoppers crowded the well-stocked aisles. So why is the store closing in 2010? |
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U.K. village at forefront in fight to ban plastic bags Welcome to Modbury, England, population 1,500. It's a quiet place in the Devon hills not far from the sea. There are three churches, three pubs, a market and absolutely no plastic bags. |
Sunday, September 21, 2008
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Seattle's growth projection reflects a city pushing limits Seattle cannot accommodate the people it's projected to gain over the next three decades without adding homes in single-family neighborhoods, according to members of the Northwest EcoBuilding Guild. |
Friday, September 19, 2008
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Peak Moment: An Engineer Examines a Town's Energy Future How much energy does a town consume? Brian Corzilius sleuthed that out for Willits, California, and got a big surprise: in this community of 13,000 people, nearly 25% of after-tax revenue leaves town to pay for energy--gas, diesel, electricity and natural gas. |
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Our ideal ’hood
Upper West, Lower East, Flushing—what makes the best neighborhood? Lucky for Kew Gardens, it all depends on your tastes. To expand our own, we asked experts in ten fields to nominate their favorite parts of town—then used the characteristics from each to build the ideal neighborhood you see on this page. Herein are the winners—and runners-up—for each category. Love ’em? Hate ’em? Let us know. And hey, Kew, we were just kidding. You’re great in your own way too. |
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Seattle to the World: Seattle's Best in Urban Design In celebration of the official debut of Worldchanging Seattle, we bring you our Seattle to the World series: a collection of the 100 best local innovations, institutions, policies and people that we think could benefit readers in cities around the world. We've collected your recommendations – and sought out our own – to locate what we felt was a sample of Seattle's most inspiring solutions for a better future. |
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Rethinking the Bodega Chips, orange drink and Laffy Taffy beckon to people in the same way that Las Vegas does. Sitting on the shelf of a city’s bodega, the products are too brightly-colored to be natural or healthy, but they’re also too tasty and cheap to pass up. “You get [fruit drink] for a quarter, you get chips for a quarter, and you got a lunch for fifty cents,” Rafi Kam says. |
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Sky-high spinoffs A gleaming new vertical city has sprouted above Toronto's lower-scale buildings. The big question is whether all this condo construction will translate into sustainable economic growth. |
Thursday, September 18, 2008
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Toyama "Compact City" With Citizen Involvement When Toyama City in western Japan was considering different alternatives for its development, it hit upon a good source of ideas: its citizens. Holding meetings and discussions with the people in the pop. 400,000 town helped City Hall decide that a Light Rail Transit (LRT) would be ideal for getting people around. The alternatives? To build massive parking centers and generally lose sight of the city center. What people felt was that as they get older, using cars would be less convenient, anyway. |
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
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Communities plan for a low-energy future ‘Transition initiatives,’ begun in Britain, aim to empower people to tackle effects of climate change and decline of oil. |
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
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Freeing the Elephants A chain of elephants, trunks and tails linked, wanders, with a mixture of upbeat energy and complacent pride, along the endpapers of a children’s book. So begins one of the stories that most please the imagination of the modern child and his distant relation the modern adult—Jean de Brunhoff’s “The Story of Babar,” published in 1931. The Babar books are among those half-dozen picture books that seem to fix not just a character but a whole way of being, even a civilization. An elephant, lost in the city, does not trumpet with rage but rides a department-store elevator up and down, until gently discouraged by the elevator boy. A Haussmann-style city rises in the middle of the barbarian jungle. Once seen, Babar the Frenchified elephant is not forgotten. |
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Taxi drivers 'have brain sat-nav' Scientists have uncovered evidence for an inbuilt "sat-nav" system in the brains of London taxi drivers. |
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Study says too much of downtown is off limits Researchers find almost 30% of public space in the financial district and the area around city hall is limited or closed to the public because of security concerns. |
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Richest Cities And Urban Areas In 2020 As global urbanisation continues apace - 2008 is the first year in history in which more than half of the world's population lives in towns and cities - figures compiled by PwC show which conurbations are expected to come out on top in terms of wealth and affluence over the next decade. The research looked at the world's top cities and ranked them by gross domestic product by using purchasing power parity exchange rates (the rate that gives you equal buying power in each country). It shows that the mega-cities of Tokyo and New York (with GDPs similar to that of Spain and Canada), lead the pack by a considerable margin. |
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Riding out the housing market Real-estate agents are ditching their suits and cars for helmets and bikes. The payoff? Eco-minded clients love it - plus the workout doesn't hurt. |
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How to make Chicago better City and suburbs enter a new era in planning how we live, where we live and how we get around. |
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Who Owns the Public View? The billboard industry is pushing for new laws to prevent trees on public land from blocking billboards. |
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Experts in a race to keep Grandpa on the road Contrary to popular belief, the future of the automobile isn't green; it's grey. With a glut of Canadian drivers entering their golden years over the next two decades, car manufacturers, urban planners and academics are scrambling for ways to compensate for seniors' accident-prone driving habits. |
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Hasid Lust Cause It's the Hasids vs. the hotties in a Brooklyn bike war. Leaders of South Wil liamsburg's Hasidic community said yesterday that bike lanes that bring scantily clad cyclists - especially sexy women - peddling through their neighborhood are definitely not kosher. |
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Testing Vancouver's Urbanism by Pedal and Foot I occasionally get accused locally of being too much of a "booster" for Vancouver's success and reputation in city-building and urban design. Although I usually tend to mix in a healthy dose of "constructive candour" on how we need to improve, if there's truth to this accusation, I'd say I come by it honestly. First off, I've been an admirer and careful student of the Vancouver approach to urbanism, as imperfect as it might still be, long before I arrived in the City as Director. Second, my perspective on the progressive work of all of those who've contributed to this city, is positively reinforced whenever I take urbanists from all over the world, on tours of our city (including the many faces of Vancouver, not just the "post card" images of the city). Seeing Vancouver through their eyes always helps me see it with fresh eyes. |
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This Friday is Park(ing) Day Back in 2002, Park(ing) Day was founded in San Francisco by a group called Rebar. Just as Critical Mass worked its way down the coast, Park(ing) Day has come to Los Angeles as well. Basically, on Park(ing) Day, activists, architechts and other interested parties set up a small "public park" in a metered parking space, temporarily reclaiming the space for public use instead of private vehicle storage. |
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Building ivory towers The battle for tuition dollars is just as fierce as that for airplane seats, Internet eyeballs and November votes. That's why large U.S. state schools and second-tier private colleges are joining brand-name ivory towers in plowing big money into new, iconic facilities to raise their stature and boost enrolment. |
Monday, September 15, 2008
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Abu Dhabi bans bicycles from parks Abu Dhabi: Residents cannot ride bicycles in Abu Dhabi parks anymore. Abu Dhabi Municipality has started to enforce an existing blanket ban on bicycles in all parks in the city, a senior official told Gulf News on Saturday. |
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Superstar, by MAD Are we looking at the expression of the boosted confidence of the Chinese after Beijing 2008? I think so. The ‘Superstar’ is a design for a different kind of China Town, one that would be more in tune with the rapidly progressing China of today. The project comes from an architecture firm whose office was located closely to the past – successful – Olympics. They are Beijing, they are MAD. |
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Bringing L.A.'s alleys out of the shadows Urban planners re-imagine the city's concrete connectors as community oases, replacing trash and crime with trees, grass and swing sets -- and civic leaders are paying attention. |
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The emergent dimension, or why New Urbanism is not urbanism The field of urban design has gained a lot of popularity since efforts to plan whole cities were abandoned. The focus of the urbanists has shifted to the scales considered controllable: the development, greenfield, brownfield and other. The most successful of the urban designers are the New Urbanists. They have managed to produce their name-brand Traditional Neighborhood Developments in practically every city in North America. |
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New Yorkers are neurotic and unfriendly, says Cambridge University 'personality map'
New York is home to the most neurotic and unfriendly people in American while North Dakota is where the nicest people live, according to a Cambridge University "personality map" of the USA. |
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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. |
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2020 Global Sustainability Centers Let’s face it; large cities can get a bad rap. They can be noisy, dirty and smelly. They have towering skylines that block out the sun, and their dark alleys are often stereotyped in the worst kind of way for the sake of a good crime story. Why then did the United Nations recently release a report claiming that more than 50 percent (and counting) of the world’s population lives in urban areas? Perhaps it’s because large cities have some of the best parks, the most breathtaking art and the top sporting events. It doesn’t hurt that they tend to have 24-hour metro and bus lines for the late night booze hounds and the generally restless, either. |
Sunday, September 14, 2008
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Streets are places, too Local authorities could – and should – have taken a little trouble to make sure that road design and maintenance was coordinated with town planning. But, says Colin Davis, most of them didn’t, leaving us with many problems to address |
Saturday, September 13, 2008
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The Invisible Things That Give a Hometown Its Flavor The forces behind Seattle's clouds, Chicago's snow, and Philly's cheese steaks. |
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Worldchanging Interview: Ed Mazria Last year, Ed Mazria and his New Mexico-based non-profit organization, Architecture 2030, revealed that architecture – or the building sector, more generally – is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, worldwide. |
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Investigating Intersection It is probably fitting that I got diverted on my way to write about Intersection, the first publication in the ChainLinks series, which I had planned to delve into when it was published last spring. The volume, which is subtitled Sidewalks and Public Space, takes as its jumping off point Jane Jacobs’ groundbreaking investigations into that topic in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. |
Friday, September 12, 2008
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Compact and bijou - the slums of tomorrow? New homes in England are being built smaller than almost anywhere else in Europe, a new exhibition reveals. Are the gleaming new apartments buildings of the past decade the inner-city slums of tomorrow? |
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Rail, Road Or Waterway? Is road transport the best way to send oranges from Spain to northern Germany? Or would it be better to ship them by rail or waterway for part of the route? A new software package determines the cheapest, fastest or most environmentally compatible mode of transportation. |
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Conceptualizing the One Planet City Back in April at the EcoCity World Summit in San Francisco I met Jennie Moore, a fellow alumna from the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. As I chatted with Jennie during a lunchtime break at the conference, she told me that after earning her Master’s degree in city planning at UBC several years back, she returned to pursue a PhD. She’s currently working on her doctoral research, investigating the concept of a “one planet city.” |
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Can new-look fountains beat the plastic bottle? They were once the yuppy accessory of choice, but the days of the plastic water bottle may be numbered. If a national campaign initiated by a group of Sydneysiders is a success, the humble drinking fountain will take its place. Fountains offering free filtered water have been installed along Manly beach as part of a bid by the local council to slash bottle use and associated litter. |
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A Virtuous Cycle: Safety In Numbers For Bicycle Riders It seems paradoxical but the more people ride bicycles on our city streets, the less likely they are to be injured in traffic accidents. |
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
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The Concrete Dragon It takes a deft hand to break China’s rapid urban growth over the last 30 years down into informative and manageable chunks − fortunately Thomas Campanella possesses one. Despite an abundance of statistics, technical details, and numbers, The Concrete Dragon is a thoroughly engaging and accessible read on a formidably vast subject. |
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One nation under water
The rain keeps falling, so why aren't developers or the government preparing for our flooded future? |
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A Walk in the Park(s) Five years ago, Metropolis sent me back to Detroit, my former hometown, to see where the city was headed amidst a wealth of new development. I had only been gone for a year at that time, yet I was surprised by all the projects underway—a new stadium complex, an inviting software company headquarters, the restoration of two historic downtown hotels. More importantly, though, I was impressed by the uncharacteristically coordinated approach city officials, planners, and developers appeared to be taking, even as several projects were fast-tracked so they might be completed before the 2006 Super Bowl. |
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My Other Bike is a Public Transportation System Gas prices are higher than Snoop Dogg at Mardi Gras. Tiny carbon footprints are the tongue piercings of the new millenium. Even diehard carburetor-huggers must get tired of the endless cruising it takes to find a parking space in the average American metropolis these days. Together, these forces create, if not the perfect storm, then at least a pretty strong tailwind: There has never been a better time to be a bicycle advocate. |
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
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Turf War Americans can’t live without their lawns—but how long can they live with them? |
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Dharavi, India's largest slum, eyed by Mumbai developers In a boomtown starved for room to grow, Dharavi occupies a prime location at the junction of two commuter rail lines close to the heart of the city. One of Mumbai's swankiest new business parks, the Bandra-Kurla Complex, a diorama of concrete and glass that shimmers in the tropical heat like a mirage of order and progress, looms just beyond a fetid bog of mangroves used by many of the slum dwellers as a toilet. |
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Vernacular Urbanism and the Next City What should the next city look like, and how should we inhabit the future? I have been puzzling over these questions for quite a long time. For architects and urbanists, this is one of the few projects we can work on that might keep us from total irrelevance (see earlier posts here, about emperors and their wardrobes) in these increasingly perilous times. And as I have continued to think about the character and form of the next city, I have begun to come to some general conclusions. Let me explain. |
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The Glass Stampede As this last great building boom winds down, our architecture critic asks: Does the new see-through city look better or worse than the one it replaced? |
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The Bad News About Green Architecture Sustainable buildings are virtuous, but they can be ugly. Only a few designs are truly great. |
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Revival by Restaurant Downtowns used to be the place to shop. Now, they’re the place to eat. |
Monday, September 8, 2008
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Social costs of cars, planes, trains $40B a year: Transport Canada A groundbreaking federal study has calculated the "social costs" of operating cars, trucks, planes, trains and boats across Canada at up to $40 billion a year. The study for the first time attempts to put a national price tag on the unwanted byproducts of transport, that is, accidents, pollution, congestion, noise and greenhouse gases. |
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Cities are emerging as the theme parks of the 21st Century It's about taking people for a ride. The ultimate inauthentic branded environment. |
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The Adaptive City A few months ago, Scott Burnham kindly asked me to contribute to the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project he conceived and then developed with Droog Design. It is being sponsored by the city of Amsterdam and is premiering there this September. In Scott's words, "Urban Play is about placing the individual at the heart of the city’s development and encouraging creative interaction between the individual and the physical city". You can also find out more at the Experimenta site. |
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London suburbs seduce Nicolas Sarkozy President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has enlisted some of Britain’s leading architects for one of his most daring projects. He wants to make Paris more like London. |
Sunday, September 7, 2008
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Planning schemes still lack woman’s touch Local authorities are failing to consider women's needs in their planning schemes, more than a year after legislation designed to stop the problem was introduced, a Cambridge University report reveals. |
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The Best Cities For Singles For the first time ever, Atlanta tops our list of the best cities for singles. The capital of Georgia and home of Coca-Cola earns the top slot because of its hopping nightlife, relatively high number of singles and sizzling job growth. |
Friday, September 5, 2008
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The real truth is: you are where you eat Publication last week of a “fat map” showing the growing obesity hot spots in Britain raises an ethical dilemma for architects. With political debate focused on the degree to which government should interfere in our lives for our own good, the parallel question is whether cities and buildings could or should be designed specifically with obesity in mind. |
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San Francisco developing policy on use of local food
The Bay Area produces more than enough fruits and vegetables to feed San Francisco, and Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to get a lot more of that local produce onto the plates of anyone served a public meal - including schoolchildren, homeless people, hospital patients and jail inmates. |
Thursday, September 4, 2008
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Unburdened by Gas Costs, Bike Couriers See a Chance New York City’s bike messengers remain a fixture on the streets, having weathered the advent of the fax machine and, of course, e-mail. Now, with the cost of gas pummeling courier companies that rely on motorized vehicles, a few enterprising cyclists are using the opportunity to generate more business. |
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Tirana Rocks: MVRDV wins lakeside competition with dense urban and ecologic masterplan The city of Tirana and an international jury announced MVRDV winner of the competition for the urban masterplan creating a new dense urban neighborhood with a park and public facilities at the shore of Tirana Lake, in the south of the Albanian capital. |
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What makes the perfect city? Bustle, culture, clean streets, the Olympics. The director of the Design Museum gives a menu for the paradise metropolis. |
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
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The Eco-town of Tomorrow and it's planning. Gordon Brown's "legacy" project of building 10 eco-towns in the South East of England is an endeavour of specious rhetoric, of mobilised Nimbyism, and unfettered hyperbole. |
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The Professional Panhandling Plague A new generation of shakedown artists hampers America’s urban revival. |
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Master of Crisis Is Mississippi Gover Haley Barbour getting things done for the right reasons or has he politicized diasaster? |
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
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Is sustainability boring? I am not that smart. I am actually pretty mediocre: I never take cold showers, I don’t do sports. I bite my fingernails. I am just a molecular designer. I start from molecules and then I look at the big picture. But in between it needs industrial design, graphic design – it needs architecture. Commonly, people think that when they protect the environment they are being less bad. Like the German Environmental Protection Agency says: “Please protect the environment. Don’t use your car that often!” That is not much different from saying: “Please protect your children. Don’t beat them up that often!” |
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Air conditioning could 'heat up' London A report by Mayor of London suggests air conditioning could heat up London. The large scale installation of air conditioning to combat rising temperatures in London could make conditions in the capital even hotter – according to a draft report on climate change issued by the mayor’s office. |
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Police to shame jaywalkers on TV Shanghai police will post photos and videos of jaywalkers in newspapers and on TV in a bid to shame them out of breaking traffic rules, local media reported on Thursday. |
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At 150, Central Park Is a Perfectly Balanced Masterpiece This year, with surprisingly little fanfare, Central Park is celebrating its 150th birthday. Five years ago, there were fireworks and daylong festivities to mark the sesquicentennial of the city's decision, in 1853, to build a great urban park in the middle of Manhattan. But it was in 1858 that the municipality finally decided upon the so-called Greensward plan of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and it was in that year as well that the great work began. |
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Canada's smartest cities If you were to imagine Canada's smartest city — a place filled with fascinating people, cultural delights and endless learning opportunities — what would it be like? |
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A development primer Mayor Greg Nickels and the City Council are at it again. As early as September, they will be entertaining a proposal for "incentive zoning," which would allow nearly a doubling of densities in neighborhood business districts, mid-rise and high-rise residential zones. |
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Livingstone to advise Chávez on urban issues Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, has found a new role as an adviser to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his political allies. During a surprise visit to Caracas, Livingstone said yesterday that he would act as a consultant on the capital's policing, transport and other municipal issues. |
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Death knell sounded for Aussie suburbs Australia's big cities are being urged to ban outer suburban housing estates to cut urban sprawl and be more like London and Rome. |
Monday, September 1, 2008
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P Diddy weighs in on transportation issues Sean “Diddy” Combs complained about the “… too high” price of gas and pleaded for free oil from his “Saudi Arabia brothers and sisters” in a YouTube video posted Wednesday. |
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Vancouver's walkability -- a sign of good health In my 12 years of perambulating through 2,400 North American towns and cities -- walking, poking and probing -- I conclude that towns and cities in and around Vancouver represent the heart and motherlode of North America's walkability. |
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