Urbanism News
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
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Dreaming on the waterfront A vision for seven miles along the Delaware is touted as populist and scorned as pie-in-the-sky. |
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Is ‘Small’ the New ‘Smart’? “The smaller smart-growth projects are at this stage more acceptable and easier for public officials to approve,” said Richard V. Guardino, executive dean of the Breslin Center for Real Estate Studies at Hofstra University. “The scale is not overwhelming. You’re not transforming an entire area.” |
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Towering ambition Is a pioneering South Bank housing body compromising its principles by wanting to build tall? |
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New developments mask wild land's deadly threat To break the cycle of build and burn, those who create and approve subdivisions in Southern California must take site and climate into consideration. |
Monday, October 29, 2007
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Mind-boggling' cost on roads makes MP cross A British MP is investigating how much the Highways Agency spends on roads after discovering that it costs £114,000 to put up a zebra crossing. |
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Coming soon to your home: a personal adviser on how to get to work by bus Millions of households, businesses and schools are to be offered free transport advice clinics to encourage more people to walk, cycle or take a bus instead of use their cars |
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Eco-Cities Take Root The home -- and the neighborhood -- of the future is on its way. Coming soon to a market near you is a zero-carbon property, surrounded by a meandering stream that treats your wastewater and recycles it to you. The heat from the sun generates enough electricity to power the entire house. The green roof and smart walls of the house provide natural, radiant heating and cooling. You and your neighbors will bike or walk to work; you'll also have the option to car-share any of the electric vehicles at their charging stations. |
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Wake up, Toronto – you're bigger than you think Toronto is on the leading edge of a critical change in the global economy. |
Sunday, October 28, 2007
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Book offers every urban transit map in the world Some people love the romance of long-distance railroad travel. Some like to step off the curb and hail a cab. But others prefer the screech and rumble of subways - and the more arcane and exotic the system, the better. |
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Wily Foxes Embrace Easy City Life More and more foxes are seeking their fortunes in German towns, where food is ample and people sometimes mistake them for overgrown dachshunds. But the furry predators come bearing an unwelcome guest -- parasites. |
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A Canadian Condo Boom Downtown Vancouver is the most expensive housing market in Canada, according to a survey of 21 cities worldwide released last April by Century 21. The average sales price for a condo in Vancouver was around $419,750 in 2007, up 14.6 percent from last year, according to Royal Le Page Real Estate Services. The average sales price in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, was about $241,818, up 15.7 percent from last year, and in Montreal, $201,818, up 4.6 percent. |
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Detroit seeks to sell off 92 parks One-quarter of Detroit's 367 parks could be sold under a proposal designed to help the city shed dozens of its smallest and most worn-down parks in an effort to aid others and position the land for redevelopment. |
Saturday, October 27, 2007
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'Humanity's very survival' is at risk, says UN The speed at which mankind has used the Earths resources over the past 20 years has put humanitys very survival at risk, a study involving 1,400 scientists has concluded. |
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Buy a house, get the electric car thrown in In Mexico, you'll soon be able to buy a house and put a new electric car on the mortgage as part of the package. |
Thursday, October 25, 2007
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The Future Is Drying Up Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this countrys fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water seems to be a more modest worry. |
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The Architecture of Parking," finds beauty in dark garages Cars can indeed be lovable but how can anyone love the bleak oil-stained chunk of concrete called a parking garage? |
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Looking for attractive people? Don't go to... Philadelphia is home to the least attractive people in the United States, a survey of visitors and residents showed on Friday. |
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U.S. cities are back: Take a stroll in downtown Washington Last April, Washington's oldest continuously operating market burned down, a victim of faulty wiring. The neighbourhood was in shock: The Eastern Market is the very heart of Capitol Hill. But Adrian Fenty, Washington's young new mayor, vowed to have the building restored and reopened in two years or less, and in the meantime city hall used surplus revenues to construct a temporary shelter. The locals raised an astonishing $385,000 in a few weeks to help out the vendors. The market was up and running in its temporary new building by the end of August. |
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Curitiba And The Creation Of Sustainable Cities This podcast features excerpts from a speech by Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, home of one of the world's first and most successful bus rapid transit systems. In this speech Lerner presents the five commandments of the sustainable city, and introduces a planning concept he calls "urban acupuncture". |
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Saving Venice The romance of living in a 1,300-year-old city built on wooden stakes driven into the mud floor of a lagoon is dimmed by the floods, which take place at least 100 days of the year, usually starting in November. Battered by tidal surges from the east and river influxes from the West, Venice is the world's first city but certainly not the last to know what it's like when the sea is reaching your knees. |
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
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Man’s Vision to Carve Prime Real Estate From Hudson River Proves a Tough Sell Developers have long argued that you cannot go wrong buying waterfront land because no more is being created. But Charles J. Urstadt’s dream is to extend Lower Manhattan a little bit farther into the Hudson River. |
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Fear Thy Neighbor Sometimes the xenophobia of the suburbs is subtle, sometimes it’s not. But you can’t live here very long without becoming aware that so much of what draws us to the suburbs — the ability to find a parking spot in town, the quiet of the night, the sense of safety — is based on the principles of exclusion. |
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Chicago, My Kind of Green Like other cities around the world that are participating in the Clinton Climate Initiative, which addresses the fact that cities pour about three-quarters of all greenhouse gases into the world’s atmosphere even though they occupy only two percent of its land mass, Chicago is not waiting for a lagging federal government to take action, but doing things now. |
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Hunting Big Game in Urban Areas As development spreads--79% of the U.S. population now lives in urban areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau--more animals are losing their natural habitat, and so are forced to trade open land for golf courses and the backyards of greenbelt communities like the 1,850-home Pinery. That not only leads to more human-animal confrontations but also opens up opportunities for poachers to track elk, mountain lion, antelope, black bear and deer. |
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Welcome to the transport of tomorrow
First mooted over a century ago, personal rapid transit systems might soon be running through our cities. |
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Haligonians won't stand for controversial roadwork
Residents of key commuter road create outdoor living rooms to protest against controversial plans to widen road by slicing away part of their lawns. |
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
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Retail Real Estate The biggest retailer in the world covers an area larger than Manhattan. |
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Three Gorges Dam May Displace Millions More
As a trickle of environmental problems emerging from the Three Gorges dam area steadily grows into a deluge, Chinese authorities have begun weighing plans to relocate several million people to avert an ecological catastrophe. |
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The end of the Wal-Mart era Its influence on the economy is profound and lasting. But for the first time, the world's biggest retailer is having a tough time providing what consumers want. |
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There is a darkness in the city centre All over Britain people are looking for affordable homes. The solution can be found above the brightly lit shopfronts. |
Saturday, October 13, 2007
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Gusty and Ford This film is about the way you see more when you walk - in this case, the way you look at road signs. |
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Greater Los Angeles
I got back from Los Angeles last night and my head is still spinning. I'd move there again in a heartbeat. |
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Hot World? Blame Cities Before you sell your ranch house and plunk down big bucks for that cozy condo in the city, take a closer look at the claims of big cities environmental superiority. Heres one point thats generally relegated to academic journals and scientific magazines: Highly concentrated urban areas can contribute to overall warming that extends beyond their physical boundaries. |
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Killer Sprawl Spreads To Great Northwest Remember when the Great Northwest was one of the remaining corners of the nation where you could pack your granola bar, put on your hiking shoes and trek away from it all? Millions of pristine wilderness acreage remains, but there's also a greater chance a move there will cause you to die fat, become road kill and contribute to thinning the population of salmon, gray wolves and caribou. |
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An environmental utopia - up to a point The scientist across the table from me was laughing, unusually for a conversation about climate change. "You're in environmental utopia now," he beamed. This being Sweden, he was partly being ironic - but only partly. |
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The Next New York Large and raw, Hudson Yards isnt just another development parcel. Its a very real and potent extension of what is already the nations largest, wealthiest and most powerful Central Business District. Its a new piece of, not just a new adjacency to, the market that is the very definition of high barrier to entry. But even before a piling has been driven in what will likely be the $1 billion-dollar decking over of the rail cut that is Hudson Yards itself (not to mention the likely $1 billion price tag for ownership), the site bears the expectations of many constituencies: City Hall and Albany, the would-be developers, the larger real estate industry and the citys business interests, and of the local and regional community. |
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Cities push tap water as `better than bottled' It's good with a twist, on the rocks or straight up -- and, South Florida tap water advocates say, just as tasty from a faucet as from a bottle. |
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Urbanisation of Panic Berardi describes the state of urban territory as striated by new dimensions of panic where the mental and physical environment of the city overlap in an over-saturation of signs that create a sort of continuous excitation," he writes, "a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual mind as well as the collective mind to a state of collapse. |
Thursday, October 11, 2007
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The Future of Markets Farmers markets are widely viewed as an effective means to promote nutrition and good health in communities that lack access to fresh food. But a nagging question is how markets in low-income communities can fulfill this mission while sustaining themselves financially. |
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The longest commute A new breed of commuter is rising long before dawn to beat the rush, a lifestyle that can take a toll on family time and on infrastructure. |
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O. M. Ungers Influential architect whose drive for clarity produced strong, simple forms that seem to reduce architecture to its essence. |
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The shame of British architecture We have become a nation of glorified property developers. |
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California suburbs will continue to sprawl Bad news: Unless the experts are wrong, California suburbs will continue to sprawl beyond the horizon. |
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Urban Natures: Of Fields and Forests If we want to think beyond the city-nature dichotomy and its corollary, private-public ideology, we have to go back all the way to pre-agrarian modes of operation, which by the way are not only pre, but also post and actually simply “non-agrarian”. |
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Mapping the Future of Bicycling, Walking, and Transit Google Transit has just expanded its trip-planning service--again. This nifty service now includes nearly 20 US cities and Japan, providing a useful tool in areas where the trip-planning services offered by public agencies leave something to be desired. |
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Pollution seen deadlier than car crashes in Europe Air pollution has cut the average life expectancy of Europeans by nearly a year and contributes to the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of people annually, the European Environment Agency said on Wednesday. |
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Wal-Mart Era Wanes Amid Big Shifts in Retail The Wal-Mart Era, the retailer's time of overwhelming business and social influence in America, is drawing to a close. |
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The Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density Thomas J. Holmes created "The Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density" in 2005. The epidemiology and visualization of dumb growth is just as visually interesting as the spread of a disease, and follows similar models. |
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'Enough is enough,' S.F. says of homeless Residents of a famously liberal city appear to be changing views. |
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Downsize Me! Shrinking the McMansion Diet The McMansion phenomenon is likely to survive both the residential property slump and the popularity of green design, but communities are increasingly opting to regulate house size. Even Los Angeles, often blamed for spawning the culture of sprawl, is evaluating a measure that would limit the size of single-family infill housingsome 300,000 properties. |
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Ikea ventures into flat-pack homes Ikea is putting on sale flat-pack homes, with their own plot of land, at the furniture giant's store in Gateshead, Tyne & Wear today. |
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Future positive Its 2022 and low carbon living is as attractive as it is crucial. So whats on offer? In an exciting new project, Forum for the Future comes up with iconic adverts and a thoughtful rationale for the innovative products and services well all be wanting. |
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Giving Peace a chance in Muslim suburbia Before dawn in this sprawl north of Toronto, McDonald's is locked and Tim Hortons is empty. The fake mountain of Canada's Wonderland, the amusement park, peeks from the gloom. Across the street looms the white minaret of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at mosque. |
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Megacity mix and match Prefix a number with a letter, hold an international summit, and what do you get? Fine phrases, vague promises and mass protests? C40 could be the exception. This isnt a traditional government-to-government structure. It started when the mayors of 40 megacities met in London a couple of years ago to look for ways to bolster their efforts on climate change. |
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Viewing Urban Change Through A Different Lens Urban development, demolition, and redevelopment has been a century-long pattern in Salt Lake City, Utah. As the city again ventures into a massive redevelopment project, former planning director Stephen Goldsmith wants the community to take a new look at what this change means for the city. And he's created a museum to help them do it. |
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
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Supernatural City I Toronto is coming alive in our imaginations. We no longer mutter so defensively how really, truly, honestly and sincerely Toronto is a world-class city. We’re done muttering. Done envying, resenting and also-running. Some days now, we actually reckon Toronto the greatest. |
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The larval stage of a new kind of architecture I wonder if the Bilbao Guggenheim is a work of architecture at all? |
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Big cities try to ease way for bicyclists Cities are accelerating their efforts to encourage commuting on two wheels, putting bike racks where cars once parked, adding bike lanes and considering European-style bike-share programs to get residents out of their cars. |
Sunday, October 7, 2007
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Stop! It was at the top of Parliament Square in December 1868 that a railway engineer named JP Knight introduced a device with rotating green-and-red gas lanterns, in the hope of bringing order to the flow of horses, buggies and pedestrians. Weeks later, the contraption exploded, injuring the policeman operating it. Nevertheless, the traffic light had been born, and now there are 5,000 in the capital and tens of thousands around the UK. Now a counter-revolution has begun. A London council wants to remove traffic lights from busy roads. This might be a motorist's dream - but health and safety officers don't agree. Who will win the fight? |
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Meat Market Plaza is Open for Business As Danish urban designer Jan Gehl says, "How nice is it to wake up every morning and know that your city is a little bit better than it was the day before." |
Saturday, October 6, 2007
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Some modest proposals to liberate city streets There's a growing movement of pedestrians and cyclists ready to turn the transportation hierarchy on its head to put people ahead of cars. |
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Taking Life Easy in Urban Italy Supporters of Italy's "Slow City" movement are trying to develop liveable cities, banning cars from city centers and blocking McDonald's branches and supermarkets. The movement is spreading across Europe and is now taking off in Asia. |
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Artist gets probation for building secret mall apartment The leader of an artists' cooperative has been sentenced to probation for illegally setting up a secret apartment inside the Providence Place Mall that was equipped with furniture and a video game system. |
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Is it time for the Great Synthesis? For years, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses have represented warring visions of city-building. Yet a reassessment of the latter's work in remaking post-war New York City has opened the door to an intriguing marriage of their ideas. |
Friday, October 5, 2007
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Sky's the new limit for urban living in Texas, and beyond The helipad atop the swank, 33-story W Hotel offers a panoramic view of Victory Park. Ross Perot Jr., his helicopter nearby, proudly points to glimmering high-rise condominiums, luxury hotels, office buildings and giant cranes poised to build more on 275 acres of former wasteland. "This is a part of Dallas that had been forgotten," says Perot, one of Texas' top residential and commercial real estate developers and the leader of a $3 billion-plus effort to create a massive downtown district from scratch. |
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Walk21: Wayfinding I have a particular interest in the idea of pedestrian maps, and co-created one for the now-finished Walking Life exhibition (I hope to post an electronic version soon). So I was very interested in a Walk21 session this morning about pedestrian maps and wayfinding. |
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Walk21: Public health and urban design Today’s Walk21 post brings you some findings from a fascinating session on the relationship between public health and urban design as they affect and are affected by walking. |
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Strawberries, Birds, Bees Find Home on S.F. Museum's Green Roof The roof of the new California Academy of Sciences building in San Francisco is sprouting. Soon it will look like a meadow. Designed by Renzo Piano, the $484 million building in Golden Gate Park opens in about a year and will house the academy's natural history museum, planetarium, aquarium tanks, visitor center, offices and support facilities. |
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Secretary to the Mob Since Jane Jacobs demonstrated that citizens can be smarter than experts, planners have been increasingly required to design publicly, to complete their projects in open-door workshops, and to seek not just public approval but also public direction in their schemes. |
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Driving to Green Buildings As the world’s first LEED Platinum building, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Philip Merrill Environmental Center is loaded with green features: photovoltaic panels, rainwater harvesting, composting toilets, and bamboo flooring, to mention just a few. However, moving the organization’s staff of around 100 into the new building meant that many employees who had been able to walk to work in the older downtown facility now have to drive roughly ten miles (16 km) to get there. |
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The Vortex of 80,000 Nikes Contrary to popular belief, Fresh Kills in New York City's Staten Island doesn't contain the biggest collection of garbage in the world. What Wikipedia says “could be regarded as the largest man-made structure on Earth, with the site's volume [...] exceeding the Great Wall of China” and was once the temporary dump site for the remains of the WTC Towers isn't the largest landfill at all. In fact, it isn't even on land, but rather it is trapped in an oceanic riverine system known as the North Pacific Gyre. |
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S.F. moving to catch up with European bike-share programs San Francisco is one push of the pedal closer to offering residents and visitors a bike-sharing program in an effort to ease traffic congestion and to promote health through exercise. More than a dozen European cities have government-sponsored programs in which bikes are provided for people to share. Last month, Paris started the most ambitious program yet, providing more than 10,000 bikes at 750 stations and expecting that the program will be double in size by year's end. |
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Rob Hopkins of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Culture In this interview, Rob tells Treehugger what inspired him to tackle peak oil, why the survivalist approach holds no interest for him, and how permaculture has influenced the Transition Towns concept. He also explains why he doesnt believe in a technological solution to the coming crisis, and he gives his thoughts on how everyone can help prepare for the challenges ahead. |
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The Magic of America online Marion Mahony Griffin (18711961), the second woman to receive a degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first licensed female architect in Illinois, is perhaps best known as Frank Lloyd Wrights principal delineator. A draftsman with a unique personal style that helped to define the Prairie School of architecture, Griffin was instrumental in bringing Wrights ideas into graphic form. After working with Wright and practicing architecture with her husband, Walter Burley Griffin (18761937), for decades in the United States, India, and Australia, she began The Magic of America in the 1940s, when she was in her 70s. Since her death in 1961, The Magic of America has achieved a kind of cult status among architects, designers, artists, and historians. Described by some as impossible, the heavily illustrated 1,400-page manuscript never found a publisher in Griffins lifetime or thereafter. Nonetheless, its reputation as a manifesto, polemic, memoir, and chronicle of a brilliant mind has grown over the decades. The Art Institutes Ryerson and Burnham Libraries have fielded hundreds of requests from researchers for time with the manuscript |
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City of the Future How would you like the chance to design the commission of a lifetime - to look into the future, envision the changes that will take place in American cities, design solutions to the problems they pose, and make the world a better place? Are you up for the challenge? The History Channel, with sponsors Infiniti and IBM, is proud to offer this extraordinary opportunity to architects and designers nationwide to compete in City of the Future challenges in the San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington, DC areas. |
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
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When Downtown Is in the Suburbs What was once a lonely regional mall is now prime real estate. The mall is the modern town square in most of America, said Joel Kotkin, the author of The City: A Global History (Modern Library, 2006) and a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. |
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
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Alsops 20-flavour housing I am traipsing across the wasteland of the vast New Islington site, being pelted by rain and listening to Urban Splash director Nick Johnson talk about confectionary. This area, he explains, was once Manchesters Little Italy and therefore the centre of the citys ice cream production. The Penny Lick and the Hokey Pokey were both floated as names for the latest project to emerge within SMC Alsops masterplan for New Islington but, in the end, Tutti Frutti won the day. |
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New York Rollercoaster City Elizabeth Currid’s “Warhol Economy” (Princeton University Press, 2007) celebrates the creativity of New York City with a clear agenda. It wants the city’s arts scene to be acknowledged as a driver of its economy. The book is a fun read, well documented and features numerous interviews of New York celebrities. Thanks to Currid, the expression “the Warhol Economy” might well become a fixture in conversations and recommendations of planners and other city marketers for times to come. |
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Sagatopia What began as an experiment in (relative) modesty has been subsumed by raging Hamptons excess. |
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Richard Rogers: Transforming public spaces In the heady days just after the opening in 1977 of the Pompidou Center, one of its two previously underemployed architects, Richard Rogers, was gazing at his creation in the rain when an elderly lady offered him shelter under her umbrella and asked what he thought of the building. I am the architect, he beamed, whereupon she hit him over the head with her umbrella. |
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Tutti Frutti Tutti Frutti is Urban Splashs answer to Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam, but without the crazhy acshent. They will build their own canal in Manchester (lets see how many shopping trolleys it can take) and site these 26 houses alongside it with a pub and a vicarage either end. |
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Dozing in the Slow Lane
Who are the leaders who can get Los Angeles moving again? |
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Walking into the urban future Advocates of walking have gathered in Toronto this week for "Walk 21," a conference about "putting pedestrians first" in the 21st century. It's astonishing that anything as natural as putting one foot in front of the other should need advocacy, but that's the essence of the current crisis. When the machine dominates, the natural is trashed: Local food is hard to find, clean air rare and using your feet discouraged. |
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Toronto embraces green wave City government credited with decreasing the size of its footprint on the environment. |
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His credo for city: Walk don't ride "The way you see a city is on foot," says Walker, a world traveller and policy adviser to the U.K. Department of Transport, who lives in London. |
Monday, October 1, 2007
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Big Developments Need Good Timing, Not Just Good Location "Location, location, location" may be the mantra of real estate, but equally important is "timing, timing, timing." |
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City's Once-Wasteland Is Hipster Heaven It's nighttime in downtown Los Angeles and the sidewalks are packed with pretty people out for the monthly Art Walk. Dressed in their skinny jeans, they're trolling the edgy little galleries, clutching their plastic cups of wine, sidestepping the panhandler wearing a garbage bag. Suddenly, a stylish young couple appears -- pushing a stroller. Bert Green, a gallery owner, points at the nuclear unit. "That's what I'm talking about," Green says. " It's happening." |
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UN says urban expansion is spurring crime Crime is increasing in the world's cities and now affects more than half of urban residents in developing countries, the UN agency for human settlements said in a report today. |
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