Urbanism News
Friday, October 31, 2008
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U.S. urban planning priorities out of whack What if we paved over the whole state of Wisconsin? Actually, we already have. According to recent Federal Highway Administration figures, the United States has close to 240 million motor vehicles - almost 40 million more cars than licensed drivers - and just under 4 million miles of paved roads for them to run on. All told, some 61,000 square miles of the United States - an area a little smaller than the Badger State - is solidly paved over, either with roads or with parking. And, of course, there's always more pavement on the way. |
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Back to the Land With long-haul truckers battered by soaring diesel costs and air-lines pummeled by the recent spike in jet-fuel prices, its not hard to imagine a worst-case scenario in which all of our petroleum-dependent systems collapse and locavoresthose people who only eat food produced within, say, a 100-mile radius of where they liveemerge triumphant. We will turn the abandoned runways at JFK and LaGuardia into wheat fields and collectively bring in the harvest using bicycle-powered threshers. O.K., Im getting a little postapocalyptic, but its clear that our highly industrialized global food-distribution system is under assault by a convergence of economic, environmental, and cultural forces. |
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Offshoring Audacity Look abroad: Whole cities are planned, built, and inhabited in less than a generation. Artificial islands, indoor ski slopes, and the worlds tallest this-and-that are being constructed, not in the West, but in the Middle East, China, and beyond. The result: a sense that the Wests cities are falling behind and, increasingly, watching from the sidelines. A dynamic panel will discuss the accuracy of this assessment of todays architectural situation. What are the urban implications of so-called offshoring audacity and how can the phenomenon be described without resorting to nationalism, nostalgia, or even uncritical celebration? |
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Stop Development, Stop Traffic? In an effort to reduce traffic, citizens in Santa Monica, California have proposed a yearly cap on commercial development. Though many in the congested city are behind it, opponents say it's not an effective way to reduce traffic -- and that its passage could set a dangerous example. |
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New Urbanisms Economic Achilles Heel Whether one believes that form follows function or that function can follow form, a town or a city needs three key elements to be healthy. Firstly, a sense of place that includes the sacred is important to people to provide a basis for spiritual involvement. The city must then be able to reliably deliver safety and security to its inhabitants in order to grow and mature. And lastly, a city must provide the means of employment for its inhabitants. |
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The Work of Neighborhood Stabilization Foreclosures are blighting neighborhoods across the country. There's no question that something needs to be done. But to react effectively, the field of community development needs to carefully consider which areas should be targeted and how much can be saved. |
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Portland bike traffic up 28% over last year The City of Portland is sitting on loads of interesting and important data about bike ridership. Full reports on summer bike counts at locations throughout the city and survey results from the City Auditors Office are all due out in the coming weeks. |
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Planet faces an ecological credit crunch The 2008 edition of the WWF Living Planet Report reveals a planet in environmental crisis. Only urgent action to curb our rampant consumption can prevent ecological recession sliding into irreversible breakdown. |
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Overheard in New York: Biking Up 35 Percent in 2008 A tipster reports that DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan dropped an interesting stat at an NRDC fundraiser Tuesday night: A fresh batch of bike traffic counts are in, and the numbers show a 35 percent gain compared to 2007 levels. |
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
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Urban Residents' Vulnerability To Heat Examined By Researchers Darrel Jenerette, a landscape ecologist at UC Riverside, is on a team led by Arizona State University researchers that will be investigating human vulnerability to deadly heat exposure. The three-year project will examine how variation in the "urban heat island" - a metropolitan area that is much warmer than its surrounding areas - impacts human comfort and health risks, as well as how human decisions lead to this variation. |
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Welcome, Ikea Shoppers! A big-box retailer arrives in hipster Brooklyn and (shockingly) fails to end the world as we know it. |
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New Malls, Old Ideas With a handful of new retail projects, several major architects are attempting to bring the much derided mall into the 21st century. But is good design enough? |
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Can U.S. Go 'Green' Even When Oil Prices Drop? Like clockwork, it seems like every time oil prices skyrocket in the United States, the country takes a step toward energy independence. Then the price of oil recedes and American energy consumers revert to their profligate ways. |
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Drive-by Urbanism Today I try to understand our cities in another way, using a comparative juxtaposition of images. When I went looking for these images, I knew in my head what they would look like, but the actual facts are, nonetheless, a bit of a shock. |
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The world's ugliest buildings Monstrosities, eyesores, nightmares of architecture -- call them what you like, ugly buildings are sadly all around us. |
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Interview with Kongjian Yu, Designer of the Red Ribbon, Tang He River Park Was the new architecture created for the Beijing Olympics sustainable? Frankly, I don't think they are sustainable, because they just cost so much to build and consumed so much steel and energy. So, that's my answer, but, certainly, I'm proud that China can handle such a big event. That doesn't necessarily mean that I like this kind of big event. It's certainly not sustainable. |
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From Mobiquity to Search-Urbanism Adam Greenfields talk at Lift Asia 08 discusses topics ranging from Mobile Ubiquity and Ambient Computing to the introduction of the term Search-Urbanism. |
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Not Everyone Can Have A Car if We Still Want A Planet Traffic in almost all large Asian cities has ground to a polluting halt, even when only one trip in 10 is made by car or taxi (versus eight in 10 in the US and six in 10 in Europe). Beijing, where only drastic action kept the streets (but not the air) clear for the Olympics, is the most current example of the mess in Asian cities. Manila, where this meeting is being hosted, and Bangkok, where the next key meeting will be and everywhere else (except Singapore) is non functional. |
Monday, October 27, 2008
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'Boring' playgrounds stifle children's creativity
The creativity of children is being stifled by badly-designed, unimaginative "cloned" playgrounds, a report has warned. |
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Supermarkets come in from cold as part of low carbon revolution
Rising energy prices and green campaigns persuade firms to open ecostores. |
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From landfill to landscape A landscape restoration of a rubbish dump has won the Energy, Waste and Recycling category at the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Spain. "La Vall d'en Joan" (The Valley of Joan) project, designed by Spanish architects Batlle and Roig, has transformed a 150 hectare site in the Garraf Natural Park, south-west of Barcelona into a green terraced agricultural landscape. |
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Bringing Soil Back Hunters Point Shipyard is an unusually shaped peninsula hanging off the southeastern corner of San Francisco. Once an important Navy yard servicing the United States' Pacific fleet, Hunters Point today is 495 acres of artificial fill steeped in spilled diesel fuel, chemical solvents and radioactive heavy metals. A federal Superfund site, Hunters Point is eventually slated for construction as a mixed use development. The Navy is currently remediating the site by removing contaminated soil at great expense. |
Saturday, October 25, 2008
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Zones of Exclusion Researchers at the University of Glasgow, sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, have spent the past two years asking young residents of Bradford, Peterborough, London, Glasgow, Sunderland, and Bristol to draw maps of their own individual urban experience in order to explore micro-territoriality as both a cause and a symptom of social exclusion. |
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Think ahead: 3 bedroom condos needed During the last real estate cycle, condominium living became popular in many cities. Most buyers were singles or either young couples without kids or empty-nesters. With perhaps Manhattan and Vancouver being notable exceptions, families with young children have generally not been among the new inner urban residents. |
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As Yard Sales Boom in Hard Times, Sentiment Is First Thing to Go As the classified ads put it, everything must go. Socks. Christmas ornaments. Microwave ovens. Three-year-old Marita Duartes tricycle was sold by her mother, Beatriz, to a stranger for $3 even as her daughter was riding it. |
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Living with the giant down the street When Wal-Mart sets up shop, local economies get a kick start - though smaller businesses often need to refocus. |
Thursday, October 23, 2008
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In every backyard, a garden plot It all started in June for Deb Heighway with a call from her brother, Craig, proving that good ideas grow roots and flourish quickly. He had declared himself CPO - "chief pitchfork operator" - of an urban farming venture in Vancouver, and he urged her to give the concept a try. |
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Vernacular Urbanism, Part III I continue to search for a vernacular urbanism for the next city. After some reflection, I have concluded that what I am looking for is an urbanism that is local in character, conditional, circumstantial, meaningful and of value (in every sense - not just financially) for its inhabitants, rooted to its surroundings and its past, an urbanism that is founded on local resources and the specific nature of a particular place, that is based on the found and the available and the renewable. And so I have found myself thinking about slums. Let me explain. |
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The Future of Food: How Science Will Solve the Next Global Crises. Forty years ago, advances in fertilizers and pesticides boosted crop yield and fed a growing planet. Today, demand for food fueled by rises in worldwide consumption of meat and protein is again outpacing farmers ability to keep up. It's time for the next Green Revolution. |
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Tracking toxins in our city University of Toronto professor Miriam Diamond is researching how toxic chemicals move around urban areas and later end up in soil and waterways, affecting the fisheries. |
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The Late American Space We regret to inform you that the American myth has given up the ghost. It had been fashioned by the anxious wonder of generations of Europeans discovering this unexplored continent, unlimited space just made for every kind of adventure. That has vanished, devoured by shopping centers, golf courses, residential areas, parking lots, hangars, factories. America was empty; now it is full. It was infinite; now it's restricted. It was open; now it's divided into grids. |
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Architecture can focus on L.A.'s shared spaces In a recession-dampened Los Angeles, the next big thing may not be a big thing at all. It may be a thousand little ones. |
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Curing Urbanitis the Metropolitan Disease The problems of today's inner cities and the problems of the suburbs are inextricably linked, says William E. Finley, author of Curing Urbanitis. Americans have a love-hate relationship with big cities. They love the vibrancy, diversity, the sophisticated shops and restaurants, the preserved neighborhoods and the museums and shiny towers that justify and state their importance. They dislike, but put up with, high costs, traffic, crime, rudeness, long commutes, too few taxis, erratic transit and many annoying inconveniences. |
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
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The Most Radical Thing You Can Do LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, The most radical thing you can do is stay home, a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed. The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less. Its curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes upliving smaller, staying closer, having lessespecially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people. |
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Will Your Recession Be Tall, Grande, or Venti? The higher the concentration of expensive, nautically themed, faux-Italian-branded Frappuccino joints in a country's financial capital, the more likely the country is to have suffered catastrophic financial losses. |
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Is there a poetry in architecture? Is there a connection between poetry and architecture? I remember talking on this subject some while back at an Arts Council-sponsored evening at Somerset House. In preparation, I'd spent the best part of a fortnight walking through parts of London I'm particularly fond of and photographing buildings and places that seemed, to me at least, somehow poetic. I learned, by heart, a number of poems that seemed relevant to what I wanted to say. To me there was, and is, something in the structure, rhythm, balance, and the very language of architecture corresponding in certain ways with those of sonnets, odes and epics. |
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States, Cities Step Up Climate Change Responses Before the fiscal crisis, there was the global climate crisis. After the fiscal crisis, well still have the global climate crisis for the rest of our lives. |
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With 265 shops and 50 restaurants, an impossible city is reborn
At a time when retail therapy has become as unfashionable a treatment (but for what?) as syrup-of-figs, London's newest shopping mall is preparing to open its doors. The 40-acre Westfield mall in Shepherd's Bush - "Westfield London" as it wants us to know it - will be the biggest thing of its kind within the boundaries of a British city. Two new railway stations have been built to serve it and a third extensively refurbished. Westfield's 265 shops and 50 restaurants include Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Gucci, Prada, the Croque Gascon and the Comptoir Libanais, as well Topshop and Marks & Spencer. The floor is covered in marble: "half the metamorphic layer of Italy is in here", a Westfield executive said recently, meaning there was a lot. Westfield's cinema has 13 screens. Westfield's car park can take 4,500 cars. Westfield's bus station will cope with 65 buses an hour. One could go on. |
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The challenge of dense sprawl Los Angeles followed the standard American model of urban growth, developing a central business district on a simple grid where the original center of the city was founded, then later adopted suburban sprawl to continue its growth and grew a cluster of skyscrapers adapted to this sprawl where the center once was. The policy of sprawl is blamed for the impossible traffic congestion that cripples Los Angeles, but generally what is meant by sprawl are the low-density housing subdivisions, office zones and other standard typologies of suburbia. The solution that was called for was more density, even though some geographers pointed out that Los Angeles was already one of the densest cities in America. The result of this choice has been dense sprawl: worse traffic, worse crowding and seemingly no improvement in quality of life. |
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
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'Leapfrogging' in China's race to innovate There's a Chinese saying that's intended to comfort anyone brave - or reckless - enough to set off on a road journey: "Good horns, good brakes, good luck." Given the chaotic Chinese traffic, they'll need all three - with extra dollops of the third. Some 90,000 people died on China's roads last year. The country is bedeviled by Smeed's Law, which was coined by the British statistician R.J. Smeed and suggests that whenever the number of new cars rises steeply, so does the risk of accidents for the ingnue drivers. China is a classic case. Tens of millions of new cars jostle for space on often-antiquated streets with a motley assortment of rickshaws, bicycles, scooters and electric trikes. Even the road signs look scared. Rather than issuing calm instructions, they appear to be trying to frighten motorists into compliance by depicting overturning trucks and cars crashing while the drivers jabber on cellphones. |
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Turns Out There's Good News on Main St. As the financial crisis takes down Wall Street, the regular folks on Main Street are biting their nails, watching the toxic tsunami head their way. But for all our nightmares of drowning in a sea of bad mortgages, foreclosed homes and shrunken retirement plans, the truth is that the effects of this meltdown won't be all bad in the long run. In one regard, it could offer our society a net positive: Forced into belt-tightening, Americans are likely to strengthen our family and community ties and to center our lives more closely on the places where we live. |
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Elements of Urbanism: Albany A brief tour around the downtown of New York's capital city: Albany. |
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The 2008 Global Cities Index There is no single correct path a city should tread to become global. But how should cities that want to boost their international profile go about it? They could follow any of the tried-and-true models that came before them. Just look at the various ways some of this years 60 global cities manage to use urbanization and globalization to their advantage. |
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Singapore skyscraper that might need weeding Due to begin construction in Singapore shortly is this super eco-friendly skyscraper that features a living wall of plants (video below). Looking more like an advertisement for When Plants Attack!, the EDITT tower (Ecological Design in the Tropics) was designed by TR Hamzah & Yeang as a substitute to the glass-dominated faade of the city. |
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Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough The paparazzi should have been hiding in the hedges that evening. Cindy Crawford, Goldie Hawn, John Mayer, and some 50 other Hollywood and media types were gathered in the Malibu home of one of L.A.'s biggest power brokers, Universal Studios president Ron Meyer, and his wife, Kelly. The guest of honor at this 2005 dinner party: William McDonough. "He is," Kelly Meyer tells me later, "the environmental architect of our time." |
Monday, October 20, 2008
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The Business of Saving the Earth We are rethinking our perceptions of nature, and our place in it. It is dawning on us that we are neither masters of nature nor its victims, but merely another of its artifacts; that its fate is ours. The dark forest of folk tale, the bottomless natural bounty of Canadas founding myths, are being revealed for what they are: a biophysical web as essential to humans as to any other animal. And when we look, we see that this web is rapidly unravelling. |
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Low-rise D.C. skyline under pressure to look upward As vacant land disappears in Washington, concerns about high real-estate prices are fueling debate over whether developers should be allowed to build taller, which is prevented under a century-old law. |
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Winners in Flip a Strip Mall Redesign Contest Announced Strip malls define our streetscapes. Here, and in suburbs across the country, strip malls are a fact of life. They are the wallflowers of thousands of streetscapes that millions of people travel daily. To envision a new future for this lowly (yet overabundant) building stock, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) initiated the national competition Flip a Strip in late 2007 that resulted in 35 innovative proposals by architectural teams from around the country, for flipping local strip malls in Scottsdale, Tempe and Phoenix, AZ. |
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Kingsway tunnels A series of tunnels that run underneath central London and were used for communications during the Cold War have gone on sale for an estimated 5m. |
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This House Turns and Returns, Too Many things tend to remind us of many other things. For instance, the image of King Alfonso XVII's architecturally riotous bathing machine moving back and forth, in imitation of the often hypnotic ebb and flow of the tides, slowly, languorously as one would expect to be when holidaying at the beach, instantly called to mind two projects by the Dutch artist-architect John Krmeling. |
Sunday, October 19, 2008
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Market panic? Bring it on If there is a new imperative in this desperate economy, it is surely to build more intelligent architecture. To think optimistically in uncertain times and trim the fatty, frivolous excess to favour what must absolutely be achieved. Cancel the mediocre, the cheaply built, the towers and housing developments that ignore sustainability. To build is a vote for human productivity. To build well confirms a sophisticated, thinking society. |
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A step in the right direction Inspired by a visionary Dane, communities around the world are reacquainting their citizens with the joys of walking and cycling. Can cities in climate-challenged Canada get off car-free as well? |
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Eco homes: England's greenest and most pleasant new town is on its way The plain black and white cast-iron sign at the empty crossroads in the heart of the South Hams, Devon, reads Higher Sherford and points towards a small group of farm buildings and acres of undulating green fields. The hamlet is as rural as are its immediate neighbours, East and West Sherford, that between them make up the basin of land, sandwiched between Plympton and Plymstock, east of Plymouth. |
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Let's talk crap Our frank interview about human waste may horrify you about how the world cleans itself down there. |
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Rome workers uncover city of dead Workers renovating a rugby stadium have uncovered a vast complex of tombs beneath Rome that mimic the houses, blocks and streets of a real city, according to officials, who have unveiled a series of new finds. |
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Some Cities Will Be Safer in a Recession Cities with a strong presence in health care, education, law, energy, and the government will feel the impact of a downturn less. |
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'Lost' Louis Sullivan storefront found on Wabash Avenue Detective work leads to architectural gold on South Wabash. 'There was some unbelievable stuff back there.' |
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Homeless can camp in public parks The city's homeless can camp in public parks and green spaces under a British Columbia Supreme Court ruling handed down yesterday. "Yesterday it was illegal to set up my tent, today it isn't," said David Johnston, one of the homeless activists who argued they have a right to sleep outdoors on public property. |
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The Brutal Truth Unloved and (gasp) unattractive buildings deserve protection, too. |
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Economic Thinking is Job Number One In the midst of this financial crisis, it is doubly important to understand the economic perspective on urban planning and real estate development. |
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Urbanism India, New Delhi Apart from China, India is another economic giant that is taking the world by storm. Statistics show that Indias economic growth has sustained an averaged of 8.5% for the past 4 years (OCED). It has a growing well educated population and the country has found its niche in the information technology industry. Much of Indias economic growth has to do with the liberalisation of Indias economy. This liberalisation has brought a flock of foreign investors that have arrived on Indias doorstep to jump onto the bandwagon of one of the worlds fastest-growing economies. |
Saturday, October 18, 2008
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This Stock Collapse is Petty when Compared to the Nature Crunch
The financial crisis at least affords us an opportunity to now rethink our catastrophic ecological trajectory. |
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
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Urban expert offers advice on San Francisco After 40 years as a professor of urban design and nearly a decade as a consultant to locales as varied as New York and Zurich, Milan and Melbourne, Jan Gehl knows a thing or two about cities. |
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Does Central Park Need Any More Praise? The American Planning Association on Wednesday announced that it had designated Central Park as one of the 10 great public spaces in the United States. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Greensward Plan of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the 1858 document that established the aesthetic vision for the park. |
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Honey, It’s Time to Mow the Roof There are rooftop gardens, and then there’s Chris and Lisa Goode’s rooftop garden, which is essentially an urban farm on top of a Little Italy building, complete with chickens and vegetables, fruit trees and migrating butterflies; all anchored by an elegant modernist penthouse pavilion by architect Andrew Berman. |
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In Modern China, ‘Little Kingdoms’ for the People “Tulou: Affordable Housing for China,” which just opened at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, may not dispel the Western image of Chinese cities as nightmarish visions of dehumanizing towers. Architectural projects as divine as this one are still the exception, not the rule. |
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Swiss countryside succumbs to urban sprawl Switzerland has gone from a largely rural country to an urban one in just 70 years with developmental sprawl taking over pristine alpine regions, a study has found. |
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Steering toward a bicycle future While touring Cambodia on his bicycle, Cliff Kienlen was impressed with the tremendous loads Cambodian riders could carry on their bikes, despite rough, pot-holed roads. In further travel through Asia and Africa, Kienlen discovered most people in the developing world ride bikes for transportation, not recreation. Bikes are used as "trucks," taxis and commuter vehicles and riders often pack heavy loads of vegetables, live animals, firewood or water. |
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Unwanted subdivisions are our modern-day ghost towns Skamania County — They're so behind the times down here there's not one stoplight in the entire county. And that's a big point of pride. So a couple of years ago, when developers started building two new subdivisions — the kind where the homes have granite countertops and price out north of $600,000 — it seemed like a mirage. Prosperity, long a stranger here, was moving into one of the poorer counties in the state. "We thought: If we build it, they will come." |
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Stirling prize 2008: At last, homes
What a joy to see innovative public housing beat big-name projects to the UK's premier architecture award. |
Monday, October 13, 2008
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The etiquette of bike parking With more and more cyclists taking to the roads and designated bike racks in short supply, where they park has tremendous capacity to annoy. So how can those on two wheels avoid winding up officialdom, pedestrians and even fellow cyclists when they lock up their trusty steeds? |
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Future farms over our heads Professor Julian Cribb, author of The Coming Famine, said the global food crisis was a forewarning of what could be expected as civilisation ran low on water, arable land and nutrients, and experienced soaring energy costs. Professor Cribb said the urban farmers of the future - who would primarily grow vegetables - would play a much larger role in the global diet. |
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Urban Wheat Field Sprouts on Streets of New York On Monday, October 6th, a live wheat field, approximately one quarter of an acre in size, sprouted at New York Citys South Street Seaport. The Wheat Foods Councils Urban Wheat Field Experience, which ran October 6th through 8th, brings the farm-to-fork journey of Americas most-consumed grain to life with a wheat field, full-size combine, functioning mill, bread-baking station, nutrition lab and more. |
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Cambodian couple cut home in half An estranged couple in Cambodia have sawn their house in half to avoid the country's convoluted divorce process. |
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Urban Golf Certain personal attributes can be advantageous in particular sports. In basketball, height helps. For sprinting, fast twitch muscle fibers are a boon. With golf, a sizable trust fund sure doesn't hurt. Along with squash and polo, golf has long been considered a patrician pastime. But from Paris to Portland, roving bands of revolutionaries are reclaiming this sport for the masses by taking golf quite literally to the streets. When you combine egalitarian ideals with natty fashion, a dose of whimsy, and plenty of beer, a good time is par for the course. |
Sunday, October 12, 2008
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U.S. City Dwellers Flock to Raising Chickens In the backyard of a suburban home in Denver, Colorado, 22 chickens are hiding out from the law. They arrived when a member of BackyardChickens, an online forum, ordered the birds in the mail this past May. "I actually get my chicks in today hopefully, and I am worried that animal control will be at the post office waiting for me with hand-cuffs," the new poultry farmer wrote. |
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Danes Come Down With a Case of Park Envy To its natives, New York may look like a city on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But to a team of Danes from the Copenhagen parks department, on a grand tour of New Yorks finest parks this week, everything appeared to be coming up roses. Or at least flowers. |
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A box of one's own The idea of a home, no matter how small, to truly call our own, has been the goal of British society in recent decades. But has it gone badly wrong and should we take a lesson from the sprawling family homes of the past? |
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Golden Gate Bridge to get suicide net to catch would-be jumpers Stainless-steel netting hanging 20 feet down and extending 20 feet on either side will be placed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge to catch would-be suicide jumpers, San Francisco officials decided Friday. |
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Move Up? Move Out? Families Squeeze In IN most parts of the country, Dr. Stephen Shaw, an internist, and his wife, Bobbi Avery, a labor nurse, and their two young children would probably live in a three- or four-bedroom house with a yard. But like a growing number of well-off families, they have decided to remain in Manhattan, even though it means squeezing into a one-bedroom rental in the West Village. It costs them $3,995 a month, an amount that would allow them to rent a four-bedroom house in a suburb like Short Hills, N.J. |
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The end of planning? Just maybe A new report suggests that urban planners should let city-building happen on its own. The real surprise is who wrote it. |
Friday, October 10, 2008
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Urbanodiversity We live in an epoque in which the end of the resources and the rise of global population force us to choose between war or conviviality. |
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Sustainability Reloaded At the occasion of Ma0s presentation in Venice in the Italian pavilion, Volume had an interview on what proved to be the hidden theme of this years Biennale: sustainability. The Italian office Ma0 (emmeazero, acronym for Media Architecture Office) has for more than 11 years been engaged in research and design with special focus on architecture as medium and the interaction with media. |
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How safe is your city? Put it to the bicycle test. How long will an unchained bicycle last on a city street before someone steals it? Using hidden cameras and cheap bicycles as bait, an Argentine publicist set out to gauge crime in different neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. The longer it takes for the bike to be stolen the safer the area, is his hypothesis |
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'Atlas of the Real World' puts us in our place In our age of Mapquest and Google Earth and Global Positioning Systems, printed maps can seem downright quaint. |
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Mayne warns Dubai set for ecological disaster Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne has predicted that Dubai will become an ecological disaster if development there continues in its current direction. In a dramatic speech delivered on Tuesday to the World Architecture Congresss Cityscape Dubai conference, the US architect said the private sectors dominance in the Gulf state had led to a lack of joined-up planning and that this combined with the immense speed of development would lead to a major crisis in the future. |
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Breaking Down the Big Box Josh Stephens feels driven to bring attention to last year's Big Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses by Stacey Mitchell. The book argues that mega-retailers have not only drained the American economy of much of its entrepreneurial spirit, but also have contributed to the degradation of the social fabric, intellectual life, and built environment of cities and towns across the United States. |
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S.F. traffic noise risks health of 1 in 6 Noise from traffic is putting nearly 1 in 6 San Francisco residents at risk for heart disease, high blood pressure and other stress-related illnesses, city public health officials have found. |
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True Urbanism As suburbs grew in popularity in the second half of last century, many North American cities became neglected. A lot of people preferred the idea of having a large house on their own piece of land in a quiet community instead of living in a small apartment in the loud, dirty city. In True Urbanism, Mark Hinshaw argues that we are seeing a rebirth in our cities and that more and more people are appreciating the benefits of living in areas with higher density. |
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Housing Pain Gauge: Nearly 1 in 6 Owners 'Under Water' The relentless slide in home prices has left nearly one in six U.S. homeowners owing more on a mortgage than the home is worth, raising the possibility of a rise in defaults -- the very misfortune that touched off the credit crisis last year.
The result of homeowners being "under water" is more pressure on an economy that is already in a downturn. No longer having equity in their homes makes people feel less rich and thus less inclined to shop at the mall. |
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Restless Americans: Migration and Population Change, 2000-2007 Americans may be less mobile than in the past, but millions since 2000 have continued to be on the move, reshaping the landscape and economy of the nation. Three maps will be briefly discussed: one of population change by county, 2000-2007, one of net internal migration by county, and one of net immigration from abroad. We will then focus on the extremes, unusually large levels or intensities of net internal migration and of immigration. |
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
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In Dubai, Show Goes On for Property Housing crisis? Mortgage meltdown? Credit crunch? After spending a few hours at Cityscape, this Mideast boom-town's annual real-estate trade show, you just might forget about the financial crisis gripping much of the rest of the world. The four-day event attracts the region's biggest property developers, contractors, interior designers and investors. Never mind that many of the projects introduced here with great fanfare may never get built. |
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An urban neighbour Last year must not be allowed to slip away without commemorating a sometimes under-appreciated urban neighbour. To its little pink feet and matching pink eyes, let's raise a glass for the to an almost-overlooked event: the quadricentennial of the pigeon. It was some 400 years ago, in 1606, that Samuel de Champlain unloaded the cages of the very first pigeons to arrive in North America. |
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Vertical Food Gardens Sprout in L.A.s Skid Row Brilliant inventions usually result when someone asks the right question at the right time. Taja Sevelle, the founder and executive director of Urban Farming, a Detroit-based nonprofit dedicated to eradicating hunger, had just such a query for architect Robin Osler when the two met last year for the first time: If sedum and other non-edible plants thrive on green roofs and walls, why not tomatoes, peppers, and onions? If so, she reckoned, these gardens could supply free, healthy food for economically distressed neighborhoods. |
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Folding bikes: a transit alternative After getting off at the Rockridge station, Babcock pedals to her job of teaching sculpture at the Oakland campus of the California College of the Arts. "It's just so much more pleasant than being in a car," she said. |
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Spains Carbon-Neutral Ecotopia Gets the Green Light While Rioja is a name that is normally associated with red or white, the autonomous Spanish province will soon be just as synonymous with green - building green, that is. This week the local government gave the green light to the Logroo Montecorvo Eco City project, an ambitious carbon neutral development north of its capital city, Logroo. Designed by Dutch firm MVRDV and Spanish firm GRAS, the stunning development will feature enough photovoltaic cells and wind turbines to produce 100% of its energy. |
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
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The suburbs as a museum piece There are those who think America's suburban existence will not survive the coming age of expensive gasoline. Among the first images I saw after walking into the Carnegie Museum of Art's new exhibit, "Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes," with its curators the other day, was a pair of oversized photos of lawn mowing, one man pushing and another riding. |
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RMJM's New York and Dubai offices work to bring the old back into New Dubai Around Dubai, towers spring up almost in the blink of an eye. Glass and steel permeates the skyline creating a jagged, sparkling and intensely futuristic cityscape. But within this towering city a new type of futuristic landscape is set to challenge this aesthetic. International architects RMJM have been chosen by investors Nakheel to design Madinat Al Soor – a pedestrianised city which will house 22,000 new residents. |
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Book review - The Chinese Dream China is in the midst of breakneck transformation. The last 30 years of astonishing economic growth and political and cultural reform have been driven by the world's biggest ever urban boom. The new China is now halfway built. Within the next 30 years China will most likely take centre-stage as a global superpower, with hundreds of millions of new urbanites flooding into the rapidly swelling cities. But this process - presenting no less than the construction of a new society - is taking place almost without time to think. |
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Spark of inspiration
Many cities are trying to be distinctive, but too many are trying to do so by copying each other. Beyond the boutiques and public art, is there any fresh thinking? |
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Which cities are more recession proof? Professionally and personally I’ve been devoting considerable time to understanding the current American economic crisis. One interesting issue emerging from my readings — but that is being overlooked in the mainstream media and even in some of my favorite economic blogs — is that there is not really _one_ national economy. The US economy is comprised of myriad regional economies. Therefore, not every place may be suffering, even if the average or sum of all the local economies faces a crisis. |
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Ice Climbing in the Abandoned Malls of Foreclosure America Perhaps because it's getting colder by the day here in the North, but Jules Spinatsch's photographic series Snow Management came to our minds today. Specifically, this photo of an icy stalagmite that at first seems to have formed after a water main burst. |
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Does closing roads cut delays? File this one under “intensely counterintuitive.” A recent study has found that closing off certain streets can actually relieve traffic congestion. |
Monday, October 6, 2008
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Don't Build Parking, And They'll Come--Without Cars For decades, the District and residents wary of overdevelopment have used the city's parking regulations as one of their main weapons in the war against congestion. Complex formulas require a certain number of parking spots for each chunk of new residential or office space. |
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A Big Sum of Small Differences It's easy to mock little efforts to save the environment: reusing grocery bags, buying a Prius, putting an energy-efficient refrigerator in an energy-eating mansion. The big gains to curb greenhouse emissions, the argument goes, will come from controlling big industrial companies that spew millions of tons of heat-trapping gases every year. But consumers -- especially American consumers -- have more influence over climate change than they might think. |
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Life inside skeleton dwellings The excuse for my visit to Paris was SmartCity, a conference organized in the frame of the festival Emergences. Emergences is an 'international festival of electronic cultures and new art forms'. However, one must accept that in a city like Paris the word 'international' doesn't necessarily that tacit rules will be respected and that the activities and conferences will be held in any other language than french. That's probably why i enjoyed the event so much. While both the issues discussed and the quality of the speakers invited to the panels were definitely of international relevance, the festival had a homely feeling with an audience ready to participate and dialog, un-refrained as they were by any lack of knowledge of the ubiquitous english. |
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The Old Urbanism: It's A Wonderful Block On warm evenings, especially when the light lasts long, 11-year-old Lucy Friedman-Bell rides her Razor scooter up West Rock Avenue until she gets to the corner of West Elm Street. If she crossed West Elm and kept going, she would soon arrive at our house, where she would see me and my wife sitting on our front porch with our 1-year-old daughter, Rebekah, and her best friend, J. J. the spotted mutt, snuggled between us. But Lucy’s not allowed to leave her block by herself, so she turns around and goes back toward her house, the fifth in from Yale Avenue at the other end. Before she gets there, she will pass about a dozen houses — some on her side of the street, some across the street — whose inhabitants know her. ‘‘Hi, Lucy!’’ they call, and she always waves, sometimes with the regal, cupped-hand wave of the queen, and shouts in her small voice, ‘‘Hi!’’ Lucy’s head is barely visible under her helmet, and people appreciate the effort it must take to call back to them. She used to make this circuit on her bicycle, but last year it was stolen. The whole street went into mourning, and we whispered to one another, ‘‘What will Lucy do without her bike?’’ But after a week of shiva, she emerged on the scooter, and all seemed well again. She does this circuit, up and down the block, every day she can, sometimes for an hour or two. ‘‘It’s my thinking time,’’ she told me. |
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'Broken Windows' Rebuffed: The Social Life of Skid Row As an urbanist I grow weary of repeated references to Jane Jacobs. Large numbers of planners and architects have heeded her advice of mixed-use, diversity-focused city crafting. The struggle of making it happen in the communities where they work is long underway. I argue, though, that some of the people advocating Jacobs’ legacy have missed an equally as important point she emphasized in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: |
Saturday, October 4, 2008
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Why Place Matters Torhild Eide Torgersen, an artist from Norway, drew Why Place Matters during Richards recent speech in Larvik. What do you think of her interpretation? |
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Seven pillars of Le Corbusier Detractors claim he was a sex-starved automaton who destroyed our cities. Devotees say he revolutionised urban living. On the eve of a major retrospective, we explore the true legacy of this controversial architect |
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Will Cities Soon Be Able to Feed Themselves? A growing interest in urban farming is sprouting all kinds of new ideas -- including growing food in high-rises. |
Thursday, October 2, 2008
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Gas Prices Apply Brakes To Suburban Migration That 1958 brick rambler inside the Beltway is suddenly looking a lot better to Dawn and Jeff Schaefer, who are buying their first house in Northern Virginia. Not too long ago, they were looking farther out -- for a newer house, a bigger yard and all the amenities. But no more. "You get less house and property for the same price, but we're willing to make that sacrifice to save on gas prices and commuting costs," Dawn Schaefer said. |
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Lose weight on your way to work With gas prices skyrocketing, using your own foot power to get to work can be the perfect way to save money, squeeze in a workout and be good to the earth. If the distance to your workplace is too far, consider walking part of the way. Even just a few minutes of early morning striding relaxes and primes your body for the day ahead. And avoiding the frustrations of end-of-the-day rush hour traffic lets you arrive home refreshed and de-stressed. Here's how to make walking a part of your daily commute. |
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Green buildings ineffective Queensland University of Technology professor of architecture Janis Birkeland yesterday dismissed so-called green buildings as simply conventional designs tweaked with energy-efficient technologies. "Even the best-practice green buildings we have today only reduce negative social and environmental impacts relative to standard buildings," she said. |
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Momentum Grows For Futuristic Scheme In 2007, the nine-year-old architecture studio UrbanLab won The History Channels City of the Future ideas competition with its entry, Growing Water. Most notably, the submission envisioned how Chicago could insert eco-boulevards into the street system that would clean wastewater and storm water by bioremediation. The concept has gained traction among decision makers in the citys transportation and environmental departments, as well as the mayors office, according to Martin Felsen, AIA, UrbanLab coprincipal with Sarah Dunn. But for a young office juggling a gamut of residential and small commercial projects, Felsen says, the water project is much bigger than our firm. |
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Government fails on pledge for good design The Labour government has failed in its pledge to champion high standards of design in UK housing, architects believe. |
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Green and unpleasant The ecotowns plan, with its proposed nosy-parker scrutiny of residents, is patronising and illiberal. |
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Tale of two crises born of one disease: greed The Wall-E parable isn't just the usual sappy greenwash. That's the story's surface, littered with its skyscrapers of compacted trash. Beneath this rusty crust, though, is a subtler, layered allegory about the flubbery human mind (the Captain) locked in mortal combat with its business-as-usual auto-pilot. About the importance of overriding both gloss and fear (the two iterations of the on-screen Buy n Large president), about the courage to defy convention (the robots find their autonomy) and about self-denial for the sake of the big picture (Wall-E's final act). |
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More women ditching cars, riding bikes Soaring gas prices are fueling a surge in bike sales worldwide, and women are a big part of this trend. In fact, some local businesses are now catering to this new girl pedal-power. |
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Arts, Culture, and the Design Intensive City Prof. Adam Krims latest work, Music and Urban Geography theorizes about how music affects and has affected the tremendous physical upheaval that urban and ex-urban space experienced in the modern, post WWII era. One of his most interesting observations is the way in which the city has moved toward design intensity which he defines in the introductions as the tendency in advanced societies for products and services to owe much of their value to aspects of design and informational content, and for design and informational aspects of products and services to develop rapidly. |
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Removing Cars to Create Public Space Cars dominate cities, especially in America. But as many cities in other countries have found, removing cars can turn busy streets into lively public places. Now the U.S. is starting to catch on. |
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
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On your bike
Obesity and high oil prices are good news for the world’s biggest bikemaker. |
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Under Strain, Cities Are Cutting Back Projects Cities, states and other local governments have been effectively shut out of the bond markets for the last two weeks, raising the cost of day-to-day operations, threatening longer-term projects and dampening a broad source of jobs and stability at a time when other parts of the economy are weakening. |
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Gas Signs Truth in Advertising. These signs were put up around Los Angeles as a public art piece. |
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Bike Rack Design Competition Entries Unveiled Prototypes of the shortlisted entries in the CityRacks Design Competition were installed for public scrutiny at Astor Place in New York today, the jury are welcoming feedback via comments on the official site and will announce the winner October 24th, 2008. |
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Urban Land Institute prepares exhibit on future of urban design The Washington-based Urban Land Institute (ULI) is preparing an exhibit on the future of urban design and development that will debut at ULI's Annual Fall Meeting and Urban Land Expo, scheduled for Oct. 27-30 in Miami Beach, Fla. "The City in 2050: Creating Blueprints for Change" will be an "urban laboratory" in which participants will explore factors that are expected to affect cities in the future, such as alternative energy use and new approaches to sustainability. |
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A glimpse into life on city streets Artist Nancy Davis Halifax arranges her work, part of an exhibit in which homeless people share their stories through photos and poetry. Exhibit gives homeless a chance to tell their stories in a way organizers hope will get people thinking. |
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Villaraigosa to unveil L.A. housing plan Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Monday will unveil a $5-billion, five-year plan to build housing for the poor and middle class. The blueprint, which calls for thousands of new homes along subway and bus lines, and developments with people of all incomes living together, would, according to the mayor's deputies, alter the look and feel of the city forever. |
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