Urbanism News
Thursday, November 30, 2006
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Seeing the Seediness, and Celebrating It Ever since the great suburban exodus of the postwar years, American cities have experienced varying degrees of panic about their identities. One result is that more and more cities have taken on many of the qualities of suburbs to survive. Meanwhile, the once-smooth surface of suburbia has cracked open, revealing a dark underbelly that once seemed to be the exclusive realm of the city. |
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In Praise of Chain Stores One of the fastest-growing cities in the country, Chandler is definitely the kind of place urbanists have in mind as they intone, “When every place looks the same, there is no such thing as place anymore.” Like so many towns in America, it has lost much of its historic character as a farming community. The annual Ostrich Festival still honors one traditional product, but these days Chandler raises more subdivisions and strip malls than ostrich plumes or cotton, another former staple. Yet it still refutes the common assertion that national chains are a blight on the landscape, that they’ve turned American towns into an indistinguishable “geography of nowhere.” |
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
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Russian Window on the West Reaches for the Sky Gazprom City, a proposed complex of stylish modern buildings that evoke, among other things, a gas-fueled flame, a strand of DNA and a lady’s high-heeled shoe, would sit on a historic site on the Neva River here, opposite the Baroque, blue-and-white Smolny Cathedral. |
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The (Naked) City and the Undead Goo-Goo was an old City Hall term for believers in Good Government, by which the regulars meant idealistic lightweights whose feet seldom touched the ground. But all at once every big shot in New York seemed to have gone Goo-Goo. |
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Vancouver: World's Most Liveable City? The social and economic trends suggest that Vancouver is moving away from -- not toward -- social inclusion and social sustainability. |
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Beijing to build world's longest metro Beijing's metro system will stretch to 561 kilometres by 2020, replacing London's Underground as the longest subway system in the world, according to a recently completed construction plan for the capital city's public transportation offerings. |
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
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Subdivision Bans Wreath With Peace Sign A homeowners association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan. |
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Creative Housing Ideas for an Aging Population Before moving into her new apartment at a housing development for elderly Asian-Americans here, Wai-Chun Chiu lived alone in an apartment building where everyone spoke English and no one spoke Chinese. |
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Rem Koolhaas The Dutch architect and urban visionary spotted a wealth of potential in our congested cities. |
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European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs Are streets without traffic signs conceivable? Seven cities and regions in Europe are giving it a try -- with good results. |
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Panel to discuss gay neighborhoods A few decades ago, straights in urban neighborhoods around the country were nervously watching a "gay invasion" of their territory as local communities became gentrified by a property-buying influx of LGBT individuals. |
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Plan for Canada’s Niagara Falls Would Create New Main Street Walk 20 minutes due north of the wax museums and honeymoon motels at the tacky core of this perennial tourist stop and you will find the eight-block stretch that locals here call downtown. It looks like any other main street in a death spiral: dozens of empty storefronts, plenty of cheap rental apartments and a few hold-out businesses limping from month to month. |
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Artist Displacement From Soho to the Lower East Side to Williamsburg, the story has been more or less the same – artists move in, eventually helping to cause the neighborhood to go through sweeping changes, which results in hardship for local families and businesses -- as well as for the artists themselves. |
Monday, November 27, 2006
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Ho Chi Minh City hurries to become a megacity Meet the world's next great metropolis, a once-gracious city bursting from the confines of its history, wide-eyed with the wonders of traffic jams and tall buildings and thinking very, very big. |
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The Radiant City When we look at the New York City skyline after dark, we see an urban landscape particular to modernity, one in which the significance of each building is designated not by form or position, but by light. |
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Burbs not so bad after all If absence makes the heart grow fonder in far-flung romances, it seems a bit of elbow-room does the same for neighbours. |
Saturday, November 25, 2006
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Cities Compete in Hipness Battle to Attract Young Some cities will do anything they can think of to keep young people from fleeing to a hipper town. In Lansing, Mich., partiers can ease from bar to bar on the new Entertainment Express trolley, part of the state’s Cool Cities Initiative. In Portland, Ore., employees at an advertising firm can watch indie rock concerts at lunch and play “bump,” an abbreviated form of basketball, every afternoon. |
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No Parking: Condos Leave Out Cars Aneemieke Clark and her boyfriend, Daniel Pasley, do not spend a lot of time driving. Ms. Clark, a 29-year-old nursing student at Oregon Health and Science University, takes the bus to school. Her boyfriend is a ''crazy bike rider,'' she said. So when they decided to buy their first home last winter, they chose a one-bedroom unit in the Civic, one of the first new developments in Portland to market condominiums without parking spaces. |
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Shaggy protesters baaaa-ttle urban sprawl On a weekend of street rallies in Spain -- Basques demanding independence, right-wingers nostalgic for the late Francisco Franco, pyramid-scheme investors who lost bundles -- on Sunday it was time for sheep to come forward and bleat. A 700-strong, bell-tinkling flock meandered through stately downtown boulevards -- now home to McDonald's, Starbuck's and such, a far cry from the very old days of inns and straw -- in a demonstration called by farmers who say urban sprawl is eroding ancient routes used to transport the woolly critters from one pasture to another. |
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
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Noodles versus Magnum Researcher and designer Ekim Tan from Istanbul, currently living in Rotterdam and developing her doctorate research proposal at Delft University of Technology, kept a diary of her visit to the International Forum on Urbanism in Beijing in October. |
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Let's go visit the car park! Must a multi-storey be an architectural disaster? Not if we learn from Germany. |
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The megacity: Decoding the chaos of Lagos The Third Mainland Bridge is a looping ribbon of concrete that connects Lagos Island to the continent of Africa. It was built in the nineteen-seventies, part of a vast network of bridges, overleaf, and expressways intended to transform the districts and islands of this Nigerian city—then comprising three million people—into an efficient modern metropolis. |
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How Green Is the Big Apple? New York City ranks among the country’s most sustainable cities, owing primarily to its density and the fact that the majority of the population uses public transportation. But how green is it really? And how much greener can it be? |
Thursday, November 2, 2006
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Are We Shopping? Is This a Store? It’s hard to window shop without the windows. But in malls across the country, the floor-to-ceiling glass storefront — a tradition of transparency in retailing that dates back at least 100 years — is beginning to give way to elaborate walls that make it impossible to see inside. |
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Congestion creeps up on property values When asked to describe the most important feature of a good property investment, an oft-repeated catchphrase among property pundits is “location, location, location”. However, pundits are often referring to what would be called a good area rather than the access to that area. But property economist Francois Viruly, of Viruly Consulting, says location in property is also a function of how accessible that location is via transport routes and whether it has infrastructure linked to it. |
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
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Modern urban planning is no child's play Remember back to that secret place the neighbourhood children would meet at to begin the afternoon's fun. A spot beside the local creek, perhaps. A hidden cubby house in the bush up the hill or behind the estate. Parents yelling at dusk for their kids to come home for dinner. |
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