Urbanism News
Friday, November 30, 2007
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Man with Sydney in his sights Jan Gehl is devoted to urban design and architecture. He has spent 46 years of his life practising it and even longer studying it. He has written four seminal books on the subject and is considered by many to be one of the world's pre-eminent experts on the intersection between psychology and urban design - how people are affected by, and react to, their physical environment. |
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New Approaches to Quiet Buildings Can Help Address Climate Change If everyone in the U.S. lived in a condo, apartment or town home in an urban setting, we could cut potentially carbon emissions by 1 billion metric tons or more. That is approximately what Italy and the United Kingdom generate, combined. |
Thursday, November 29, 2007
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Are you driving yourself crazy? Long commutes to work take heavy mental, physical toll, experts say. |
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Why cities shrink ... and grow After decades of decline, many U.S. cities are showing signs of rebirth. This three-part series examines a little of what happened to pull people and development away from cities, what's attracting them back, how shrewd private investors are spotting trends, and what institutional investment and redevelopment projects have done to bring some cities back to life. |
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What makes cities green also makes them great Walkable, livable, high-density communities produce less greenhouse gas than sprawiling urban regions. |
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Squatter Imaginaries One of the most intriguing facets of Dionisio Gonzalez's photographic constructions is that they immediately question the viewer's knowledge of what a "slum" actually looks like and what are the political forces that shape slums. To that end, he asks us if "slum" is even an appropriate term at all. |
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Leaps of faith drive ever-expanding 'burbs' None of families putting down roots across the arc of outer-edge development are thinking about the epic changes they are helping make in the region's politics, economics and way of life. They're thinking about furniture for the living room and the color they've chosen for the kitchen walls. |
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Bicycles That Carry Powerful Beats, and Even a Rider or Two A new biker gang is roaming the streets of Richmond Hill, Queens. This crew of mostly teenagers can be seen riding along 103rd Avenue just west of the Van Wyck Expressway. The bikes roar, but the booming sound has nothing to do with engines — because there are no engines. They are ordinary bicycles, not motorcycles, although these contraptions look and sound more like rolling D.J. booths. They are outfitted with elaborate stereo systems installed by the youths. |
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U.S. Must Conserve More Americans will have to face a stark reality as they strive toward a greener lifestyle: no matter how much more efficient their vehicles, homes and products are, they're using them too much, a new report suggests. |
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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Shock and awe In the years that Berlin has been claimed as a united Germany’s capital, it has become a mecca for the world’s architects, who have taken up the unique challenge of creating a modern European metropolis, complete with an embassy district, government buildings, cultural institutions and corporate headquarters. |
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Urbanism for Life: Let Children Help Design our Cities Without getting into theories of urban structure, here is a simple criterion for human design: "Shape a city around our children." |
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Arup to design world’s first ‘solar city’ in Arizona Mixed-use development for 300,000 inhabitants will rely on the sun for all daytime energy. |
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Algae Power It has long been known that algae produce small amounts of hydrogen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. In 1999, researchers in Berkeley observed that algae alternate between hydrogen production and normal photosynthesis depending on the chemical environment. Depriving algae of oxygen and sulfur, the researchers greatly increased the hydrogen production and triggered the algae to produce hydrogen for an extended period of time. Another research group also discovered that algae will sustain simultaneous production of hydrogen and oxygen from water by illuminating the algae and depriving it of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Researchers estimate that a small pond (1.5 acre or 10 meter diameter) will produce enough hydrogen on a weekly basis to fuel 12 cars. |
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The Need For Planning In An Aging Society Community design, the availability of amenities, and ease of mobility have a tremendous impact on the aging population, but the 50+ community is often ignored when these elements are being planned. |
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
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How do U.K. cities stack up in terms of sustainability? Every year more and more people live in cities. Globally, we became a majority urban world for the first time last year, while here in the U.K., nine out of 10 of us live in towns and cities. |
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In Search of a Great Street Every time I go on a trip, as I did last month to Barcelona, I am reminded how singular streets more than signature buildings distinguish a city. |
Monday, November 26, 2007
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The carbon cost of protecting our heritage For more than 300 years, people have peered through the window from the kitchen at the front of Richard and Lydia Savage's 17th-century farmhouse near Painswick, Gloucestershire. And for most of the time, they probably shivered. The Savages do what they can to keep out draughts, but even in October the house has a distinct chill. As a result, their central heating system burns twice as much fuel as the average house, and produces twice the carbon emissions. |
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In Miles of Alleys, Chicago Finds Its Next Environmental Frontier If this were any other city, perhaps it would not matter what kind of roadway was underfoot in the back alleys around town. But with nearly 2,000 miles of small service streets bisecting blocks from the North Side to the South Side, Chicago is the alley capital of America. In its alleys, city officials say, it has the paved equivalent of five midsize airports. |
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Architecture by Accident We need more than isolated clusters of container-homes, each connected to one stacking machine. We need thousands of these things, aligned in continuous routes like train tracks, connecting neighborhoods, cities, countries, and continents. |
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The Sustainable City
Against climate change and global warming, the Sustainable City as an alternative to urban sprawl: a dense, mixed use, eco-friendly traditional urban form with full integration of renewable energies. |
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In Plans for Railyards, a Mix of Towers and Parks The West Side railyards are the kind of urban development project that makes builders dance in the streets. A footprint bigger than Rockefeller Center’s and the potential for more commercial and residential space than ground zero: what more could an urban visionary want? |
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Blind women seek sidewalks along busy streets Visiting with virtually every local leader who might help, two blind Jefferson City women - Maud Campbell and Sindy Puckett - have been pounding the pavement in recent weeks. |
Saturday, November 24, 2007
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Bicycles may be classified as `speedy pedestrians' for more legal flexibility Besides being legally defined as slow-moving vehicles, bicycles in Taiwan may now acquire a new definition as "speedy pedestrians" or suren (速人). |
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A brief history of urbanophobia The prejudice of city-hating seems to be deeper, more persistent and more poisonous to progress in Canada than anywhere else in the world. That’s going to spell trouble in a century experts say will be defined by cities. |
Friday, November 23, 2007
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Beyond the Spectacle Fifty years from now, New York will be considered the economic and cultural capital of the previous century, filled with quaint artifacts of another time and places to visit for the sake of nostalgia, but not the center of world culture—somewhat like how we think of Paris today compared to 100 years ago. |
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Earth's Eighth Continent Located in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii and measuring in at roughly twice the size of Texas, this elusive mass is home to hundreds of species of marine life and is constantly expanding. It has tripled in size since the middle of the 1990s and could grow tenfold in the next decade. |
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Megachurches Add Local Economy to Their Mission The church’s leaders say they hope to draw people to faith by publicly demonstrating their commitment to meeting their community’s economic needs. |
Thursday, November 22, 2007
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New York City to Install Sleek New Bike Parking Shelters While the NYPD, Parks Department, MTA, unnamed authorities and, of course, bike thieves, busily clip locks and cart off New Yorkers' bicycles in great number, the Department of Transportation is making sure that not only do bike commuters have a classy spot to park outdoors, but their tushies won't get wet when it rains. |
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35 years on, why we need another gas crisis We've been here before. We've gone through the oil crisis, the exploding cost of gasoline, the lineups, the anger, the search for alternative energy sources. |
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Running On Empty A new exhibition considers the lessons of the 1973 oil crisis. |
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Vancouver named a top `smart' city Vancouver isn't just another pretty face. In fact the city has been short listed as one of the world's smartest cities by a New York-based think-tank that focuses on economic development in the broadband economy. |
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For an edgy city, S.F. frowns on oddball art For a group that is supposed to embody liberal values, San Francisco residents have a surprisingly timid view of large public statues. They may not know art, but they know what they DON'T like. |
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
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London's EcoPod Tram Station A UK initiative called ConnectingSouthwark.com is putting the green in public transportation with an EcoPod tram station that provides information and a great teaching tool for environmental responsibility. Made from recycled shipping containers and powered by renewable energy such as solar panels and wind turbines, the EcoPod is a great symbol of the green principles underpinning both the tram and its recent regeneration program. |
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Do Roads Pay for Themselves? No -- But They Could The Sightline Institute recently linked to an analysis by the Institute of Transportation Studies that asked a simple question: "Do motor-vehicle users in the US pay their way?" |
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Planning Ahead: Architects plan for Cuban reconstruction Havana and Its Landscapes, is the first realistic attempt at developing an organized model of how the city should develop after Castro dies. |
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We built this city... without architects Karachi uses only 2% of the services architects offer when planning projects. |
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A Civic Gateway: Santa Monica Civic Center Parking Structure by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners The humble parking garage is humble no more with a bold design that makes it a sparkling destination point in itself - oh, it's LEED green, too. |
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Future Snow Every time the doors opened tonight on the tram ride home, an amazingly crisp and cold autumn air breathed into the cabin – and it smelled like snow, though no snow was in sight, and so I found myself thinking the two following things: 1) Weather control is the future of urban design. 2) If a city wants to attract new residents it should try scenting the snow. |
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Urban designers critique Minneapolis and offer this idea: Tear down all those horrible skyways When two of the world's top urban designers drop in for a visit and come away with the impression that your city — in this case Minneapolis — is a relic of the 1970s, ill-equipped to thrive and compete in a new century, and that its only hope is to tear down its skyways, well, that gets your attention. |
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Canadian cities near collapse The physical foundations of Canada's cities and communities are "near collapse,” according to a report on the state of municipal infrastructure released Tuesday by Federation of Canadian Municipalities. |
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
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The Laws of Urban Energy The world is flatter than ever. But while technology may give us each the tools of creativity, it takes urban proximity and unpredictability to sharpen them. |
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Dutch architects are welcome Building Design Online published the article London’s Dutch capitulation. In it Will Hurst asks if the fashion for getting Dutch firms to work on Olympic and Gateway projects is down to superior skills or just a political fad? |
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From car bombs to carbuncles And so the oft-repeated prime ministerial vision of the future is suddenly expressed as the architecture of paranoia. City walls stopped defining our settlements long ago. British towns could spread horizontally, just one reason why we have no tradition of living in flats. But last week, for the first time since the middle ages, defensive architecture became a matter of national, or at least government, concern. |
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Beijing Is Ready for the Olympics Ten months before the official kickoff of the Summer Olympics, China has already prepared the stage for the world's top sporting event. Twenty new sports facilities have been built and 11 others renovated. The message from Beijing is clear: Nothing about the 2008 Olympics has been left to chance. |
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Green city Sustainable development is what we are all about," Ronald Barrott, chief executive officer of Aldar Properties tells Arabian Business. With the World Wildlife Fund placing Dubai second in the world for highest per capita carbon emissions it's not difficult to see the reasons for the rise in corporate responsibility and why priority is being given to green design and sustainability as much as design. |
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Carbon-neutral building sets a standard With its spinoff energy benefits, Vancouver office tower is said to be the first of its kind in North America. |
Monday, November 19, 2007
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Take one RAF base, add a line of wind turbines et voila, an eco-town They are the eco-towns of the future. In one, tree-lined boulevards are replaced by an avenue of wind turbines in a lake. In another, all the floor levels are raised as a safety measure against the risk of flooding. |
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Magic box It was a private haven on a public street, a glazed confessional, a symbol of cast-iron solidity. But now, with a question mark over its future, Blake Morrison pays tribute to the red phone box. |
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House style The Bauhaus movement emerged as architects and artists began to rebuild a battle-torn Europe after the great war, and became a fashion in itself. |
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The urban jungle Brick Lane opens today, after controversy over its portrayal of east London. So how have other great cities fared on film? |
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Detroit most dangerous city in U.S. In another blow to Motor City's tarnished image, Detroit pushed past St. Louis to be ranked the most dangerous U.S. city, according to a private research group's controversial analysis of annual FBI crime statistics. |
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Live and learn The government wants 3m new homes by 2020. But will they be user-friendly houses or soulless boxes? |
Sunday, November 18, 2007
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'Green mortgages' taking root Loans that push energy efficiency could make homes more affordable. |
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Cars out as London mayor clears way for Paris-style plage and cycle boulevards Visitors to London may not find the streets paved with gold but they could certainly find that a lot more streets have been paved, under proposals for the tourist heart of the capital. Cars will be banned from some of London’s busiest streets as part of a bold plan to create continental-style boulevards devoted to pedestrians and cyclists. |
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In support of ditching the commute For the 1.5 million Canadians who work out of their homes or in satellite business centres at least a few days a week, work isn't so much about where they go, but what they do. When instant messaging and Internet-ready cellphones make it easy to literally slip the office into our pockets, these employees are turning to telework as an alternative to maddening commutes, buck-a-litre gas prices and too much time away from family. Some organizations tout telework as one of the best ways to boost employee recruitment and retention and save millions in the process. Here's how. |
Saturday, November 17, 2007
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Incubating the Future The dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture talks about the program’s pursuit of greener design solutions. |
Friday, November 16, 2007
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Avoid Cancer, Lose Weight, Look Great, Attract a Mate, Be Happy ... and Stop Global Warming The industrialized world seems to be rushing its inhabitants towards a kind of choice point, a Meaning of Life Moment, an existential fork in the road. The choice is this: Do we want to be happy, healthy, safe, and wise? Or stressed out, sick, scrambling for protection from terror-bomb blasts, and cursing ourselves for having been too stupid to act wiser, sooner? |
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Imaginary Location Location Location Pinewood Studios has announced plans for a huge development which combines - in a move of either supreme logic or inspired surrealism - movie making and sustainable development. The 200 million GBP Project Pinewood will centre on a 100-acre site next to the existing studios in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire. |
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Climate Change Escapism The Guardian recently introduced us to a series of images, produced by artists Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez, for a new project by Greenpeace. The images show us what Spain will look like in the future, in a world transformed by climate change. |
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Visions of an ultra-contemporary city The urban mesh of the Central Business District in Hong Kong is surrounded by the green hills visible from the Victoria Peak in the South and by the sinuous bank of the Pearl River. On the horizontal stratum compressed along the curves of the levels of the precipitous relief, the city structured itself vertically through a field of more or less frayed towers of glass and steel. Hong Kong is one of the more populated territorry in the world with a density of 30 000 inhabitants/km². |
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Architect's plans transform Croydon into cosmopolitan oasis Some of Croydon's best-known landmarks could disappear as part of ambitious plans unveiled by a leading British architect to transform the town centre from an urban concrete jungle to a cosmopolitan oasis. |
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We have more than enough engineers. We need magical conjurers The real shortfall is in expertise and creativity - people who can help save the planet. |
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A Peaceful Revolution: Hey Mom, Where You Live Matters! I flew into San Diego some time ago, and from the air you could see it wasn't a good location for a big city. There area is very dry, so much of the water supply comes from the Colorado River. The river is hundreds of miles away, and drying up. The recent fires made it obvious that the problem is even worse. People have built homes spread across miles of desert and mountains, and that means long commutes, and the public expenses of providing electricity, water, schools, and fire and police protection across an expanding area. |
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NYC Taxpayers May Soon Be Funding 'Pigeon Czar' Don't feed the pigeons … or else. A new pigeon plan is in the works that includes the creation of -- get this -- a pigeon czar. |
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Divorce stokes the condo boom: "It's tremendous for real estate brokers and developers." Miranda Pearson remembers that when she decided to leave her common-law partner, with whom she was renting an apartment, she began secretly searching for a property to buy. Once the relationship fell apart, she saw real estate as her ticket to freedom. |
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Japan's melody roads play music as you drive Motorists used to listening to the radio or their favourite tunes on CDs may have a new way to entertain themselves, after engineers in Japan developed a musical road surface. |
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Visualising the Pulse of the City The emerging opportunities to use geovisualizations to reveal the "pulse of a city" with the visualization of spatio-temporal data generated by the people's experience of systems to interact with the urban environment. |
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Congestion is what urban life is really all about Cities thrive on crowds, diversity, and high-rise. |
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Become an Author: Digital Urban's Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces Book We are looking for authors to contribute to a new book on the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces. The book embraces the concept of Web 2.0 by being based around Flickr and self publishing, in essence it is a nod to the changing world of publishing, you the readers and the ability to print on demand. |
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California town fights Starbucks invasion A sleepy Californian town straight out of the old West is battling plans to drag it into the 21st century with a development of fast food outlets including a Starbucks that locals say will forever destroy the character of their rural community. |
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Homes tailored to the new urban voyeur Glass and metal condo towers seem to invite prying eyes, but it's a theme deeply rooted in modernist architecture. |
Thursday, November 15, 2007
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America's Most Sedentary Cities It's no secret that Americans have grown accustomed to a lifestyle of convenience where cheap 700 calorie cheeseburgers are only a 10-minute drive away. But this way of life is literally killing us. |
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How to Make a Building Cool That developers draw from creative fields to generate buzz for their buildings is nothing new. John Legend and Seal headlined dueling concerts last year to launch two different condos; Vera Wang is creating an artwork for the lobby of a Chelsea project; and the Wooster Collective documented a two-month-long graffiti-fest that gave taggers free rein over 11 Spring Street’s walls before its owners converted it into condos. Next month, Oro, a new condo on Gold Street in Brooklyn, will exhibit the work of three local artists at its sales center. But what’s in it for artists? |
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Blogger Geoff Manaugh sees L.A. through the sights and sounds of Culver City. For Manaugh, whose blog carries a mouthful of a subtitle ("Architectural Conjecture; Urban Speculation; Landscape Futures"), everything is architecture and vice versa: Home Depots and their parking lots, space stations, passages in J.G. Ballard novels. |
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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How Happy Is Your City? In recent years, researchers have attempted to use a variety of statistics and surveys to answer a question that’s occupied countless generations of philosophers: What makes us truly happy? |
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The Future of Cities: How Sprawl and Racism are Intertwined Civil rights leader and environmentalist Van Jones talks about suburban sprawl, race and the future of cities. |
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What Would Jane Do? A new book of essays and an exhibition examine the legacy of Jane Jacobs. |
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High-rise vision sparks Paris revolt A dizzying controversy will grip the French capital this week as its mayor tries to convince recalcitrant Parisians of the beauty of high-rise buildings. |
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It's one El of a Park The High Line may be the city's newest jewel - and for Manhattan developers, the rusting rail trestle has been pure gold. |
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Running Out of Space to Park, and Places to Walk Wandering along a walkway in central Athens, Tassos Pouliasis found a sport utility vehicle blocking his path. The vehicle — parked illegally with its boxy body positioned squarely across the pavement — left no space for pedestrians to squeeze past, and like most Athenians who face the same predicament daily, Mr. Pouliasis was about to step into the street to go around it. But then, he thought, why not go over it? And on the spur of the moment he decided to engage in a form of activism, popular elsewhere in Europe, called car vaulting. |
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Croydon is the new ... Barcelona It is a place that gives concrete jungles a bad name, an urban nightmare famed for its tram system and some of the ugliest architecture outside the old Soviet bloc. |
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Welcome to the CBD: all arteries, no pulse Venture into the the heart of Sydney and you'll find it is lacking ticker. |
Monday, November 12, 2007
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11 most bike friendly cities in the world Biking is a great way to become intimate with a city and get excercise at the same time. There are many amazing cities for biking throughout the world - these gems allow you to explore the city at ease and safely. The 11 most accessible and bike friendly cities are listed below, but these are merely a sampling of the bike friendly paradises that exist throughout the world. |
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Ditching bicycles was a bad idea China, once the capital of the bike, is now becoming one of the world's largest car countries. At a time of rising oil prices and climate change, you have to wonder about that. |
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Seattle's big bike plan gets a green light The city of Seattle has approved one of the nation's most aggressive attempts to raise the popularity of bicycles. |
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Rose Kennedy Greenway Working within the 27 acres of public land made available by the removal of the elevated Central Artery, Greenway designers set out to balance beauty and grace with the vitality and dynamism of a 21st century city. |
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Where are the grocers? Supermarkets followed middle-income families out of urban areas and into the suburbs 40 years ago, said Andy Fisher, executive director of the Community Food Security Coalition, a Los Angeles-based non-profit dedicated to helping low-income people get better access to nutritious food. But, indeed, the situation is steadily improving: grocers are returning to city neighborhoods that are gentrifying. |
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Free Running Parkour and free running on YouTube. |
Saturday, November 10, 2007
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The New Suburban Migration How do you use density to link affordable housing to the suburban population it now needs to serve? |
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Thinking Outside the Box Store The stated object of Mayor Sullivan's EcoDensity initiative is to reduce Vancouver's "eco-footprint" by cutting energy use and waste, while improving livability and housing affordability. These goals are laudable, but will EcoDensity actually live up to its billing? The apparent willingness of the mayor and some councillors to significantly expand big box development in South Vancouver is clearly at odds with EcoDensity. |
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Condo boom and spinoff A Toronto report earlier this year estimates that nearly 40,000 condo units in 155 projects are in the pipeline for the downtown core. The good news is that the greater population density has helped create lots of new services, such as 24-hour grocery stores, food delivery and cleaning services specifically for condos. |
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At the intersection of immigrant and hippie Dr. Florida delights in Kensington Market, with its old-world market and with seemingly incongruous groups living side by side. But he warns about pressure. |
Friday, November 9, 2007
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World Urbanism Day In honor of World Urbanism Day (aka Town Planning Day), I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what might become of some of the world's great cities if global warming's worst case scenario came to pass. Scientists estimate that, were all of the ice caps and snow pack on earth to melt, the sea level would be somewhere between 230-260 feet (70-80 m) higher than it is today. |
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Team proposes urban center in Detroit 'burbs An urban planning team from the University is theorizing that reducing Michigan's historic dependence on automobiles by building pedestrian friendly neighborhoods will help prevent people from leaving the state. |
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Plan for future that doesn't rely on car, cities told Towns and cities must start planning ahead for a future where the car is a thing of the past and a first step toward that reality would be creating more public transit for communities, says a new report by the Ontario Professional Planners Institute. |
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The Antisuburbanites As hard as it is to find enough space for a family in New York City, the Census Bureau reports that the number of young children living in Manhattan increased by more than 30 percent between 2000 and 2006. And stroller-clogged sidewalks, child-friendly cafes and busy online message boards for parents in cities around the world confirm that it’s possible to raise children without moving to the suburbs. |
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Most ready for 'green sacrifices' Most people are ready to make personal sacrifices to address climate change, according to a BBC poll of 22,000 people in 21 countries. |
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Firm to use cellphone data to map traffic in real time Canadians will soon be able to wield a new weapon in the battle against traffic jams: other Canadians. IntelliOne, an Atlanta- and Toronto-based traffic-information firm, announced yesterday that it has an agreement with Rogers Wireless to convert the phone company's cellphone data into a sort of real-time traffic congestion map, which users can tap into to determine exactly how long it will take to get from point A to point B. |
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As communities sprawl, so do waistlines Nothing less than our children's health is at stake. So says a report released yesterday by the Ontario Professional Planners Institute. Titled "Healthy Communities, Sustainable Communities," the document argues that now, more than ever, "You are where you live." |
Thursday, November 8, 2007
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Perfect High Street Everyone loves an urban village but few cities know quite how to get the mix of retail, services and residents right. Monocle has taken inspiration from its favourite neighbourhoods to engineer the perfect precinct. |
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People Make Places Based on in-depth studies of three British towns and cities Cardiff, Preston and Swindon, People Make Places explores how the best public spaces are created by people and communities themselves. |
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Tokyo to Mumbai and Back This story is about this incremental development – which is both simultaneously urban and economic. A story that unfolds in the shadow of the skyscrapers that have come to symbolize Japan’s economic miracle. A shadow that actually stretches over a 100 kilometers around Tokyo’s historical core and largely dominates its landscape just as the informal settlements largely dominate the urbanscape of Mumbai. |
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Welcome to Los Angeles With one of the country’s most notorious slums sitting within spitting distance of new million-dollar lofts and five-star hotels, Los Angeles is using tough new policing to clean up its worst eyesore. For the children of Skid Row, though, it’s business as usual—finding shelter, trying to stay out of trouble, and most of all, getting out. |
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Walk Don't Run We know that that we are supposed to walk more, and we know that we should get off the subway a stop earlier than our destination and walk the last bit etc. etc. But it is so hard to get started, and so easy to jump on a bus (or into the car) instead of doing the right thing. A handy website for Londoners, and those lucky folks in Birmingham and Edinburgh (why there?) will make the choice a lot easier, and a lot more fun. |
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City Slickers Monocle believes that the measure of a city is more about everyday wonders - pavements, well-designed schools, punctual transport - rather than one-off grand projects. Here's our list of the top 25 urban elements that make a city. |
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Almere letters no.1 - The Trojan Horse You, the ‘ordinary’ individual! Now log onto the municipality’s digital plot-shop, pick yourself a piece of land from and realize the house of your dreams. Welcome to 21st century city generation in Almere, the ‘adolescent’ new town of the Netherlands. Urban developers, large-scale construction firms and housing corporations are pushed off the stage and finally now you are given the chance to become the producer of your city. Your local government wants you to be proactive, creative and engaged! |
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Walk this way “Everyone wants to have a more lively, attractive, healthy and sustainable city,” Gehl said. New York has “traffic ideas that are 30 to 40 years old, that when there’s a square meter, give it to the traffic.” |
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London Station Reawakens in Victorian Splendor London's St. Pancras station has been restored to its old Victorian glory to become the new home for high-speed trains to continental Europe. Is this the dawn of a new heyday for British train travel after decades of decline? Not quite. |
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
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GreenTOpia: Towards a Sustainable Toronto Without understating the gravity of contemporary environmental challenges, GreenTOpia reminds us that even modest modifications of our perspectives and practices can improve local well-being in the here-and-now as well as global ecological health in the distant and difficult-to-imagine future. |
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New Asian Cities Pursue Sustainable Design The word “sustainable” is not often used to describe the pollution-choked cities of Asia, but the continent is poised to host a new generation of green cities that right the wrongs of industrial-era urban planning. The question “Could we do better?” motivated New York-based SHoP Architects to take on one such project, the high-tech Sector 61 node of Gurgaon, India. |
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Architecture of the Absurd: How "Genius" Disfigured a Practical Art Have you ever wondered why the Guggenheim is always covered in scaffolding? Why the random slashes on the exterior of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, supposed to represent Berlin locations where pre-war Jews flourished, reappear, for no apparent reason, on his Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto? Or why Frank Gehry's Strata Center, designed for MIT's top-secret Cryptography Unit, has transparent glass walls? Not to mention why, for $442 per square foot, it doesn't keep out the rain? You're not alone. |
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Review: Public Space LA! It’s Not Just a Visionary Thing Anymore Los Angeles is pregnant. Ultrasound says it is going to be an urban baby. Sure to be a hyperactive child who has been punching mother's womb relentlessly since its inception. We do not know who the father is. They say, he might be an action-type of dude who likes dense urban environments and Sunday drives to large parks. Most likely he has a car. |
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Grrridlock In the wake of Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to calm Manhattan traffic through a plan called congestion pricing, the City section asked its readers to offer their own solutions for easing the borough’s traffic woes. More than a hundred responded, proposing ideas ranging from the wonky to the off-the-wall. Ban cabs. Ban private cars. Close streets. Add lanes. |
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Rebuilding New Orleans, Post-Katrina Style This city has always been known for its eclectic housing styles — Greek Revival, Italianate, Creole. Now emerging is what could be called a posthurricane vernacular, wide-ranging architectural responses to what everyone here refers to simply as the Storm. |
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If You Build It, Will They Come? Ten years after the Guggenheim opened its extremely successful Frank Gehry outpost in Bilbao, a museum-building boom is occurring worldwide. From Los Angeles to Minneapolis to Abu Dhabi, new buildings designed by architects such as Renzo Piano, Herzog & de Meuron, and, of course, Mr. Gehry, are sprouting up everywhere. |
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Vicious Cycle Repeat something often enough and people will assume it’s true. Portland is bike-friendly. Portland is bike-friendly. Portland is bike-friendly. Year after year, Bicycling Magazine ranks Portland the best cycling city in the country. The League of American Bicyclists gives us a gold rating, and we may soon become the first big city to join Davis, Calif., in the coveted platinum category. |
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Join the Mow No Mo’
I got a little letter from the Water Department
So the lawn’s gotta go |
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Rich pickings for designers in £2bn Waterloo makeover Plans revealed last week for a £2bn makeover of Waterloo station and the surrounding area in south London will provide major opportunities for designers. Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, working with his urban design arm Design for London, has unveiled a new vision for Waterloo ‘to give Waterloo a new city square’, to mcreate an improved public space and to provide a new development in the area around, and above, the station. |
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
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Pedestrians 3 times more likely to be killed when clocks change. Professors Paul Fischbeck and David Gerard have made a study of traffic fatalities that shows pedestrians walking during the evening rush hour are nearly three times more likely to be struck and killed by cars in the weeks after the fall time change. |
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Two Kinds of Knowledge Architect and planner Huasheng Sun talks about urban planning in South China’s fastest-growing city. |
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Brown's 'get fit' towns: Kim Jong-il would be proud With its new towns that will force people to keep fit, New Labour is pushing an authoritarian health agenda that will be the envy of tinpot dictators. |
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Make fat people use the stairs, architects told Staircases will need to be made more attractive and roads narrowed or even closed to discourage cars, under guidance to be sent to developers and authorities. |
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Study finds air quality in Delhi has worsened dramatically Air quality in Delhi has deteriorated dramatically in the past two years, exposing the capital's residents to heightened risk of a range of respiratory diseases, a leading environmental research group warned Tuesday |
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In Portland, Cultivating a Culture of Two Wheels Cyclists have long revered Portland for its bicycle-friendly culture and infrastructure, including the network of bike lanes that the city began planning in the early 1970s. Now, riders are helping the city build a cycling economy. |
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Arabian Heights Architecture follows money and the money is gushing in the United Arab Emirates. |
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2029: The Year Bicycles Save the World Bikes are not merely fun to race, they're also the most efficient people-moving device ever invented. Zero fuel required beyond a hunk of bread, shot of espresso, soylent green power bar, etc. Zero emissions. They also go fast, handle easily, and work remarkably well in those tight, urban spaces where cars perform their worst. In short, if a locality wants to reduce its share of emissions, getting a few people out of cars and onto bikes is a no-brainer. And if your city is busily painting bike lanes, chances are they're not just tossing a bone to the bikers anymore; they're looking at bikes as part of the solution to far more pressing concerns. |
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Atlanta water use is called shortsighted When Rick McKee, the editorial cartoonist of the Augusta Chronicle newspaper, set out to capture the historic and severe drought that is afflicting the Southeast, he did not draw parched rivers or shriveled crops or brown lawns: He drew an oafish, bloated hulk of a boy holding up a straw to slurp up water from a smaller boy's water fountain. |
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Urbanism, globalisation and Saskia Sassen
Urbanization is not a new phenomenon but serious understanding of what cities are, how they work and what urbanization means for the human race are some of the crucial issues of our time. Never in the history of man has the need for such understanding been more acute. This year is unique in that, for the very first time since the dawn of time, more humans will live in cities and urban areas than in villages and rural communities. |
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MIT offers City Car for the masses The City Car, a design project under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is envisioned as a two-seater electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. It would weigh between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds and could collapse, then stack like a shopping cart with six to eight fitting into a typical parking space. It isn't just a car, but is designed as a system of shared cars with kiosks at locations around a city or small community. |
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Landscape Architects' Report Offers Hundreds of Tips for Sustainable Sites The American Society of Landscape Architects yesterday released a comprehensive report giving a snapshot of the many ways that architects, designers and facility managers can enhance how well their sites fit into surrounding ecosystems, provide cleaner air and water, and reduce the impact of climate change. |
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Designing Lifestyle in 21st Century New York: Starchitect Condos The early years of the 21st century have witnessed a number of brand-name architects (henceforth starchitects) designing condominium buildings in downtown Manhattan. While the physical living spaces are not significantly different to, say, 1980s New York luxury loft-style apartments, what has changed is the imaging, or perhaps more correctly, the total design of luxury lifestyles. |
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Cutting car emissions saves lives Soaring pollution linked to cancer and asthma and costs city billions, medical officer finds. |
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Franchises sucking the local flavor out of L.A. As the city trends toward corporate coffee shops, ice cream parlors and sandwich joints, even the long-standing Wiener Factory in Sherman Oaks is getting the boot. |
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The Best-Laid Plans of Govt. Planners Usually Screw Up Your Life It is safe to say economist Randal O'Toole is an expert in many of the things that have caused Pittsburgh and other cities great pain -- government planning, government mass-transit systems and government attempts to shape or contain the redevelopment of cities. |
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Bringing Meaning to Urban Design Placemaking is a way of thinking about urban design to maximize a people’s connection to the history, land, flora, and fauna of where they are from. It’s a way to anchor people to their locale. |
Monday, November 5, 2007
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Mayors, Looking to Cities’ Future, Are Told It Must Be Colored Green The mayor of Fayetteville, Ark., gushed through a slide show about how his city was in the midst of great change. Bleak roads and bland shopping strips were being redrawn to a more human scale. Downtown condominiums were going for a million dollars. Streets once silent at night now bustled.
Besides being great for the local economy, the mayor, Dan Coody, told his counterparts from other cities gathered here, the redevelopment is also helping Fayetteville go green. |
Sunday, November 4, 2007
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The Blue Planet’s Lifeblood: A Finite Flow It is impossible to enter “Water: H2O = Life,” the exhibition opening tomorrow at the American Museum of Natural History, and not feel excitement at its possibilities. You walk into darkened space where a tumbling aqua-lighted waterfall seems to descend from the ceiling; letters projected on its turbulent surface spell “water” in multiple languages. |
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Yours for the Peeping City life has always been to some degree a public performance, and one of its pleasures is the opportunity to catch a glimpse of other habitats, to watch the movie of others’ lives through a half-drawn curtain, as Jimmy Stewart did in “Rear Window.” But in the same way overheard phone conversations used to be tantalizing until cellphone use reached saturation point — “I’m on 14th and Fifth,” bellows the guy into his Bluetooth, and your ear — ogling other people’s apartments is no longer so appealing, and holds about the same narrative punch as the inane muffin video (homemade by some teenager in his kitchen) my daughter watches over and over on YouTube. |
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From Farm to Market, Down the Stairs, Around the Block Award-winning Mithun design brings agricultural and sustainable self-sufficiency to the city. |
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India suffers from Gandhian 'antipathy' to cities: British expert India and China fundamentally differ in their approach to their cities with the former a victim of the Gandhian ideology that militates against the 'idea of the city', suggests London-based design and urban expert Deyan Sudjic. |
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PDX Inked The whole media universe is humping Portland. We dissect the hype, and how the hell we got here. |
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Time for Some Jane Jacobs Revisionism? First, Robert Moses’s legacy was reassessed. Now, an exhibition takes a look at Jane Jacobs’s contributions to New York City. Of course, history has been far more kind to Jacobs, who died last year, than to Moses, who died in 1981. But is that a fair assessment? |
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Architects hit out at 'rape' of waterfront development TWO of Scotland's leading architects have claimed that Glasgow's riverside is being "raped" by developers and that the city's planning policy is still destroying its built heritage. |
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It tries, but Detroit seems doomed to fail Despite some determined signs of hope, the city remains in freefall 40 years after the riots that tore it asunder. |
Friday, November 2, 2007
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A Billion Slum Dwellers and Counting In 2003, the United Nations Human Settlements Program issued an alarming report on the status of the world’s urban poor. Called The Challenge of Slums, it concluded that nearly a billion people, primarily in the developing countries of the global South, live in circumstances that fit the classic definition of slums, circumstances characterized by overcrowding, substandard and / or informal housing, inadequate access to clean water and sanitation, and insecure tenure. |
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Design for Rising Sea Levels A waterfront site for a single family house in Easthampton, New York recently sold for more than $100,000,000. Condo development rolls onward over the barrier beaches along Florida’s eastern shore. The Pudong district rises from the marshes in Shanghai as towers are constructed on newly formed islands off the coasts of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The possible effects of storm surges, on top of a global rise in sea level, don’t seem to be influencing how investors, governments, and tenants are making decisions about all this. |
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Gearing Up City-dwelling bicyclists typically choose between two types of rides: the high-traction mountain bike (dependable but better for navigating dirt paths than concrete roads) and its skinny-wheeled cousin, the ten-speed racer (which, though nimble, requires a slumped riding posture unsuited to the morning commute). |
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Reaching Toward Human Sustainability in Harlem When you think green, you may not think of Harlem, but Carleton Brown is trying to change that. |
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Graveyard shift British report says views toward cemeteries should change and they should be used more like public parks. |