Urbanism News
Saturday, November 29, 2008
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A Village Down the Block
Some New Yorkers never get to know their neighbors. |
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Better Place announces Bay Area electric car infrastructure plans Missing from much of the talk about electric cars has been how to charge them up--"just plug it in" sounds simple enough, but when you're dealing with a 400 pound battery that takes 5 hours to juice up, electric vehicle infrastructure suddenly snaps into focus as a make-or-break part of the picture. |
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There Goes My Social Life: Heavy Traffic Leads to Fewer Friends If you’re feeling like a loner, consider where you live. Residents on busy streets tend to have 75% fewer friends than those living on similar streets with less traffic, according to research published in September by the University of the West of England, Bristol. |
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On riding bikes
It is very early morning, and because mornings have recently been robbed of an hour of daylight, I am biking in darkness. Up ahead is a tunnel, a nexus of sorts. On one side exists a quiet tree-lined residential street and on the other the raucous unpredictability of Calgary's urban centre. I enter the tunnel leaving behind a tranquil neighborhood and emerge into the bright lights of downtown Calgary. |
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New Oslo Opera House Is Really a Stealth Skate Park For years, architects have gone to great lengths to protect their buildings from marauding skaters. But as aesthetic trends move toward folded planes that transition seamlessly from wall to ceiling and back to wall, designers have been looking to their former adversaries for a lesson in flow. |
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A field guide to the Smas, Ghetto Fabs, Gabberbitches, Reli-Rockers and more For the past 14 years, a pair of Dutch artists, Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, have been documenting styles of appearance in series of photographs. They go to a city, notice a particular look that seems to recur, find a dozen or so people who look like this and invite them into a studio to pose. The people tend to look a certain way because they belong to a recognizable social group, defined by region or class or style of music. Versluis and Uyttenbroek put their subjects against a white backdrop and pose them in exactly the same way. Then they create a grid of images and label it "Skins - Rotterdam, 2007" or "Sapeurs - Paris, 2008." The results are stunning: The people in each group look identical. |
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Saving That Landscape, in Pictures at Least “Many of the landscapes that are on our list this year will quite easily die a quiet death,” Mr. Birnbaum said. “And so what we want to do is make them visible, put a bit of light on them so that they too have a discourse instead of letting them one day just be gone. They’ve deserved it.” |
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Financial recovery needs a massively different mindset Our reliance on single-family homeownership is a product of the past 50 years – and the experiment has outlived its usefulness. Not only is it now readily apparent that not everyone should own a home, and that the mortgage system is a big part of what got us into the current financial mess, but homeownership also ties people to locations, making it harder for them to move to where work is. Homeownership made sense when most people had one job and lived in the same city for life. But it makes less sense when people change jobs frequently and have to relocate to find new work. |
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Top 10 Books - 2009 The Planetizen editorial staff based its 2009 edition list on a number of criteria, including editorial reviews, sales rankings, popularity, Planetizen reader nominations, number of references, recommendations from experts and the book's potential impact on the urban planning, development and design professions. |
Monday, November 24, 2008
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Architecture critic Paul Goldberger looks at the challenges of the city Goldberger revealed himself as a follower of Lewis Mumford, the Mumford who wrote, "Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends." Mumford was a believer in the big, messy, discordant, chaotic, sometimes ugly city, where the greatest diversity of people meet each other on the street and in public spaces and have an affect on each other, one way or another. He favored diversity, the street over particular buildings, transit systems over the car, quality of life over growth. |
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When Buildings Try Too Hard In a devastated real-estate market, builders and developers are clinging to an ambitious word with magical properties. In New York, a proposed 56-story luxury residential tower, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, though as yet unbuilt, already claims to be "iconic." A Brooklyn condominium high-rise with a textured façade of jagged, light- and dark-colored glass designed by SOM, the same firm that designed Chicago's Sears Tower, promises "iconic design within reach." A Seattle developer, taking no chances, has simply named his forthcoming residential tower The Icon. Apparently, everyone would like their building to be an icon, but it's not that easy. |
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Interlock Quantifying the impact of human habitats on animal habitats is complex and ever-shifting. Only when a freak incident of a bear, or wolf, or deer wander into our developed environment - and a strange tussle between fumbling law enforcement officers and a primal instinct-driven beast ensues - are we reminded on our habitat overlaps. |
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A meaty project for leaner times Will the rejection of a 'megalomaniac' scheme for London's Smithfield herald a new era of more considerate architecture? |
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More for less: An optimistic strategy of renewal in sombre times The publication PLUS: Large Scale Housing Development - an Exceptional Case makes a convincing argument for the renewal of big housing complexes in France. In the Dutch situation the PLUS strategy can complement the current, one-sided discussion on the renewal of the post-war city. |
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ULI Launches Global City Index Report London and New York still rank among the world’s most successful cities, but face increasing competition from other global cities, according to an analysis of 30 major global indices and other data prepared by the Urban Land Institute, a global research and education institute dedicated to responsible land use. The report, entitled ‘City Success: What do the global indices tell us?’ was released today at ULI’s London New York Dialogue Conference in London. |
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America’s top bicycling cities Bicycling Magazine has unveiled its annual list of the country’s best cities for cycling. |
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Cycling for Everyone In spite of their affluence and high rates of car ownership, countries in northern Europe have achieved a high overall rate of bike shares in their urban travel; ranging from almost ten per cent of trips in Belgium and Germany to about 20 per cent in Denmark, and 30 per cent in the Netherlands. What is equally impressive is Northern European women cycle as often as men, and all age groups make a considerable percentage of their daily trips by bike. That is quite a contrast to Canada and the United States, where only about one per cent of trips are by bike, and most cyclists are young men. Two important aims of cycling policies in North America should be to raise the overall bike share of trips while simultaneously making cycling safe, convenient, and feasible for women as well as men, and for all age groups. |
Sunday, November 23, 2008
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From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist Factory Records borrowed Andy Warhol's art affectation - the appropriation of an industrial term to describe art practice - and applied it to the original landscapes of the industrial revolution. By inverting the idea of a Factory, the normal Fordist aims of industry are suddenly perverted and equally artist-as-genius mythologies are overturned. Warhol and Wilsons Factories manufactured culture rather than goods. For Factory, this crystalised in the Hacienda which retooled a Victorian textile factory into a industrially themed machine producing youth culture by the yard. |
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The Long View By embracing the city’s industrial past—reclaiming landfills, remediating brownfields, developing neglected waterfronts—James Corner has helped reinvent the field of landscape architecture. |
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Americans driving less, unmoved by lower gas prices Americans are driving less despite falling gas prices, reflecting the deepening recession and signaling a shift in lifestyles and driving habits that could outlast the current turmoil. |
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City planner with a dirty secret In my day job I advocate cycling and transit use. But at heart, I love to drive. |
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
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Preserving the majesty of old works New uses for water pumping stations will draw on their glory days. |
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Temples dedicated to the art of spending The ideal city as posited in contemporary culture is all about consumption. Whether it is through shopping, hotels, culture or dining, it is the acts of consuming that define its image. |
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Leadership is THE Strategic Issue This century will probably determine the survival of our civilization. We will succeed only if design becomes the organizing discipline of the future, and that will happen only when designers become leaders. The world needs what designers have to offer — not just on the drawing board but on the board of directors. |
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Urban Visualization Installatio fLux, binary waves [lab-au.com] is an urban visualization installation based on the measurement and real-time representation of infrastructural (passengers, cars...) and communicational (electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio...) flows. |
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China Prepares for Urban Revolution By 2025, at least 220 Chinese cities likely will have more than 1 million people. Such a colossal population shift requires massive building. |
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Architecture is war Architects still have difficulty publicly discussing the purpose and advantage of architecture within political processes – even if that is abundantly clear to the outside world. In the exhibition Decolonizing Architecture in Bozar (Brussels) three architectural researchers – Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman – go a step further by proving the strategic role of architecture within an ordinary military struggle. |
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Larry Beasley's Simple Plan Cities all over the world, in love with the image of Vancouver as an urban utopia, are eager to clone it. But as former planner Larry Beasley will tell anyone who’ll listen, it’s not quite that easy. |
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Environmentalists promote 'green stimulus'
Governments can save the economy and the planet, they say, by spending on mass transit, renewable energy and fuel-efficient cars. |
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From MIT, a quantum leap in bike mechanics Bicyclists in Copenhagen will soon be able to take part in a project that will allow them to track the roads they've traveled, get a boost up tough hills, and maybe even improve their social lives. |
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
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GM Must Re-Make the Mass Transit System it Murdered Bail out General Motors? The people who murdered our mass transit system? |
Monday, November 17, 2008
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Gehl to New York: Lose the Cars When the Danish urban-design guru Jan Gehl visited New York a few years ago, he was struck by how little the city had changed since the 1970s—“as if Robert Moses had only just walked out the door!” But since that visit, as Gehl recalled last night at the Center for Architecture, New York has made a surprising about-face on matters of public space, embracing the ideals of his late friend (and Moses nemesis) Jane Jacobs. |
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Recessionary design: A boom time for creative energy Recession. Depression. Slump. Crash. Whatever it's called, and however severe it turns out to be, the economic crisis is bound to affect design. The question is how? Judging by design's fate in past recessions, it will suffer in this one. Some designers' clients will go out of business, and others will cut costs. Research and development budgets will be slashed. Designers' jobs will be lost, and projects scrapped. But there may be positive consequences too. Design has always coped well with austerity, and is especially well-equipped to do so now. |
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Big Box & Beyond Today's Temples of Consumption Don't Have To Be Tomorrow's Ruins. What's in Store? |
Sunday, November 16, 2008
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U.K. city axes renowned Canadian architect's controversial development Defenders had hailed the towers' "billowing" appearance as a stroke of genius, but critics said the project's bold colours and uneven facades evoked "transvestites caught in a gale." |
Friday, November 14, 2008
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Photo Essay: Sustainable Neighborhoods in Malmo On October 29, Adele Peters had a chance to explore two internationally leading examples of sustainable urban neighborhoods in Malmo, Sweden, on a tour led by city official Trevor Graham. The tour was part of the Sustainable Innovation '08 conference. Graham guided us through the newly built Western Harbor as well as a 1950s tenement district that was transformed in the 1990s. |
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Land and re-localisation With allotment waiting lists in the UK massively over-subscribed, and people right across the country keen to grow their own fruit and vegetables, a new project called Landshare aims to make British land more productive and fresh local produce more accessible to all. |
Thursday, November 13, 2008
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Report Sees New Pollution Threat A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations. |
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The new urban architecture: it talks back In this SEED Salon, mathematician Steven Strogatz and architect Carlo Ratti suggest that there are laws of urban behavior from which the mathematician and architect can draw lessons. Feedback loops? Dynamical systems? The city of the future just might talk back. |
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Of Houses, Castles and the Universal Dream As I sit here in Beijing Capital International Airport waiting for a flight to Taiyuan, I realize something universal about people. Whether in the suburbs of Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Xi’an, Shenyang, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Nanjing or even in the historical accident of Hong Kong, some of the most beautiful single-family detached housing in the world is here. It is not extensive, because it is not affordable to the great majority of Chinese. The Chinese call them “villas.” It is, however, the most expensive of housing and a goal to which many of the nation’s rising. |
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Night-time pedestrianisation plan Proposals to pedestrianise an area of Livepool City Centre at night are being recommended for approval following consultation with local businesses. |
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NYC proposes bike parking rules in new buildings The city is proposing bicycle parking rules that could be among the toughest in the nation, requiring one secure bike parking space for every two units in new apartment buildings and one space for every 7,500 square feet in new office buildings. |
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
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Glum Tidings: Santa Gets Sacked as Cities, Companies Look to Save Santa won't be waving to the children of Bay City, Mich., this year -- at least, not the giant illuminated Santa that used to perch on a downtown rooftop. Mayor Charles M. Brunner made the call with a heavy heart. During long winter nights, it always gave him a lift to see the lights all aglow. But this year, even Santa is getting downsized. It's too expensive for the struggling old lumber town to hoist him up to the roof and keep him twinkling. |
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Extreme Makeover: Nuclear Power Plant Edition As the world seeks low-carbon forms of energy production to reduce the emissions blamed for global warming, the champions of nuclear power have been re-branding the industry as one of the world’s greenest. |
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Hooked on Biking Speaking of biking in the city, the Forum for Urban Design held an exhibition and party last night for its first-ever competition. Entitled Reimage Red Hook, the competition sought to make the pioneering, cobblestone neighborhood the premier cycling spot in the city. |
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
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Ensuring the Future of Food An infographical and isometric Sims-like styled video created for the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), which highlights some of the complex issues surrounding the future of food in Japan. Topics include the amount of food imported from other countries, the problem of changing food habits, the aging farming population, and so on. |
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Dept. of Funny Signs: Lawn Chair Parking I saw this “official graffiti” stencil on Queen West just east of University, in preparation for the annual Santa Claus Parade this weekend. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen a parking sign for pedestrians. It certainly looks official, although I guess it could be for publicity. |
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Family ditches SUV, rides bikes instead Diana Methot and her children Kyle and Marisa have been busy bicycling rather than using their SUV. "The morning ride is really invigorating and I have more energy during the day,” Diana said. |
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Chicago Architectural Club announces winners of high-speed rail station design competition If the dream of turning Chicago into a high-speed rail hub ever came true, would the station be an anonymous piece of infrastructure or would it give something back to the city? |
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Oakville loses bid to limit billboards The Ontario Court of Appeal has dealt a major blow to the Town of Oakville's attempt to restrict the use of billboards, a move designed to cut visual pollution and preserve the community's "character." |
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CABE pulls UK out of Europan 10 No suitable sites for UK's Europan 10 bid, says design watchdog. |
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European tram makers stand to gain from U.S. streetcar push America may have invented the streetcar, but Europe perfected it. As a result, as gas prices soared over the past couple of years and dozens of North American communities sought to reintroduce electric streetcars as an alternative to diesel buses, some of the biggest beneficiaries were European tram builders. |
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In search of an urban plan How design must change in a warming, oil-scarce world. |
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Report Calls for Overhaul of Power Grid to Handle Sun and Wind Power Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation’s electrical grid, an industry report says. |
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A building with an energy all its own Fritz Lang likely never dreamed of this for his futuristic city in Metropolis: Offices and retail centres that harness the earth, wind, sun – and even people – to generate energy for their own needs, to share with adjacent buildings, or to sell to the power grid. |
Monday, November 10, 2008
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How did Italy get so ugly? While the art world celebrates Palladio’s quincentenary, no-one is pointing out that his famous villas and the sublime countryside around them have been wrecked by hideous urban sprawl. |
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Town centers are a new catalyst for small cities The U.S. is reaching the end of a chapter ruled by cars, cheap energy and wasteful land-use patterns. |
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Her New York Ada Louise Huxtable is, hands down, the dean of American architectural criticism. In her many books and columns for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal (where she continues to serve as architecture critic), Ms. Huxtable has brought a sharp, skeptical, receptive eye and a nuanced writing style to the task. |
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Gerhy's towers plan in Hove is dropped Plans for Frank Gehry's first building in England have bit the buffers, Brighton & Hove City Council has announced. |
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New York tries to create Gardens of Eden on city streets The Bloomberg administration sets up oases of plants and blooms of umbrellas along Broadway in a quest to devise a new urban aesthetic. Is it the Left Bank of Paris or just a bank of shrubs? |
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Green spaces 'reduce health gap' A bit of greenery near our homes can cut the "health gap" between rich and poor, say researchers from two Scottish universities. |
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Life after oil? It's not just about us If Earth was a country instead of a planet, it would be an extremely poor nation. It would be seen by other planet-states as economically divided, physically degraded and insecure in terms of water, food and climate. It would be considered poorly governed and unsafe. If the Milky Way had a state department, it would put Earth on its travel advisory list. |
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How Frederick Law Olmsted Got the Central Park Job 2008 is the 150th anniversary of the awarding of the job to create Central Park, the first and still the foremost major park in New York City. Central Park launched Olmsted’s famous career in planning and landscape architecture and became a model for other urban open spaces throughout the United States. Olmsted’s story sounds too Hollywood to be true – a struggling farmer, B-list writer and failed businessman from the backwoods of Staten Island gets picked by Manhattan’s elite to steward their city’s emerald of open spaces. But it’s quite logical, and provides some lessons for how we can be successful. |
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Green Plans in Blueprints of Retailers In new Wal-Mart stores, the baseboards and moldings are made of plastic left over from diaper manufacturing. Chipotle, the burrito chain, has installed an energy-producing wind turbine outside a new store in the Chicago suburbs. And a Florida chain called Pizza Fusion reuses the draft from its ovens to heat water. |
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Bicycle-sharing mania takes hold in Europehttp://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/09/europe/pedal.php In increasingly green-conscious Europe, there are said to be only two kinds of mayors: those who have a bicycle-sharing program and those who want one. |
Sunday, November 9, 2008
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Re-imagining Cities: Urban Design After Oil symposium Correspondents Lloyd Alter (TreeHugger and Planet Green), Ryan Avent (Grist), Nate Berg (Planetizen), Andrew Blum (Metropolis and Wired), Randy Crane (UCLA School of Public Affairs) and Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson (New York Times Magazine, Architect, and Metropolis) bring you updates from the Re-imagining Cities: Urban Design After Oil symposium. |
Saturday, November 8, 2008
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Can shopping centres be used to regenerate cities? Yes, directly and as a catalyst, says Hammerson’s director of retail development Robin Dobson, but architect Ptolemy Dean prefers a return to traditional streets. |
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Leon Krier’s secret code for Poundbury revisited At the University of Westminster’s latest Supercrit, Leon Krier explained why his masterplan for neotraditionalist Poundbury in Dorset was meant to be boring. |
Friday, November 7, 2008
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Sharing the Road In New York City, the non-profit organization Transportation Alternatives is improving options for bikers and pedestrians one intersection at a time. The group recently organized a competition for solving the “traffic nightmare” in Brooklyn on Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street. It challenged people to reconstruct the intersection so that it meets the needs of all of its users — cars, buses, bikes and pedestrians alike. |
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Design, configuration and natural form When did human creations stop being natural? We look at a tower block, a subdivision or a shopping mall parking lot and see the worst of industrial civilization translated into form. We tolerate them as necessary to achieve the material wealth of our civilization. Those human settlements that are still natural we grant special protections through UNESCO and historical preservation laws. We do not have a law that promotes the creation of new historic settlements because we are not quite sure how they are made. |
Thursday, November 6, 2008
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A Sustainable City! China Enters the Age of Sustainable Urban Design China's rapid transformation period is enabling amazing break-throughs. While politicians and citizens of the world keep avoiding the key challenge of transforming our resource-depleting cities into sustainable organisms, China takes the necessary step into a new era of urban development: Building Sustainable Cities. |
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Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture: an architectural Olympiad With some beautiful buildings being created, our correspondent discovers which countries are leading the medal table. |
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
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Efficiency’s Mark: City Glitters a Little Less The bright lights of the big city are getting a little bit duller — with just a hint of green. |
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The best cities for small business Big cities are bad for small business, according to recent findings. If you're an entrepreneur, the best places in Canada to start and operate a successful company are found away from the glare of big-city lights. Large metropolitan centres, it turns out, are not the only engines of economic growth, at least for small business. |
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Must skyscrapers be bird-killers? Not necessarily In Chicago and other cities, thousands of migrating birds die each year due to collisions with brightly-lit skyscrapers that lure them off course. Or they fly around the lighted high-rises until they fall to the ground from exhaustion. Some advocates claim that building-bird collisons are one of the leading causes of bird deaths in North America. But the solution to this problem doesn't appear to be getting rid of lights. It's turning them down. |
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A bounty sprouts in the city with MyFarm enterprise Some might look across this city's rolling hills with its waves of roofs and see some of America's priciest real estate. Trevor Paque saw virgin farmland. He calls his enterprise, MyFarm, a "decentralized urban farm." His aim is to turn San Francisco's under-used, overgrown backyards into verdant plots of green that will provide organically grown food for the city's residents. |
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What Was Once a Dumping Ground, Volunteers Turn Into a Park “We were just strangers before, and this made us neighbors,” said Doug Harper, a sociology professor, still a bit surprised that something as simple as planting crab apple trees, hydrangea bushes and day lilies could have such a profound impact. |
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Region's wild animals migrate to urban environments Recently, on a cool, sunny morning within view of downtown Pittsburgh, I was taking out the garbage before work when I spotted something in my neighbor's backyard that made me stop and take a breath. A large, gray cat -- twice the size of a housecat -- was loping across the lawn. Something I did cause the animal to notice me, and it became a blur of powerful leaps. I ran down the path to catch a glimpse of it as it sped through the woods. The animal's heavy body, large ears and, most of all, its bobbed tail made me realize I was seeing a bobcat. I have enjoyed the thrill of seeing bobcats on just two other occasions, bothin Florida wilderness. To see one so close to a city seemed almost surreal. |
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Roof allotments a capital way to feed Olympians, says mayor Swathes of unused space in London, including flat roofs, are to be converted into vegetable gardens in an initiative that gives a new meaning to the slogan “Dig for Victory”. |
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Fitness buffs fight back after being muscled out of Santa Monica neighborhood Complaints from residents along tony Adelaide Drive about the medians being overrun with exercisers led to a crackdown by police. |
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Street Wise New York’s quixotic quest to turn traffic-choked streets into pedestrian paradise took another step forward today, when Transportation Alternatives released the winning entries in its Designing the 21st Century Street competition. |
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James Bond: the enemy of architecture From Venetian palazzos to fantastical submersible lairs, the buildings in Bond films dazzle - what a shame they get blown to smithereens. |
Monday, November 3, 2008
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The Good Life? A survey of leisure activities on the New York waterfront leaves a lot to be desired—in particular, something to drink. |
Saturday, November 1, 2008
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Water City Design: Vancouver Since arriving in Vancouver, I've realized that we are part of a "peer group" of international water cities. Through waterfront design conferences where the same cities seem to get invited time and time again, or through deeper and more interactive collegial opportunities for shared learning such as summits or study trips, these global water cities are taking every opportunity to learn from each other's successes and failures around water-edge planning and design. |
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The World's Most Global Cities A new study compiles a list of the world's most global cities, weighing financial as well as cultural and political influence. |
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