Urbanism News
Thursday, December 23, 2004
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Germany shines a beam on the future of energy A solar-power project built by a Berkeley company may point Germany toward a pollution-free future. |
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Envisioning the ubiquitous city The rapid convergence of mobile communications, automated positioning technologies, and geographic information systems (GIS) into “locative media” is raising the possibility of a dramatic transformation of the way we perceive and move about the urban environment, and how we interact with each other in urban spaces. Endless possibilities for locative media are being proposed that promise increased convenience, awareness, transparency, and access to information and social opportunities that break traditional power structures. |
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Tour of the Souterrain After years of designing, building and pumping, the OMA-designed Souterrain in The Hague finally opened a month ago. |
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Families Shun Industrial Cities Detroit is still home to a big chunk of the U.S. automobile industry and now the NBA champion Pistons, but not so many people any more. |
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What L.A.'s Suburbs Can Teach Us A lot of Los Angeles County should be seen as a spectacle of democracy: an ordinary landscape where millions of working people express their flawed and hopeful idea of home. |
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
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Group of Grove-ites tries to stave off a McMansion NAMBIES stands for Neighbors Against McMansions: Big Invasive Eyesores. |
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
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Review 2004: architecture Architects around the world have been creating flashy 'look-at-me' buildings in an attempt to make their mark. |
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Zen and the art of gloss maintenance Social problems are not solved with bulldozers. There is a kind of reverse entropy in the textural life of cities today, a relentless drift from authentic to synthetic, from down and dirty to schmick and span, from wholegrain to lip gloss. |
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Dome, sand and sea Outside the snow is blowing sideways, but inside there's a rainforest, a Balinese lagoon and people in swimsuits. This is Tropical Islands, a huge covered resort brought to eastern Germany courtesy of a Malaysian entrepreneur and a failed plan to transport freight in zeppelins. Could it be the first of many? |
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Can a city ticket its homeless? Nine homeless people who have been cited for illegal sleeping - one while she waited in vain for a shelter bed - have filed a class-action lawsuit in San Diego federal court. |
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In Los Angeles, a unique plan to dull the roar of jets City officials have agreed to soundproof schools and cut pollution as LAX prepares for an $11 billion expansion. |
Monday, December 20, 2004
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Transforming the Skyline and the Green Building Market The scale of the environmental commitment at One Bryant Park is the largest of its kind, ever. At 54 stories and 2.2 million square feet, the thorough and thoughtful stewardship of energy and resources will rank it as the preeminent example of sustainable architecture on earth. |
Saturday, December 18, 2004
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Urbocentrism Hyperurbanism marks the end of the city and the beginning of urbanity as a general condition. This is not the urbanity of contained concentrations of people, nor of the ideal of the Polis — self-governing concentrations of people. The contemporary urban is is dispersed, fragmented and manifested in both intense and weak forms. Its arrival marks the end of a spatial model of the city as a meaningful category of analysis. |
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To Make a Sewage Treatment Plant Pretty Patricia Johanson doesn’t merely decorate with site specific art–she cultivates and grows the site itself. For twenty years now, her parks, ponds, marshes and labyrinth-like paths have metamorphosed ecological disasters into halcyon refuges |
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Battling Urban Sprawl Depending on whom you talk to, it’s either the most pressing issue of our time or a half-baked liberal scare tactic designed to sever our basic liberties. |
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Sims like us Will Wright invented the most popular computer game on the planet. And it's about building cities, not blowing them up. |
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Elevated Park Could Face Ground Zero A new plan to locate the main World Trade Center vehicle ramps under the future Liberty Park, across Liberty Street from ground zero, is already raising concerns downtown because it may force the park to become as high as a small hill. |
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Too Hip for the Room The United States is no longer a young country; Chicago is no longer a young city. Have we grown too accustomed, too dependent - of the things we've grown most used to? Have we been dulled into a maturity dominated by predictable, dehumanizing routine? |
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Revolution in architecture opens in Curitiba, Brazil An unusual apartment building was inaugurated in Brazil, each of whose 11 storeys turns independently, giving lucky residents 360-degree views of the eco-friendly city of Curitiba. |
Friday, December 17, 2004
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MVRDV in Madrid First a museum in Japan, now apartments in Spain. A remarkable housing project by MVRDV in Madrid nears completion. |
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Parked in a Desert, Waiting Out the Winter of Life SLAB CITY, Calif. - Directions to purgatory are as follows: from Los Angeles drive east past Palm Springs into the bowels of the Mojave Desert. Turn south at the stench of the Salton Sea. Proceed down Highway 111 to the town of Niland, a broken-down place of limited possibilities. |
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Good design enlisted in the service of greater good While architects can do little to end the plague of urban destitution, a small but conspicuous number of them are giving serious thought to what can be done for homeless people until a political solution comes down the pipeline. |
Thursday, December 16, 2004
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In suburbia, garages becoming the new social hotspot Much as Eric Patterson enjoys his house, it's the garage that really rocks. |
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Cradle To Cradle To Washington Last month's U.S. election results elicited the predictable laments from the enviro crowd. "The re-election of President George W. Bush means that polluters will enjoy four more years of lax enforcement," moaned the Natural Resources Defense Council. But the political winds don't seem to ruffle one prominent environmentalist: William McDonough, a 53-year-old architect and man dubbed a "hero for the planet" by Time magazine in 1999. "We don't focus on politics, because they come and go," McDonough said in a phone interview last week, adding, "Republicans are very attracted to what we do." |
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How a tiny, working-class village is beating sprawl. There isn’t anything “new” or “urban” about Chester, a blue-collar village at the eastern edge of Chesterfield County that has long served as a bedroom community for the massive DuPont plant along U.S. Route 1. |
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Architects as saints or psychos If you've ever chuckled at how your job is portrayed in the movies, be glad you're not an architect. On film, we're either saints or we're psychos. Judge for yourself: |
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My subway map is my memory album Some people keep checklists of the countries they have visited, noting every new stamp in the passport. As for me, I keep tabs on every subway stop I take. |
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Former ‘Belly of Paris' to get makeover Les Halles, the crowded commercial neighbourhood in the heart of Paris immortalized in Emile Zola's 1874 novel The Belly of Paris but now shunned as an urban eyesore, is being given new life with an ambitious project to turn it into a user-friendly “work of art.” |
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
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Everyone deserves a well-designed house The critics of suburban sprawl are missing the public's eagerness for new ideas. |
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Parking This issue, LINE asks the question of the moment: to park or not to park? We tackle the parking myths and ask how to work parking in--and when and why to leave it out. |
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
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If you build it, they will cringe Slablike tower doesn't fit in on slopes of San Bruno Mountain. |
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The Building That Has Toronto Looking Up Okay, here's the report: The "flying rectangle" on McCaul Street, aka the Sharp Centre for Design of the Ontario College of Art and Design, is every bit as astonishing and delightful in real life as it appears in photographs. |
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Report gives communities a tool to match development to growth As the USA plans for the population growth from 2000 to 2030, the number of additional people it will have to accommodate looms large: 94 million. |
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Aichi, a model 'green' city A model “green” city promoting a sustainable way of living is taking shape in Aichi, Japan. A 173ha area of public park comprising the Nagakute Area (158ha) and Seto Area (15ha) is being transformed into the site for the 2005 World Exposition that will run between March 25 and Sept 25 next year. |
Monday, December 13, 2004
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Self-Storage The modern urban traveler tends to move through the day at an allegro pace: he speeds around absorbing too much information to process and, come nightfall, crashes hard. At which point, all the day's complicated protocols are swamped by a simple biological imperative: tune out and recharge. There's no need to bring broadloom or satellite TV into the equation. This person is whipped; all he requires to fall asleep is a little slice of real estate where kids can't poke him and the rain won't short out his BlackBerry. |
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Micropolis, The It's probably easiest to define a micropolis by what it isn't -- namely, a metropolis, which typically comprises a dense ''core'' city of more than 50,000 people surrounded by a large cluster of suburbs and exurbs. Since 1950, the United States Census Bureau has divided the country into broad swaths of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. According to the census, you were either in a metro area or you weren't. Any middle ground between big-city living and remote rural living went unrecognized. |
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Parisian blot to learn its fate The new face of Les Halles, arguably the ugliest scar to disfigure the world's most beautiful city, will finally be unveiled this week when the mayor of Paris announces which of four competing projects he has chosen to revamp the sprawling concrete and glass monstrosity. |
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Small cars get ticketed in SUV land When he came out of a Contra Costa County Mayors' Conference meeting in Walnut Creek awhile back, Martinez City Councilman Bill Wainwright was surprised to see a ticket on his windshield. He was even more surprised when he saw what it was for. Wainwright had been tagged for having too small a car. Seriously. The city parking lot where he had found a spot has two rows of slots reserved for vehicles 6-foot-5 inches or taller, according to a sign posted in the garage. Wainwright, with his Acura, was too short to park there. |
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Poor, Sexy Berlin The failure of urban planning. |
Saturday, December 11, 2004
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Listening to the City. Instead of telling the city what to do, which is the way urban planners typically operate, we decided to really listen. |
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Culture Call: An Interview with Bruce Mau Designer Bruce Mau's career has been wide-ranging. In 1995, he collaborated with Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture on S,M,L,XL. In 2000, he published Life Style, an investigation into contemporary image culture. This year, he returns with Massive Change. What's new about this project? The scale, for one. Massive Change is not just a book. It is also a major exhibition, a radio show, a website, a lecture series, and a poster project. As our twenty-minute interview reveals, it was the product of an extensive collaboration between Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries, a post-graduate research laboratory that Mau launched in partnership with George Brown-Toronto City College. |
Friday, December 10, 2004
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spacing Thanks to spacing for listing urbanism.org as one of their featured websites in the latest issue. spacing is Toronto's public space magazine but the topics they cover are universal. Run entirely by volunteers - spacing, like cities, needs your involvement to thrive. Check out the articles online and then subscribe and support the celebration of public space. |
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A symbol of city's renewal deserves to be preserved In the late 1950s, when Philadelphia Mayor Richardson Dilworth was beginning his assault on urban blight, he decided the renewal program needed a dramatic boost. So the mayor moved his family to a brand-new, colonial-style house in a decaying slum we now know as Society Hill. |
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Beautiful, brutal: but what about the people? On the edges of an artificial lake at Pampulha, outside the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, stand four small architectural masterpieces. But the complex - designed by the country's most famous architect, Oscar Niemeyer, in the early 1940s - never really served its intended function. A dance hall was too far from public transport to be popular for the city's residents. The church was not consecrated for many years, the casino was never used because gambling was illegal and the lake was so polluted with untreated sewage that no one ever wanted to go to the yacht club. |
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Kids riding down road to ruin Cars are not a kid's best friend. In fact, just the opposite: Because kids ride instead of walk, cars help make them fat. Cars pollute the air kids breathe. And cars kill them by going too fast. |
Thursday, December 9, 2004
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Logistical Metamorphosis A collection of old industrial sheds and warehouses in Krems, Austria has experienced a metamorphosis into a high-tech research center for Eybl International, a leading supplier of textiles to the automotive industry. |
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Lessons for Designers What do architect Robert Venturi and photographer Stephen Shore have in common? |
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Let city dwellers sneer -- the suburbs did, and do, cast a spell Here amid what passes for winter in the Bay Area, with rain in the forecast and hints of frost on the ground, the indolent allure of a 1950s suburb is seductive and strong. |
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A new vision for suburbia Announcing plans for nearly 80 new suburbs on Sydney's south-west and north-west fringes, the Premier, Bob Carr, yesterday pledged that every resident will be within walking distance of a shop. "It really tackles the quality of life. We've got to see that in these new-release areas families have got to have walking distance to the shops," Mr Carr said. |
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Farmers Being Moved Aside by China's Real Estate Boom For five months, Gao Lading and other angry farmers had occupied the walled compound of the Communist Party's village office. They had pitched tents, eaten rice and sweet potatoes, and waited. |
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Viaduct is out; tunnel is in After years of debate, Seattle joined forces with the state and federal governments yesterday to say the best replacement for the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct is the most expensive option -- a six-lane tunnel. |
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
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Sizzle to Fizzle East Asian cities are giants of culture and commerce, but have they hit their growth ceiling? |
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Box city: Education applied to the real world This week 350 city planners and architects will present a new city to the public. However, the buildings are ankle-high and the workers still have recess. Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders in eight Salt Lake schools have been toiling for the past eight weeks building the city — all the while getting an up-close and personal look at the world of architecture. |
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
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Roads Gone Wild No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer. |
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Exporting Exurbia The recent opening of Wal-mart in San Juan Teotihuacán, a mere 1.5 miles from the ruins, offers a glimpse into America’s largest exportable entity: Wal-mart-urbia. |
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Sandblasters to tarnish Gehry's shiny design It has been acclaimed as one of the finest buildings in the US, possibly anywhere. Its billowing stainless-steel walls, wrote one critic, are "harmonious and incomparably beautiful, the colours changing depending on where the sun is". |
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Heat wave risk rising with emissions For the first time, a study ties human-influenced global warming to the likelihood of extreme summers. |
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Walking the Unfriendly Streets Walkers are far more likely to be killed in street accidents than are motorists, according to a report on pedestrian safety released yesterday. |
Monday, December 6, 2004
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Good Design Keeps the Doctor Away Are our cities making us sick? Will children born today die fatter, more sugar-saturated and at a younger age than their parents? |
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The Horrors of Suburbia My archnemisis is suburbia. It is the enemy to my genious, bane of my existence. I plan to dedicate my efforts to its destruction through prudent urban planning. Let us look at how this abomination of Human civilization came to be. |
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City Was a Blank Canvas Artists open studios in empty storefronts and add color to struggling Pittsfield, Mass. Now the mayor hopes for an economic renaissance. |
Saturday, December 4, 2004
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Please yield to American heroes in the crosswalk Dear Mr. Chrysler Pacifica Driver: You might recall, sir, that you almost ran me over the other day when I was crossing the street. |
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Licenses Take a Back Seat As high schools cut driver's education, fewer teens are getting behind the wheel. Nerves and costly private lessons also factor in the trend. |
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Property taxes rising nationwide While fuel prices may be starting to skid, there's another expense closer to home that is upsetting many Americans: rising property taxes. |
Friday, December 3, 2004
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If only we could wave a wand and make them disappear. Alas, our ugly buildings are here to stay. |
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A restless baron Lord Norman Foster“Well, what can I tell you that you don’t already know?” says Norman Foster, as he sits down to be interviewed. |
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California company offers workers 'hot deal' for purchasing a hybrid An environmentally minded California software firm says it will give $5,000 to every one of its 1,500 U.S. workers who buys a gas-electric hybrid vehicle rated 45 miles per gallon or more in highway driving. |
Thursday, December 2, 2004
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Steven Holl. Eight Towers and a Flying Ring Outside Beijing’s historic walls, the American architect is building a “city within a city” for 2,500 inhabitants complete with a flying ring of public spaces. |
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Shopping Nation Driven by desire that can slide into addiction, Americans flock to malls, elevating consumption to a sacred and communal act. |
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'Exurbs' flourish, but is this really what we want? The evidence is increasingly powerful: The action, in terms of population, job growth and even politics, seems to be in the USA's outer suburbs, or "exurbs." And it's long past time to talk about whether this is the way we want to grow our country and build our communities. |
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Is China Ready to Embrace Sustainability? By the end of 2010, all Chinese cities will be expected to reduce their buildings’ energy use by 50 percent; by 2020, that figure will be 65 percent. Furthermore, by 2010, 25 percent of existing residential and public buildings in the country’s large cities will be retrofitted to be greener; that number will be 15 percent in medium-sized cities and 10 percent in small cities. Over 80 million square meters of building space will be powered using solar and other renewable energies. |
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Think your commute is tough? The hard-and-fast rule on Martz Trailways Bus No. 101: no talking. Almost as soon as the bus lurches from the station at 5:05 a.m., the 42 bleary-eyed commuters slouch into their seats and squeeze as many z's as they can on the two-hour ride into New York City. The only sounds are soft snores. |
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Concrete achievements Today they are designing houses, schools and shops. But these architects are all set to build the Gherkins of the future. |
Wednesday, December 1, 2004
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Better urban design can bring community together Social researcher Hugh Mackay says people are lamenting society's degenerating morality and loss of their sense of community. He thinks the real challenge is about connecting people through better urban design. |
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New Beijing airport to be world's biggest A new airport being built by the Chinese government in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics will be the world's biggest and be "truly awesome", according to its British architect, Lord Foster. |
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Too big - a city out of control Auckland is bursting at the seams, and the brake designed to stop the city's urban sprawl appears to be failing. |
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