Urbanism News
Friday, December 12, 2008
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CHINA ACCORDING TO CHINA Completely filmed by Diego Grass Puga | 0300TV before 2008’s Beijing Olympics and edited right after its ending, “CHINA ACCORDING TO CHINA” presents a set of thoughts by five local architects on China’s current situation and history. |
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New York is finally getting in gear on bike lanes A century ago, our streets were public open spaces, meeting places with markets and stalls and children playing all around. As our love for the automobile took over, so did vehicular traffic. |
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GM's Bust Turns Detroit Into Urban Prairie of Vacant-Lot Farms With enough abandoned lots to fill the city of San Francisco, Motown is 138 square miles divided between expanses of decay and emptiness and tracts of still-functioning communities and commercial areas. Close to six barren acres of an estimated 17,000 have already been turned into 500 ``mini- farms,'' demonstrating the lengths to which planners will go to make land productive. |
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Urbanism Legend: Is Houston really unplanned? It seems to be an article of faith among many land use commentators – both coming from the pro- and anti-planning positions – that Houston is a fundamentally unplanned city, and that whatever is built there is the manifest destiny of the free market in action. But is this true? |
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Can you murder a cyclist with a car? One finds themselves in a confrontation with a cyclist. To teach them a lesson one aims their car at the cyclist and guns it. They strike the cyclist hard, almost removing a limb. A limb that must be later removed during emergency surgery to save the cyclist’s life. Seeing what one just did one speeds off to let the cyclist die in his own pool of blood. When one decides that the heat might be onto to him he turns himself with a trumped up story. Now should one stand accused of attempted murder or for using his car as a weapon to assault a cyclist and remove his leg then lie through his teeth about it in addition to driving badly? |
Thursday, December 11, 2008
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Euroburbia: A Personal View The image of the European city as a tourist’s paradise of charming inner-city neighborhoods interconnected by high-speed rail networks is not entirely false, but it does not give the full picture of how most Europeans live. Contrary to the mythology embraced by romantics among planners and ‘green’ politicians, urban areas of Europe sprawl just as much as any American or Western city. |
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Van Valkenburgh Takes the Boulevard Many New Yorkers are wondering how the Related Companies will muster the wherewithal for its multi-billion Hudson Yards mega-development, but plans are moving ahead for Hudson Park and Boulevard, the newly mapped thoroughfare angling north from the West Side railyards to 42nd Street. |
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Post Carbon Cities 2008 Year in Review 2008 saw a flurry of new government responses to peak oil, plus groundbreaking legislation in California. Also, the oil price spike, the intensifying global recession, and the historic US presidential election have all helped create a sea change in our thinking about energy and what it means for the economy. |
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'Guerilla' Advertising Masquerades as Graffiti Companies are increasingly turning to graffiti and street art to give themselves a more youthful image. Taggers complain that this commercialization could destroy the street art subculture. |
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Northern Virginia Tries New Model To Battle Sprawl Tysons Corner, a sprawling suburban area anchored by two regional malls in Northern Virginia, is slated for an extreme makeover. |
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The Myth of the Happy Homeowner Sure, I know they call it a money pit. And the money pit has turned into a financial death sentence for too many Americans. But it’s a veritable truism that owning a house makes you happy. It’s the pinnacle of the American Dream after all. Not so fast. According to this comprehensive study by the Wharton School’s Grace Wong, those who own their own homes are in fact a less happy lot than those that do not. |
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Book Review: Sensing Cities Mónica Montserrat Degen’s recent book Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester provides an illuminating discussion of the sensuous dimension of the urban everyday, particularly in the context of ‘regenerated’ neighbourhoods. |
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
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Toronto Dialogues It represents the flourishing of a distinctive “Toronto school of urbanism” - descending from Jane Jacobs but evolving from the very real material conditions, issues and challenges facing Toronto in the world economy. |
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Toronto: Poor city beside rich city Loss of middle-income jobs creates urban map with swathes of poverty and pockets of wealth. |
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Spreading suburbs lure birds of a different feather University of Washington researchers have found that development brings not necessarily extinction to native bird species, but replacement with new native species colonizing the suburban environments that used to be forests. |
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Why do architects talk so much? Interviewing celebrated architects can be like Dancing with the Stars. But no matter how big the name, it still takes two to tango. |
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Is Maine kicking its sprawl habit? For decades, suburbs were snared in a spiral of costly sprawl – but recent figures show a dramatic change. |
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MIT SENSEable City Lab In this Seed Magazine video, mathematician Steven Strogatz and Italian architect and designer Carlo Ratti (director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab) discuss whether building and analyzing human networks can help us overcome our poor mathematical understanding of complexity |
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
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Urban farming school takes root A school of urban farming -- a North American first -- is finding fertile soil in Richmond. |
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As others fall, bicycles ride high One comes across surprising nuggets in the financial media, regardless of the economic season. Take for instance a recent story about the bicycle industry. Interestingly, one of the world industries seemingly not suffering in the current worldwide recession, if we can agree that the embargo over calling it that has now expired, is the bicycling business. Top bicycle and bicycle parts makers in Taiwan and Japan are reporting steadily increasing revenues, despite the falling popularity around the world of the bicycle’s four-wheeled cousin. |
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A Waterfront Revival in Columbus, Ohio A decade ago, a 75-acre area along the Scioto River less than a mile west of this capital city’s downtown was an industrial no man’s land, consisting of barren railyards, old warehouses and a shuttered 19th-century penitentiary. But that was before Nationwide Realty Investors, an affiliate of Nationwide Mutual Insurance, turned the area into the Arena District. |
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Industrial strength Historic factory under pressure from the present. |
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Architect finds beauty in the asphalt jungle Most of us walk, drive, and park on it every day, but we rarely give asphalt a second thought - until we trip on a crack or hit a pothole or notice with dismay yet another instance where someone "paved paradise and put up a parking lot," as the Joni Mitchell song "Big Yellow Taxi" recounts. |
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Placemaking Matters More Than Ever in a Down Economy Paying serious attention to places represents a breakthrough for our society, which can spark genuine progress in how we govern ourselves, how we are involved in our communities, how streets and public spaces feel to us, how we shop, work, play and socialize with our friends. If regular folks are encouraged to make the key decisions about their own neighborhoods, towns, cities and regions, a remarkable wave of citizen activity will flourish that can transform our communities in positive ways. |
Monday, December 8, 2008
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My Playground The following is a trailer for My Playground, a new "film about movement in the urban space." The film will be featuring architects, philosophers, urban planners, politicians and a parkour group called Team Jiyo. The setting for the trailer is the Mountain Dwelling apartment in Copenhagen by BIG. |
Saturday, December 6, 2008
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Notes about the Future of Urban Journalism, Part 1 Demise of newspapers is opportunity to re-invent urban journalism.
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Depression 2009: What would it look like? Lines at the ER, a television boom, emptying suburbs. A catastrophic economic downturn would feel nothing like the last one. |
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Mecca redevelopment plan stirs controversy Some Saudis outraged over the King's courting of Western, mostly non-Muslim experts for redesign. |
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A city that works at being green ... and where being green works Freiburg, Germany–It tripped me, causing me to almost break my neck. Or, at least, get annoyingly damp. Regaining my balance I glared at it, growling at my local guide: "Dear friend, wilt thou divulge what that yonder obstacle might be?" Or words to that effect. |
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MVRDV Wins Gwanggyo City Centre Competition in South Korea The Daewoo Consortium and the municipality of Gwanggyo announced the MVRDV concept design for a dense city centre winner of the developer’s competition for the future new town of Gwanggyo, located 35km south of the Korean capital Seoul. The plan consists of a series of overgrown hill shaped buildings with high programmatic diversity, aiming for high urban density and encouragement of further developments around this so-called ‘Power Centre’, one of the envisioned two centre’s of the future new town. |
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Filippo Minelli's "Contradictions" "All my "Contradictions" ongoing project has the same motivation/meaning. Technologies and the marketing behind them usually push the almost religious aspect of their evolution, as also said by Leander Kaheny in his "Cult of Mac" book, and the users are pushed to live in an intense way the abstraction from reality, living technologies only as an idea and sometimes without even knowing their real functions. And this aspect works for the social-networks too. |
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Sucked Into The Tunnels Beneath Las Vegas Hundreds of people live in the hidden matrix of tunnels beneath the Las Vegas Strip. |
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Flip a Strip Strip malls define our streetscapes. Here, and in suburbs across the country, strip malls are a fact of life. They are the wallflowers of thousands of streetscapes that millions of people travel daily. To envision a new future for this lowly (yet overabundant) building stock, SMoCA initiated a national competition that resulted in this exhibition of innovative proposals by a total of 35 architectural teams from around the country, for flipping local strip malls in Scottsdale, Tempe and Phoenix. |
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
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Alone Together Manhattan is the capital of people living by themselves. But are New Yorkers lonelier? Far from it, say a new breed of loneliness researchers, who argue that urban alienation is largely a myth. |
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Cities rack up public artwork with bike racks Bicycle racks that combine the utility of security with the aesthetics of art are popping up across the USA. |
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Will Alsop's urban manifesto (video) Watch and listen to Will Alsop's "Street Creatures" lecture on urban influences – included Corbusier – and the importance of experiencing architecture. |
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Despite Sinking Economy, Work Begins on Super-Tall Shanghai Tower Defying signs that the global economy is in a major downturn, the 2,074-foot-tall Shanghai Tower, designed by Gensler, broke ground on Friday, November 28. The mixed-use glass-and-steel tower is slated to be the tallest building in China. |
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The Pits Walking or riding along the avenues, you can imagine the storefronts without tenants. Bank branches, juice bars, shops selling electronics and scarves: all of them gone, unable to make the rent, and the landlords, verging on default, unable to lure replacements. It’s a feasible scenario, if you consider the consumer-confidence and consumer-price indices, the wealth destruction, all the layoffs and trickle-down effects, and the allegedly unrelated possibility, as the Times reported last week, that “something funny is happening on the dark side of the universe.” (“A better and more enticing explanation for the excess is that the particles are being spit out of the fireballs created by dark matter particles colliding and annihilating one another in space”—and here we were blaming Alan Greenspan.) A friend who worked in Southeast Asia in the nineteen-nineties, during the recession there, recalls visiting Bangkok and Jakarta to see the abandoned high-rises of the preceding economic boom. He found ranges of half-finished buildings, derelict superstructures occupied by tent shanties and with squatters gathered around fires. It may be no great leap from there to a vision here of burning garbage cans and jerry-rigged cardboard in Washington Mutual’s cashless vestibules or the bare aisles of Circuit City. |
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Lower speed limit to tackle obesity crisis, say experts Speed limits in suburban streets should be slashed to 30km/h to encourage pedestrians and cyclists and tackle the obesity epidemic, experts say. |
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Producing land with nested markets When the modernists unleashed their program for simplifying cities, they did not limit themselves to redirecting existing institutions. Within the modernist ideology was implied the idea that transportation, open space and buildings were separate, isolated things and could therefore be made in isolation. This lead them to create entirely new institutions that operated independently. |
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Planners to consider San Francisco congestion charge The idea of making San Francisco the first city in the nation to combat congestion by imposing a toll on motorists who drive on the local roads is "totally doable" from an administrative standpoint, a top city transportation official deemed. |
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Preserving Buildings Helps Preserve the Planet
Communities across the country are grappling with questions about what to do with their older buildings. While we generally think that preserving historic buildings is a way to honor our past, it’s time to understand that it is also a way to protect our future, says Richard Moe, President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation |
Monday, December 1, 2008
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Companies push biking to work Julie Sheu, an employee at the Clif Bar food company in Berkeley, Calif., started biking to work this year, thanks to a one-time benefit her company offers to its employees: $500 to either buy or repair a bike if they pledge to use the bike a minimum of two times per month. |
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Perpetuating Memory Monuments are ammunition in the state’s quest to control what is remembered and commemorated in the public domain. |
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Urban roofs going to seed What if an office building had a roof that filtered water, deflected heat in the summer and kept the building warm in winter? How about if it cleaned the air, too? |
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Wall-E Park On giant piles of trash left by a generation of New Yorkers, landscape architect James Corner is building a park that has the power to change the way we see the past and the future of New York. |
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