Urbanism News
Friday, May 9, 2008
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Deep in the basement of an ancient tenement on Second Avenue in the heart of midtown New York City, I was fishing |
Thursday, May 8, 2008
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Cities of the Future, Today As cool as ultra high-performance green buildings are individually, the real action is all with districts. Individual buildings may blaze paths, and as we engage in acupunctural infill (changing sprawling or underused areas into walkable, compact mixed-use communities by adding new buildings and redeveloping older properties -- something we'll be writing more about soon) we're going to need a lot of small-scale, even individual architectural solutions. |
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Urban Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market In the shadows of the elevated tracks toward the end of the No. 3 line in East New York, Brooklyn, with an April chill still in the air, Denniston and Marlene Wilks gently pulled clusters of slender green shoots from the earth, revealing a blush of tiny red shallots at the base. |
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
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Urban Splash's Bridewell Island: winner and runners up The contest for Urban Splash’s Bridewell Island saw two different approaches adopted in designs for the key central Bristol site — construct a new tower or recycle most of what’s already there. |
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Why Airlines Might Abandon Your City Airlines are bailing out of certain cities and routes. Your city could be next. |
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Steal magnolias Gardeners now spend £4bn each year on making the land around their homes more beautiful. But our green-fingered obsession has set off a crime wave, with thieves uprooting plants, trees, lawns, ornaments and even ponds full of fish. |
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Join the urban guerrillas for clandestine night-time gardening Meet 8-ish on the Lambeth Road,” the text read. “Tree pit as yet undecided.” |
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Give us a square foot and we'll give you a year's worth of produce And Mel Bartholomew stumbled upon a simple, even slightly revolutionary, idea a little more than 25 years ago when he coined the term "square foot gardening." |
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Photographer's bird's-eye view finds our surface geometry Pilot and photographer Alex MacLean shoots while he flies. His daredevil antics garner him some amazing color photos that capture the abstract in aerial views without losing the sense of landscape. |
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City under the City Early 2008 an ambitious plan was launched to realize roads and carparks under Amsterdams historic city centre, called AMFORA (Alternative Multifunctional Underground Space Amsterdam). This is a plan by Strukton and Zwarts & Jansma. This infrastructural plan solves parking problems and contains facilities for sports, leisure and recreation. |
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Watershed for this liveable city of ours Melbourne is fast running out of options for growth. The larger city now spreads about 100 kilometres from Melton to Pakenham and from Frankston to Epping, meaning Melbourne has a footprint of about 10,000 square kilometres, and a population of more than 3.5 million people — which by 2030 will approach 6 million. |
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New London Mayor Talks Up Buses and Bikes (Updated) Here's an interview from last year with London Mayor Boris Johnson, who ousted Ken Livingstone last week. It's pretty remarkable in that Johnson spends the first eight minutes talking about buses and bikes. |
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The Machinic Landscape of Tulips Nature turned into a machine, detached from the natural cycles of time and geography — in other words, detached from itself — re-landscaped here to service a $40 billion global flower industry. |
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All Streets All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. This began as an example I created for one of my students in the fall of 2006, and I just recently got a chance to document it properly. |
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Are livable cities just a dream? When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. What always strikes me is the immensity of the project, a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living and working in this wonder, things are quite different and the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill one’s view. The truth is that our cities have always been dominated by the rich and powerful and built and operated to serve their needs — not those of the mass of working people who live and toil in them. |
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Bike Lanes, Intended for Safety, Become Traffic Battlegrounds On streets clogged by pollution-emitting cars, buses and trucks, New York City’s quest to establish reasonably safe cycling paths by adding to its roughly 300 miles of bicycle lanes has been welcomed by cyclists. But the lanes are often battlegrounds between cyclists and drivers who seem undeterred by the clearly demarcated paths. |
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Fighting Global Warming Block by Block King County Executive Ron Sims has a simple test for every new public works project, building plan or government land purchase: Will it increase the region's total greenhouse-gas emissions, or reduce them? |
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Against Planners No profession has done more harm to the American city than urban planners. |
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
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Tired of paying through the nose, Americans try praying at the pump "Someone's making a lot of money and it's really, really wrong," added Twyman, who founded the Prayer at the Pump movement last week to seek help from a higher power to bring down fuel prices, because the powers in Washington haven't. |
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San Francisco sculpted in cookware Beijing-based artist Zhan Wang sculpted the San Francisco cityscape out of pots, pans, graters, and other kitchenware. |
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From Housing Complexes with Love In Japan, housing complexes are ubiquitous but most of them are nondescript and stand there for decades unappreciated. However, there are some wonderful people out there who uncover the special charms of such buildings. |
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Infrastructure and Unfrastructure Here in Minneapolis there's a housing complex called riverside plaza. It was designed by the great Minnesota architect Ralph Rapson and opened in the early 70s. It sits squarely between the university of Minnesota campus and downtown. |
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Crosswalk Culture As virtual bridges crossing the overwhelming number of black rivers, crosswalks may someday be an anthropological resource. Within the accompanying urban signage exists a multitude of behavioral indicators. |
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Growing some food It seems that three different major trends are coming together: historically high transportation costs, a renewed appreciation for local foods, and questions about the viability of the American suburban experiment. At the center of these trends, back-yard gardens have been in the news lately. |
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Top 5 Urban Design Greenifications Nothing says “give us back our space” like some unexpected greenification amidst the pavement-and-concrete dullness of the city. So we’ve picked the top 5 ideas that bring a tasty bite-sized bit of green to our urban stew of gray. |
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An Average American Consumer's Spending Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gathers 84,000 prices in about 200 categories — like gasoline, bananas, dresses and garbage collection — to form the Consumer Price Index, one measure of inflation. |
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Capital holds its breath as all powerful Mayor is deposed... After an extremely tight contest the London populous voted for Conservative candidate Boris Johnson as Mayor over long-serving Ken Livingstone on Thursday.The decision could have a major impact on the future shape of the capital. |
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MIT's work on a zero-carbon city Imagine if the city of Boston were able to emit no carbon and no waste. |
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In praise of the lost art of strolling It was the French who first grasped the cultural significance of walking. The time was the 1800s, the era when Baron Haussmann was reinventing Paris as a city of wide avenues, arcades and, above all, of light. |
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A River Runs Through It Rivers are still the lifelines of American cities, but in a new age of urbanization, once-crowded waterways boast a greener complexion. |
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Life on the ground key to new high-rise area If San Francisco planners have their way, a whole new neighborhood will grow up - literally - south of the traditional Financial District. And here's the punch line: It could feel a lot like midtown Manhattan. |
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UCLA study links poor health to fast-food neighbors Higher rates of diabetes, obesity occur in areas where fast-food restaurants and convenience stores greatly outnumber grocery stores, researchers say. |
Monday, May 5, 2008
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Poultry in motion: Chickens adopting urban lifestyle It's an idyllic scene in a sunny backyard in North Toronto. The forsythia is bright as springtime, and Sally, Heidi and Clucky wander by contentedly. They are plump, vigorous, egg-laying hens that, despite their beauty and utility, are illegal in Toronto. |
Friday, May 2, 2008
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For love of L.A. taco trucks Some residents have launched an Internet fight against an L.A. County law curbing how long the vehicles can remain parked as they sell their wares. |
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No easy access to fresh groceries in many parts of Seattle With two new supermarkets anchoring planned condo buildings, industry standards would say West Seattle has reached a saturation point for grocery stores. Tell that to Maggieh Rathbun. To buy fresh food, the carless Delridge resident has to spend hours on the bus or climb hills as steep as ski jumps. |
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The Incredible Shrinking City When the mills shut down in the 1970s and ’80s, the smokestacks and foundries that symbolized steel belt manufacturing cities gave way to factory shells and rust. First unemployed, workers then began to move away for good. Unlike former steel powerhouses, such as Pittsburgh and Allentown, that have tried to attract new industry and grow their way back to prosperity, Youngstown, Ohio, is hitching its future to a strategy of creative shrinkage. |
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Transbay plan would sprout new S.F. skyline A cluster of skyscrapers rivaling the Transamerica Pyramid would rise around the West Coast's tallest tower under an ambitious proposal that would shift the heart of San Francisco's downtown south of Market Street. |
Thursday, May 1, 2008
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Once it was only God, now we're all 'creators' 'Creativity" is a word much bandied about in our babble of culturespeak. Like "community", it has a warm glow around it, and we rarely give it much further thought. |
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Which side are you on? Today’s buildings have all the hallmarks of being designed by a profession happier to serve its paymasters than the environment or the public |
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Repairing the Local Food System West Oakland is a community with limited access to healthy food. My work for People’s Grocery, a local nonprofit, will help the neighborhood and the nearby agricultural community work together to repair the local food system. |
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