“Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents [...]
Over a decade ago, as the population of Shanghai soared, density was at an all time high and Chinese urban planners, realizing the city’s growth was unsustainable, they proposed a new solution to the problem: decentralization. The “1 city, 9 towns” project revealed in 2001 was proposed as a creative solution to the increasing urban [...]
A tremendously ambitious book, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein attempts to create a language that developers and urban planners can use to shape our environment. The author’s intent is to create a universal language that can be applied to all development projects, in an attempt to encourage the creation of [...]
Last month, I was able to share some information with you about an exciting transit project that I have had the pleasure of working on in Kane County, IL – the Randall/Orchard Road Bus Rapid Transit Study. As I stated then, “Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is a high quality transit service that integrates a variety [...]
When you think of tough neighbourhoods and burroughs like the Bronx in New York, or St Ann’s in Nottingham, you don’t necessarily equate them with energy efficient living. If you consider it living at all, it is most certainly not energy efficient living. However, it is in Nottingham England that city council has made an [...]
The Netherlands is a relatively small country, however it has a considerably sizeable population that is currently in and around 16.5 million. This makes it one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with almost 83% living in urban regions. It is an extremely low lying country with about 50% of its land [...]
The Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART as it is commonly known, is an expansive public transit system in California’s San Francisco Bay Area that has a reputation for being unsafe. Transit police is not a concept unique to just this system, but the BART Police are a strong presence throughout the 44 different stations nevertheless. [...]
New York City, above others, has defined itself through an evolving scholarship connected to its rapidly changing street life. This broad conception of street life has been widely debated and discussed from the standpoint of urban theorists and activists such as Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, whose respective works, The Death and Life of [...]
On the evening of January 29, 2013, roughly 150 people gathered in SPUR’s Urban Center to listen to San Francisco’s Planning Director speak about the city’s present state and future initiatives in an event contentiously titled “The Meanies and the War Mongers: Recent Planning Lessons from SF.” John Rahaim spoke in a direct manner that [...]
Is sustainability measurable? The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) certainly thinks so, and they are working hard to provide professionals working within the development community a framework to bring sustainability to the neighborhood level. The USGBC has been using its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System since 1998 to provide [...]
“Where you live is probably a bigger determinant of your health than whether you have health insurance,” as quoted in a Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative (BARHII) report from 2008. In West Oakland, where 45% of the residents make under $25,000 a year, according to statistics from Mandela Market Place, liquor stores outnumber food [...]
Affordable housing is scarce in the city of San Francisco. Low-income residents and students a-like struggle to get by in a city that is so full of opportunity, yet so economically biased. One viable option towards solving this crisis is utilizing secondary dwelling units, aka “in-law units,” as a way to provide living opportunities that [...]
The new regulatory master plan for the metropolitan area of Athens/Attica 2021 is a ten-year plan of interventions and urban policies founded on the basis of three major pillars – Economy, Society and Environment, while complying with the European directives for cities with compactness. On the other hand, during the last three years, under the [...]
Is it possible for people to connect with nature while living in urban environments? Especially in big cities with poor access green spaces? Here are a few examples of percentages of green space per resident, in a sample of cities around the world: Cape Town: 290 m2/resident And according to a summary of research findings [...]
By all accounts, urban sprawl is a problem that has plagued many metropolitan cities throughout the United States. Like many of these cities, Richmond, Virginia has struggled with the concept of how to control the growing population while still possessing the ability to attract new residents to the area. Recently, many of the city’s efforts [...]
With its 2.5 acres of land, Tempelhof has recently become Europe’s largest unimproved inner-city space. A site for experimental airships already in the 19th century, Tempelhof was one of Berlin’s most central airports for most of the 20th century. From holding a strategic logistic function within the Nazi regime, to providing an air passage during [...]
It is no secret that vacant lots pose difficult challenges by influencing crime and the vitality of residential and commercial areas, which furthermore decreases tax bases and property values for urban areas. It is important now more than ever to address the surplus of vacant lots and properties, which despite good intentions and modest success, [...]
“Rather than being guided, as it should be, by natural systems or human needs, the quality and placement of growth in our regions is largely dependent on the car.“-Peter Calthorpe The newly adopted Austin, Texas city plan, appropriately titled the “Imagine Austin” plan, envisions a less congested and more sustainable city. It turns the conversation [...]
Salishan 7 in Tacoma, Washington is the country’s first Hope VI Redevelopment funded project to achieve LEED-Platinum certification, the United States Green Building Council’s highest LEED for Homes green building standard. The HOPE VI Program was developed as a result of recommendations by National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, which was charged with proposing [...]
In 2011, Ford closed their 122-acre St. Paul, Minnesota plant after 86 years of production. The community has developed around the plant and Ford’s impact on the area is a fixture of this cultural landscape. The closure of automotive plants in the US is not a new phenomenon: In the last 33 years, 267 of [...]
