cities
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Britain’s ‘Coed Darcy’ shows the value of sparkling new towns
Sim Darcy: An illustration of the Welsh urban villageCourtesy The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment Coed Darcy is an oddly named urban village that’s going to be built from the ground up over the next 20 years in southern Wales. It’ll have an impressive 4,000 compact homes, plus commercial space and 1,300 acres of […]
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New homes are cropping up in cities, not suburbs
Today in conventional wisdom–busting news, we learn that grimy old cities are attracting more residential construction than the bright suburban frontier. Urban redevelopment is outpacing fringe sprawl by a solid margin, according to a new EPA study of the nation’s 50 largest metro areas. It’s a “fundamental shift in the real estate market,” says the […]
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If it does matter where CO2 is released, cities are in trouble
There’s some fascinating new research about “CO2 domes,” invisible clouds of carbon pollution that hover above urban areas. Bradford Plumer at The New Republic does a great job setting the context: Does it matter where carbon dioxide is emitted? From a climate perspective, at least, the standard answer has always been, “Not really.” Carbon dioxide […]
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Your street is fat
These California designers and their imaginations. Steve Price shows people what their towns might look like if they were rebuilt along Smart Growth principles. At Narrow Streets: Los Angeles, David Yoon takes comically overbuilt streets in L.A. and Photoshops them down to a human scale. Here’s his reinvention of Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park: On […]
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Digital designer shows what future towns could look like
[vodpod id=Video.16106617&w=425&h=350&fv=] Honolulu, HawaiiIllustrations courtesy Urban Advantage Imagine some ugly, underused street in your town, marked by drab buildings, wide streets, and forbidding expanses of parking lot. If you have to go here at all, chances are you’d prefer to drive. Now imagine it remade into a place where you’d actually want to walk or […]
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London’s transportation transformation for the 2012 Olympics [Video]
Congestion pricing has been a huge success in London — reducing traffic and making money for the city. What’s more, it challenges the notion that cities should be designed around cars rather than people. But as we’ll learn in this episode of e2, congestion pricing is the core of a much more sweeping vision that […]
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Talking Vancouver and successful urbanism on the radio
Photo courtesy BinoCanada via FlickrThere’s only so much to say about the Olympics and climate change. If you’re going to have the games, you’re going to have a lot of air-travel emissions (which account for more than half the climate impact of the Vancouver games). The city of Vancouver, on the other hand, presents a […]
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Inspired transit: Portland gets around
Photos: flickr users b and Jason McHuff Portland, Oregon, is consistently ranked as one of the country’s most livable cities (and it was a Fast City in 2007). And it continues to show solid growth despite having the second lowest per capita transit spending of the 28 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. A system of trains, […]
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Cities vs. suburbs: The next big green battle?
Alex Steffen—futurist, Worldchanging editor, tall person—makes the provocative argument that there’s really no way to make outer-ring suburbs sustainable. He thinks cities vs. suburbs is the political conflict that will define the next decade, a fact that climate-focused groups have been slow to acknowledge. The real potential, he suggests, lies with urban dwellers who don’t […]
