built environment
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One way to make cycling more appealing: offer better bike storage
Nearly every major city in the world wants to get more of its residents on bicycles, as transportation hotshot Tom Vanderbilt notes in Slate today. And with good reason: compared to driving, cycling is healthier, greener, safer, quieter, and easier on public roads and congestion. Vanderbilt digs into the idea of “bicycle highways” — dedicated […]
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Portugal’s eco-city, Amazon’s ugly HQ, and more urban notes
Progress toward a sustainable future may be stalled in the Senate, but there’s a ton of news and interesting research happening at the local level on the broad topic of improving built spaces — cities, towns, buildings, transportation systems, etc. A quick roundup from the local solutions beat: Living-PlanIT.comPlanIT Valley: Portugal’s planning to build a […]
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Tell me again why we mandate parking at bars?
They’re not all this big, but you get the pointPhoto: jgrimm FlickrOne of the silliest barriers to green urban development is mandatory sprawl, i.e. local zoning codes that require sprawl-style development, even when consumers (in the “free” market) want to buy property in walkable, compact developments. And one of the craziest examples of this dilemma […]
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Measuring neighborhood diversity and liveliness with ‘JaneScore’
Perhaps you know about Walk Score, the delightfully intuitive tool that calculates how walkable a neighborhood is and ranks it on a 100-point scale. (My Seattle neighborhood gets an 85; my suburban Chicago hometown gets a 31.) It was cooked up by Seattle developer Mike Mathieu and others to help quantify walkability and promote its […]
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Hottie bikers in Miami Beach, Complete Streets in St. Louis
Ten minutes of biking a day and you too can look like this.Decobike.comSpend enough time watching the Senate dither on the climate threat/energy quest/defining challenge of our time and it’s easy to lose sight of the sanity and localized progress happening around the world. A few quick examples: Miami Beach added a bike-sharing program to […]
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Portland Mayor Sam Adams wants ’20-minute neighborhoods’
Newish Portland Mayor Sam Adams wants to build more “20-minute neighborhoods” in his fair city. From a Fast Company interview: We’re also working to make every section of Portland a complete 20-minute neighborhood to strengthen our local economy. Two-thirds of all trips in Portland and in most American cities are not about getting to and […]
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Why urban businesses have better advertising
It’s no secret that there are lots of chain businesses in sprawling areas and relatively more independent businesses in urban cores. The blog Discover Urbanism has a fascinating explanation of how the built environment determines the kinds of businesses — and the types of marketing — that succeed in a given place: The urban and […]
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New Urbanist progress in Atlanta
Sick of those bloggers going on about sustainable urbanism and walkable neighborhoods? You might like the film version: the new American Makeover project has a short video about the Glenwood Park, a New Urbanist project in the sprawl epicenter of Atlanta. Unfortunately, they don’t get into the economics of who can afford to live in […]
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This building is so great it doesn’t fall down
“I don’t think sustainability is a design aesthetic, any more than having electricity in your building, or telephones, or anything else … In 10 years we’re not going to talk about sustainability anymore, because it’s going to be built into the core processes of architecture.” Advertising sustainability will be like an architect getting up in […]