cities
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Infographic: World’s tallest buildings OF THE FUTURE
(click to embiggen) Buildings are getting to be so tall that the Council on Tall Buildings came up with a new name for their most extreme versions: Megatall. This is density taken to an extreme that may not be all that helpful. For one thing, people, goods, and water have to be moved all the […]
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Cities: Not quite as awesome as we like to think
Photo: David Graham If you Google the term “a scholar and a gentleman,” the first result to pop up is a picture of Witold Rybczynski — or it would be if there were any justice in the world. Rybczynski is an architect, author, and professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written […]
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Green giants: Seattle gets even greener, starting with its biggest buildings
Brian Geller, executive director of the Seattle 2030 DistrictPhoto: Greg HanscomSeattle, a.k.a. the Emerald City, looms Oz-like in the imaginations of eco-minded architects and designers. Its reputation for being uber green drew architect Brian Geller to the city from New York a few years ago. Now, he looks at the skyline rising above Elliott Bay […]
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Has dense living gotten too dense?
Thinkers like Ed Glaeser, whose ideas have been discussed frequently on Grist, assert that density is an unalloyed good, and even Manhattan isn't dense enough. But there is another strand of thought about cities, which is that they are neither green nor sustainable, and it's exemplified by everyone's favorite foul-mouthed catastrophist, James Howard Kunstler. In […]
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Coloring inside the lanes: Art that creates community
Sunnyside Piazza.Photo: Daniel Etra Cross-posted from Sightline Daily. What if all it took to build better neighborhoods was a little paint? Walking in southeast Portland, I once stumbled on a horizontal rendition of a sunflower, painted curb to curb on the intersection of Southeast 33rd and Yamhill. Sunnyside Piazza, it is called, which may seem a […]
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Cool map shows density at a glance
The pixels on Fathom Information Design's Dencity map get smaller the more people they represent — meaning that sparsely-populated areas are low-resolution, and densely-populated ones are sharp and bright. It illustrates both the positive and negative aspects of density: Each pixel gets less space the more pixels there are, but that means that denser areas […]
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Anonymous vigilantes clean up Bangalore
The Indian city of Bangalore is not the cleanest, apparently. So a group of young Bangaloreans is cleaning up the city, a block at a time. And they're doing it anonymously. After a year of "spot-fixing," the group — they call themselves the "Ugly Indians" — has managed to clear more than eight miles of […]
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The next small thing: How sustainable neighborhoods could reshape cities
Lower Downtown Denver has become the city’s night life hub — and a laboratory for community-level sustainability.Photo: Wally GobetzI once worked for a New Yorker who loved to wisecrack that the only difference between Denver and yogurt was that “yogurt’s got culture.” Looking at the Mile High City’s endless sprawl of lookalike, Anywhere, U.S.A. subdivisions, […]
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How Baby Boomers doomed the exurbs
Homes and strip malls in America's outer-ring suburbs, which contained most of the country's most expensive homes in the 1990s, are now worth less than what it cost to build them. And the land beneath them is worth effectively zero, says Brookings Institution senior fellow Christopher B. Leinberger, in a powerful op-ed arguing that the […]
