cities
-
New walk-scoring tool finally acknowledges that walking in the suburbs sucks
At Atlantic Cities, Sarah Goodyear puts her finger on a truth universally acknowledged by everyone in the world except WalkScore: “A mile in an American suburb is a lot longer than a mile in Rome.” In other words, walking 10 city blocks is very different from walking a mile up the side of a highway […]
-
9-year-old’s lemonade stand raises over $3,000 for Detroit parks
Due to Detroit's budget gap, the park in Joshua Smith's neighborhood was full of tall grass and trash. Instead of moping and watching TV, the 9-year-old took matters into his own hands.
-
In Brooklyn, even the factories are artisanal
Manufacturing is back in Brooklyn! But only in a Renaissance Florence sort of way, where skilled artisans produce craft-objects for wealthy patrons with finicky desires. The New York Times reports that there are, against all odds, still factories in Brooklyn, although they’ve morphed from behemoth plants stamping out assembly-line goods to smaller shops: This building, […]
-
Crowdfund your community project with Brickstarter
Bryan Boyer and Dan Hill may be saints, sent down on high by the God of City Planning. They have come up with a tool that may actually make the process of improving a neighborhood less tedious, less difficult, and less prone to 10-hour-long community meetings in which everyone has to say what they think. […]
-
These trees on wheels double as wifi hotspots
It doesn’t seem fair that car-owning people can use parking spots (or rent them at extremely low rates) to store their cars, but the car-free don’t get to use them to store our stuff. We have 50 cents, and we live here too! Fortunately, Milanese designer Matteo Cibic has found an easy way for the […]
-
New York City is making cyclists go to remedial biker’s ed classes
New York City is treating wayward cyclists the same way a driver who’s racked up one too many DUIs might be: It’s sending them to class to review the basic rules of the road. The New York Times reports: This spring, the Midtown Community Court began sentencing cyclists who had been issued tickets for certain […]
-
These fruit-shaped bus shelters make public transit more delicious
Waiting for a bus is never the most fun part of a commute, but if you lived in Isahaya City, Japan, you could at least pretend you were some kind of magic bus-riding mouse in a fairy tale. Bus shelters in the city are sculpted and painted to look like giant fruit.
-
City officials are waging a war on gardens
We've heard one too many stories in which people decide to use their yards to grow some fresh vegetables, only to have city officials come down hard on them, forcing them to tear out their food or bulldozing the gardens themselves.
-
19th-century London had a train line just for dead people
Back in mid-19th century England, public transportation was popular enough that even dead people had their own railway. P. D. Smith writes: The London Necropolis Railway station was constructed by the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company, specifically to serve their Brookwood Cemetery, 25 miles away in Woking, Surrey. The Company’s logo was, somewhat ghoulishly, […]