urban planning
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Steve Price
Art: Nat Damm Steve Price Digital Designer, Urban Advantage El Cerrito, Calif. Digital artist Steve Price, 59, wants to show you the future of green urbanism—literally show you. He creates photo simulations of what blighted urban landscapes would look like if they were transformed into healthier, safer, more sustainable places—and pretty sweet spots to live. […]
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Mike Mathieu
Art: Nat Damm Mike Mathieu Founder, Front Seat Seattle, Wash. After working at Microsoft and founding an internet publishing firm, Mike Mathieu, 41, decided to put his software smarts to work for the greater social good. Seattle-based Front Seat, which he founded and chairs, has launched “civic software” projects like Walk Score, which shows you […]
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Sammy Slade
Art: Nat Damm Sammy Slade Member, Board of Aldermen Carrboro, N.C. Sammy Slade, 35, has a vision for Carrboro, N.C., a bustling, densely populated town that borders Chapel Hill. Where other people see a conventional burg with lots of single-family houses and lawns, Slade sees one big community farm for a post-oil era. Bikes, pedestrians, […]
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Good news for Earth Day: We can reduce climate pollution and boost the economy, all at once
Putting a price on carbon pollution is an important part of tackling climate change. It’s a way of leveling the playing field, removing an unfair advantage that fossil fuels have always had over clean alternatives. However! Pricing carbon is not the only part of tackling climate change. It’s not even necessarily the most important part, […]
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Making my neighborhood more walkable, sociable, sustainable, and safe
This weekend, I wrote a somewhat abstract post about how America’s built spaces prevent many Americans from connecting with the supportive social networks essential to health and happiness. Let’s zoom from the lofty down to the concrete. Let’s talk about my neighborhood. I live in the Bitter Lake area of Seattle. (In the early 20th […]
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Do you prefer your green space pre-packaged?
This enlightened group of Spanish nightstalkers are fed up with shrinking urban green space. Worried that the most greenery people see nowadays comes in plastic containers with a sell-by date, they decided to prank up the limelight on an ugly corner of Madrid with their Packaged Vertical Garden. We think their style packs way more […]
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Asphalt becomes a developer’s best friend
Photo: jgrimm FlickrNobody loves a parking lot, its endless heat-trapping concrete where visitors wander for what feels like eons, searching for their car. At least, nobody loved them until recently. Suddenly, greyfields–underutilized squares of asphalt–seem like goldmines. (Okay, this happens to be the title of a book on the subject, though it covers dead malls […]
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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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Seoul reengineers a freeway into a stream [VIDEO]
Photo: Fast Company Most metropolis’ are so busy building the future that they don’t have time to re-think the past. Not so with Seoul, South Korea. In 2003, the city demolished a downtown freeway to restore an ancient stream that once flowed beneath the thoroughfare. More than 75 percent of the scrap material from the […]
