urban planning
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Surprise! Times Square air cleaner now that cars are gone
Refreshing, isn’t it?Photo: Ed Yourdon Despite positive reviews from local business owners, area workers, tourists, and other human beings, New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo won’t stop frothing at the mouth about the pedestrian plazas in New York’s Times Square, lamenting that the once car-clogged streets have become “asphalt loitering grounds,” and that the redesign […]
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Walk this way: How to get a crosswalk on your street
Too many American streets and roads are missing something.Photo: Nicholas_TCreating an environment where people can get across the street without being killed by a driver should be a top priority for the people who design our streets and roads, don’t you think? Sad to say, it isn’t always so. You only have to take a […]
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Seoul tears down an urban highway and the city can breathe again
This downtown green space in Seoul was once a looming, congested elevated freeway.Photo: Kyle NishiokaCross-posted from Sightline’s Daily Score blog. As a sustainability-loving transportation planner, I was thrilled to learn that Dr. Kee Yeon Hwang would be visiting Vancouver and talking about the project that has made Seoul, Korea a legend in urban planning circles: […]
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China’s ghost cities and the biggest property bubble of all time
A couple of months ago, a lot of people were passing around the news about China’s plan to create a megacity that would be home to 42 million people, the so-called “Turn the Pearl Delta Into One” idea. The reporting was generally favorable, painting a picture of economic growth and opportunity — the narrative of […]
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New ‘Tactical Urbanism’ guide for aspiring guerrilla urbanists
With a few trees, some sidewalk tables, and lots of community input, a Dallas street was transformed.Photo: Go Oak Cliff Do you have the power to make your city a better place? It might be easier than you think. The Next Generation of New Urbanists (yes, these are young New Urbanists, because New Urbanism has […]
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Does sprawl development drive away talented professional people?
Troy, Michigan: can this place be saved?Photo: Wayne Senville, Planning Commissioners JournalThere’s a great discussion going on at the indispensable blog about the industrial Midwest, RustWire.com. It was prompted by their posting last week of a letter from Andrew Basile, Jr., the CEO of a legal firm with offices in Troy, Mich., entitled “Why our […]
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Traffic-snarled LA goes bike-wild with 1,600 miles of lanes
The Backbone Bikeway Network proposed by the L.A. Bike Working Group was incorporated into the city’s master plan for 1,680 miles of new bike lanes.Graphic: LA Bike Working GroupThe cab driver who cut off Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa when the mayor was riding his bicycle last year may have done the city a huge […]
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Move over, Banksy: Candy Chang’s art might actually save the world
Photo: Cesar HaradaCan art save our cities? If it’s Candy Chang’s crowdsourced fantasy urban planning, then yeah, probably. Chang’s “I Wish This Was” project challenges New Orleans residents to project their ideal neighborhood onto the still-struggling post-Katrina landscape. The installation is simple: just a bunch of blank “my name is”-style stickers that say “I Wish […]
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They just don’t build virtual cities like they used to
In the NYC Panorama, the Empire State building is only 13cm tallPhoto: John Pavlus The Panorama of the City of New York is one of a kind: Built under Robert Moses himself for the 1964 World’s Fair, its 9,335 square feet encompass “every single building constructed before 1992 in all five boroughs,” or 895,000 individual […]
