urban planning
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Older urban preservationists risk becoming urban fossils
For young urban advocates in Washington, D.C., change is good. Their elders, traumatized by the 20th century, have trouble looking forward.
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Bicycle vendors can help bring dead urban spaces to life
In China, peddlers who pedal sometimes improve poorly planned streets.
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Snotty locavores, agrarian urbanists, vegivores, and more
This week's tasty links from around the Web include pieces on the tendency to self-righteousness among hardcore locavores and the role of green space in high-density cities.
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Garden designer Lynden Miller says a healthy city needs beautiful parks
"Every human being responds to a connection with nature," says Lynden Miller, who has designed many of New York's most successful public gardens. "People of all kinds love something beautiful and will talk to each other when they see it. They change the way they behave. It changes the way they feel about themselves and each other."
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If you want a model city, fix the one you've got
Cities achieve greatness because they are containers for difference -- places where people and ideas bump into each other, where assumptions are constantly challenged, where classes and attitudes rub shoulders and jostle each other. So how do we make cities smarter (in the sustainability sense) without building a world of sterile municipalities from the ground up?
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How the places we live make us sick, and how they could heal us instead
Our built environment is quite literally driving us down the road to obesity and stress. A group of planners in Vancouver wants to turn that around.
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How automobiles make our streets less livable [VIDEO]
Sure, you know who Jane Jacobs is. But have you ever heard of Donald Appleyard? In his pioneering book Livable Streets, Appleyard documented how cars destroy a sense of neighborhood. A new video brings his research back to life.
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Will Los Angeles ever be something besides a "suburban metropolis"?
In the Los Angeles Times, architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne writes about the widening gap between those who favor a denser, more pedestrian-friendly LA and those who would prefer to remain in their cars.
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Does new public transit increase gentrification and lower ridership?
Smart Planet points us to a report from the Dukakis Center at Northeastern University that concludes that new transit can lead to gentrification.
