urbanism
-
Cities as software, and hacking the urban landscape
What if saving a rundown city wasn’t about building expensive new infrastructure — hardware, so to speak — but instead reprogramming the existing infrastructure? Changing the software of the place? That’s the analogy used by Marcus Westbury, founder of Renew Newcastle, an innovative initiative that has breathed life into the vacant downtown of that Australian […]
-
Great places: reorienting progressive politics for the 21st century
This is part one in a series on “great places.” Read parts two, three, four, and five. I asked a while back what new vision or principles could unite the left’s fractious coalition. As you probably guessed, I’ve got a pet idea along these lines. It’s a bit out in left field, at least in […]
-
Bringing a dead public plaza to life in Dallas
Cross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Although it sometimes makes “ugliest building in the world” lists, I rather like I.M. Pei’s iconic Dallas City Hall, featuring his trademark architectural triangles. Photo: Chris Zúniga But I’ll grant that it is imposing. What I don’t like is the vast, forlorn “plaza” and pool that separates the […]
-
Detroit mayor celebrates demolition of 3,000th building
Who's ready to party like it's 12/12/2012? Detroit mayor David Bing, that's who! In an announcement made via Twitter, his office proudly declared that the city had demolished its 3,000th building of 2010. That's 10 times the rate at which the city demolished buildings in 2009. Bing's stated goal is the erasure of 10,000 blighted, […]
-
Home tweet home: Twitter chooses the city over sprawl
I spent the last couple of days at a conference about climate, cities, and behavior. One topic that kept coming up among the municipal officials there — from places like New York, Denver, Vancouver, Richmond, and San Francisco — was the importance of walkable downtowns to attracting business and investment. Amenities like good transit, bike […]
-
Salt of the earth: Environmentalists and urbanists collide in San Francisco Bay [UPDATED]
In a collection of salt evaporation ponds tucked between a freeway, a sleepy little marina, and the headquarters of Dreamworks Animation, the San Francisco Bay’s ecological future hangs in the balance. The ponds themselves look deceptively blank: Vast flat rectangles of shallow water once used by Cargill to produce salt, the two-and-a-quarter square miles are […]
-
City birds have bigger brains than country birds, says study
Will the intrusion of cities into the natural environment cause birds to become brainier? That appears to be the case, say a passel of ecologists in the April 27 issue of Biology Letters. (This story has no implications for humans. Really. It just illustrates a principle that might possibly generalize to other animals. Including apes? […]
-
Developer to make sprawl slightly less bad by putting solar panels on it
Oh man, one more of these and it's a New York Times trend story: First it was sprawl developers who had to give away cars in order to sell their McMansions in the eighth circle of exurban hell, now it's some developer in Phoenix who wants to attract baby boomers to purchase 11,200 new homes by […]
-
The solution to the parking problem is charging through the nose for it
Normally, when a resource is scarce, we let the market set its price. So why not do the same with parking? That's what the city of San Francisco has decided to to, because it is populated with geniuses who own iPads and still manage to get a tan. By using “demand pricing” — in which […]