Greening the Ghetto. A TED talk (also on YouTube) on environmental justice and urban renewal by Majora Carter, the founder of Sustainable South Bronx organization. She spoke recently at the Aspen Environment Forum.
posted on Apr 9, 2008 - View this thread

New York City is the greenest city in America. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use.... But this is not necessarily something people want to hear: In a conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in Challenge to Sprawl, I said that the organization's anti-sprawl suggestions and the modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant features with Manhattan-whose most salient characteristics include wide sidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings, and an extensive network of subways and buses. The representative hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating New York City would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the people whom the Sierra Club is trying to persuade
posted on Apr 6, 2008 - View this thread

Docu-Images of China and Tibet. Thomas H. Hahn is a Cornell professor and an excellent photographer. Themed collections include Chinese modern art, urbanisation and architecture, sacred mountains, religion, and historical photographs.
posted on Dec 3, 2007 - View this thread

Peak Suburbia.
posted on Jun 26, 2007 - View this thread

It took a long time for many achievements of the ancient world to be duplicated. The first city to reach one million people was Baghdad in 775 CE (or possibly Rome nine hundred years before), a feat that would not be duplicated until London and Beijing grew in the 19th century. The largest building in the world was the Great Pyramid for forty centuries until the 19th, and the world's current longest canal is over two millenia old. Some mysteries still remain, such as the formula of Greek Fire, but it looks like a different ancient weapon's secret has been discovered, that of Damascus steel. The key ingredient -- nanotech!
posted on Jan 25, 2007 - View this thread

The City Desk is a blog dedicated to covering the history and traditions of a city that does not exist. Get the dirt on about the tramway that never happened or take a gander at fascinating statistics about the population. Heck, there's even a definitive origin for the term "Black Friday."
posted on Dec 22, 2006 - View this thread

Welcome to Urville, the city that autistic Frenchman Gilles Trehin has been designing since he was 12 years old. The drawings, in particular, are incredible.
posted on Mar 28, 2006 - View this thread

Ray Bradbury proposes monorail-bulding in LA.
via
posted on Feb 11, 2006 - View this thread

British public information films. A couple of months back, there was a post about an online exhibition of British propaganda films from WWII. Now, the UK National Archives, who appear to be slowly working their way through the decades, have posted some public information films from the 40s and 50s. BBC News discusses the history of public information films, particularly the famous "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases" (available in Windows Media (sigh) here). My favourite is this optimistic look at how the new towns developed after the war were going to be just *great*. I grew up in a new town - Hemel Hempstead. Let's just say it didn't quite work out that way.
posted on Oct 24, 2005 - View this thread

The Destruction of Medieval Boston - "Most people think of Boston as a dense city, and it is, especially by American standards. Today’s city is, however, a pale shadow of the medieval maze that was Boston before large-scale modern planning and spatial concepts entered the picture... Here is what Urban Renewal replaced."
posted on Jun 24, 2005 - View this thread

Why We Should Build Apartments at Ground Zero by Paul Goldberger:
In an ideal plan, most of Ground Zero would be devoted to housing, hotels, and retail space. Lower Manhattan currently has a range of housing options: the converted lofts of Tribeca, the converted office buildings of Wall Street, and the retro-style apartment complexes at Battery Park City. The one thing missing is experimental architecture. Ground Zero would be the perfect place for an inventive alternative to the prim, packaged urbanism of Battery Park City. [...] With several blocks to build on, Ground Zero provides an opportunity to think not in terms of single buildings that are stand-alone works of sculpture but of ensembles that fit together to make coherent streetscapes and complete neighborhoods – something modern architecture has rarely succeeded in doing, in New York or anywhere else.

Martin Filler in the NY Review of Books on books about the proposals for Ground Zero, including Goldberger's 2004 addition, Up from Zero:
Goldberger's establishment-friendly attitude toward architecture has always lacked a discernible moral center. Although here he displays less of the maddening equivocation that has been his most defining characteristic as a critic, the targets he picks are most often easy ones, and unlikely to bar him from the corridors of power.
posted on Jun 3, 2005 - View this thread

Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighbourhoods 1889-1963. Scholarly urban history project.
posted on Feb 19, 2005 - View this thread

Are these huge gated communities OUR urban future? Enormous gated communities in Latin America - complete with schools, clinics, and a wide array of recreational possibilities - are now billing themselves as Latin America's best example of New Urbanism.
posted on Dec 24, 2004 - View this thread

Town Haul: Architecture and New Urbanism meet Reality TV ^tm in NY and Britain
posted on Oct 18, 2004 - View this thread

Cyburbia - the urban planning portal. (Check out the photo gallery.)
posted on Jun 9, 2004 - View this thread

Boom! A master planned community. Boom! A big-box mall! Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia. This article, by New York Times columnist David Brooks, takes a look at exploding suburbs and exurban migration. This migration is nothing new, author Joel Garreau wrote extensively about it in his 1991 book Edge Cities. The phenomonon really took off after World War II, during the period of post war prosperity, and is best represented by this famous postwar American suburb. A veritable army of "suburban sprawl critics" has emerged over the years including Jane Jacobs and James Howard Knunstler plus many others including some who are predicting the immenent demise of suburbs because of oil depletion. For Brooks the critics of suburbs "just regurgitate the same critiques decade after decade, regardless of the suburban reality flowering around them" but you can't dismiss what the architect Paolo Soleri says about American society that "we have a society that is moving very rapidly to the super-, super-, super-consumptive."
posted on Apr 30, 2004 - View this thread

Creative, cheap, participatory, the most innovative city in the world......Curitiba !! There may be no single, organic and living font of solutions to many of the world's most pressing problems than Curitiba (previous link from Wikipedia, and a bit more of a wonkish summary here), a Brazilian city of 1.5 million that urban planners from around the globe make pilgrimages to, to learn.

On a budget a tiny fraction of those which American cities have at their disposal, how did Curitiba become the world's leading model for urban sustainability and quality of life ? - with possibly the world's most efficient and effective public transit system, a network of parks and greenery far beyond Olmsted's visionary parks, 70% trash recycling, innovative social welfare systems, trees everywhere, and "Lighthouses of Knowledge" with small libraries and free internet access as well, a low cost open university system.....and flowers! Curitiba's pedestrian-only (no cars) city center is filled with gardens.
posted on Apr 13, 2004 - View this thread

Loftcube. I saw this in Playboy and had to look it up. [Flash and music].
posted on Apr 10, 2004 - View this thread

Noiseways. Listen to New York City and Portland Oregon. "The negative effects of noise—stress and the disruption of work, sleep, learning and other activities—are well established by scientific research. And of course it comes as no surprise that there is a lot of noise in New York City. The Noiseways Project intends to complement this knowledge by letting visitors to this Internet site experience the effects of noise through the use of pictures and sound recordings. Instead of presenting data, Noiseways engages the senses."
posted on Mar 19, 2004 - View this thread

Welcome to Rawson, N.D., Population. 6. Are towns like these worth saving? Should these "areas" be allowed to go back to their natural equilibrium between man and nature? Is there a "natural" equilibrium? What does this mean for the future of small towns v. urban sprawl? Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times and Drs. Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers have an idea.
posted on Oct 29, 2003 - View this thread

The Big Urban Game: Minneapolis and St. Paul have just been turned into a 108-square mile game board. The game ends Sunday, so you still have plenty of time to play.
posted on Sep 3, 2003 - View this thread

Why we are all Venetians now Witold Rybczynski talks about the changing functions of cities, urban planning and reuse, and the tourism industry where "the urban experience has become a new product of cities."
posted on Jan 26, 2003 - View this thread

DC Suburbs slowly getting denser I've been a participant for the past 5 years in what is easily the 2nd-3rd most insane housing market in the US: Washington DC. Apartment occupancy is 99% in the desirable areas, and "affordable starter homes" (in finger quotes) are priced at $250-$350k. People with good jobs can barely afford this. So what happens to folks who are just getting their feet on the ground in the country? More the merrier. How do you strike a balance between providing affordable housing that is accessible to living-wage jobs without running out the existing neighbors?
posted on Dec 27, 2002 - View this thread

'You will stay in Saskatoon, you will stay in Moose Jaw': Plan would force newcomers to agree to live outside biggest cities for three to five years A new idea would have immigrants forced to live in rural Canadian communities for the first 3-5 years to offset the fact that young Canadians are fleeing them for the opportunities in the big cities. I sympathize with the loss that rural Canada is facing, I just don't see this working out the way proponents expect.
posted on Jun 23, 2002 - View this thread

ULTRa set for take off in Cardiff! Urban Light Transport is finally here, and trials are under way in Cardiff, Wales for these four passenger driverless cars. It is estimated that the cost of implementation ($60m) will be 1/3 to 1/2 of that of a comparable light rail system.
posted on Feb 24, 2002 - View this thread

The Microflat is a new housing design concept in London. It's a small living space intended for young urban types; as a gimmicky promotion, two people will live in Microflats within a department store. Flash required.
posted on Jan 31, 2002 - View this thread

A developer is pushing new luxury rental apartments in this building in Lower Manhattan with ads on nytimes.com. Rentals are probably slow because the building is five blocks from a disaster zone. But let's all just pretend it's not. Potential renters, take note: "actual view south" may not be the actual view south.
posted on Nov 18, 2001 - View this thread

urban coffee opportunities according to this map, there are 38 starbucks within my area code alone. and right down the block, there are 2 out of 4 storefronts, of which this map only notes one: meaning there are more coffee opportunities available. this is the full link, since i think the first one got cut off.

idea from adbusters, but i did the work myself!
posted on Nov 16, 2001 - View this thread

Do you have a favourite city park? Nominate it for the Great Parks/Great Cities Awards, to be presented this July in New York. And read about Dufferin Grove Park in Toronto; neighbors came together to help the city manage the park when they found out that the Parks Department had allotted no money for its upkeep.
posted on Jun 12, 2001 - View this thread

"Avoiding Downtown easier these days" I wonder what rock these folks have been living under. Would you believe that "thousands of people are able to live, work and have every service available to them without ever going Downtown"? This was a front-page story here, no less.
posted on May 25, 2001 - View this thread

Washington DC Metro Popularity is Possible Problem as physical limitations may hinder expansion and usability in future years.
posted on Mar 26, 2001 - View this thread

In the late 1940s, a builder named William Levitt started a revolution in a Long Island potato field. Levitt built 2,000 simple, identical houses for returning GIs in the midst of a nationwide housing crisis. Levittown, as the development became known, was the first emblem of a new American lifestyle -- suburbanism. "I think the reality of the situation is that the suburbs are going to become the slums of tomorrow ... Some of them will be the ruins of tomorrow." link via thewebtoday.
posted on Dec 7, 2000 - View this thread

"Utopian Architecture" is where it's at. Unfortunately, despite how many people seem to be interested in it, there's very little documentation concerning the subject. The only books I can think of are Yesterday's Tomorrow (1984, MIT Press), Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugo Ferriss and Impossible Worlds by Stephen Coates, and I don't know of any website on the subject.
posted on Nov 19, 2000 - View this thread

Car-free Cities
Would you like to live in a city where everything you need is within a five-minute walk? Where you can get from one side of a city of a million people to the other in less than thirty minutes? Where the air is clean, people are healthy, children and the elderly aren't dependent on others to get where they want to go, and life is beautiful? You can have it all--just ban cars.
posted on May 29, 2000 - View this thread