Cities as Software is an article by Marcus Westbury about Renew Newcastle's low-budget, DIY model for renewing urban spaces. "...You need to start by rewriting – or hacking – the software to change not what the city is but how it behaves."
[more inside]
posted by oulipian
on May 24, 2011 -
38 comments
"The plans for Victory City have evolved over a period of 38 years, nurtured by the vision and dedication of Victory City's inventor,
Orville Simpson II [
no relation]. Mr. Simpson conceived of the general idea of Victory City in 1936, when he was only 13 years old. Afraid of being ridiculed, Mr. Simpson kept his ideas about designing and building the City of the Future to himself … a secret vision he held in his mind... It wasn't until 1960 — after he had embarked on a lucrative career in real estate investing and apartment building management — that Mr. Simpson decided to make his ideas about Victory City known to the general public."
posted by Miko
on Dec 7, 2008 -
35 comments
The Congress for the New Urbanism has just released
Freeways Without Future, their top-10 list of aging highways that should be demolished in favor of city-friendly boulevards.
"There's a whole generation of elevated highways in cities that are at the end of their design life," says John Norquist, head of the
Congress for the New Urbanism.
"Instead of rebuilding them at enormous expense, cities have an opportunity to undo what proved to be major urban-planning blunder." Take that,
Robert Moses.
posted by Afroblanco
on Sep 28, 2008 -
54 comments
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 by storybored
on Apr 6, 2008 -
61 comments
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 by Abiezer
on Dec 3, 2007 -
5 comments
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 by athenian
on Oct 24, 2005 -
2 comments
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 by mrbula
on Jun 24, 2005 -
44 comments
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 by gramschmidt
on Jun 3, 2005 -
13 comments
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 by thedailygrowl
on Apr 30, 2004 -
28 comments
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 by troutfishing
on Apr 13, 2004 -
34 comments
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 by Tin Man
on Mar 19, 2004 -
12 comments
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 by Bag Man
on Oct 29, 2003 -
27 comments
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 by kliuless
on Jan 26, 2003 -
12 comments
