MetaFilter posts tagged with newurbanism

Cities for People

parudox — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:38:08 -0800

Danish architect Jan Gehl on making cities safe for people, the art and science of designing good cities for walking, and how to plan good cities for bicycling.

The Growth Ponzi Scheme

parudox — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 11:08:46 -0800

The Growth Ponzi Scheme, a series of five blog posts on the financial underpinnings (or lack thereof) of the American post-war development pattern. 1: The Mechanisms of Growth - Trading near-term cash for long-term obligations. 2: Case studies that show how our places do not create, but destroy, our wealth. 3: The Ponzi scheme revealed - How new development is used to pay for old development. 4: How we've sustained the unsustainable by going "all in" on the suburban pattern of development. 5: Responses that are rational and responses that are irrational.

A City for the Motor Age

barnacles — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:30:38 -0800

New Urbanism (previously) is a hot topic these days, yet its core idea of building walkable cities that rely less on automobiles can be traced to a city plan created almost a century ago: the Radburn Design. The Radburn design (PDF), created in the 1920s, was the brainchild of Clarence Stein and Henry Wright working in conjunction with the Regional Planning Association of America. This group of architects and planners wanted to develop a community that would minimize accidents caused by car/pedestrian contact. The general idea of the plan was to create a hierarchical system of roads, each of which carried a different amount of traffic. The most traveled roads would run completely around the outside of the community, while those that entered the community would carry much less traffic. The least traffic of all would run on housing streets, and these streets would terminate in what is perhaps Radburn’s most lasting legacy: cul-de-sacs. Houses in the Radburn design were built on superblocks of land in the middle of the housing streets. All houses were built with their backs to the roads, while the fronts faced other houses across common green areas. The original plan for Radburn was for a 30,000 person city, but the market crash of 1929 meant that only 10% of the city could be built. While a few other places in the US experimented with the Radburn design before WW2, it never became very widespread, perhaps due in part to a miscalculation by Stein and Wright as to how popular car travel would become. Post-war city planners in Australia and the UK tried to combine ideas from the Radburn design with then-contemporary ideas about public housing, often seeming to use the worst of each system in their new creations. In Australia, it was implemented in a number of locations, such as Canberra (e.g., Char nwood), the Gold Coast, Sydney (Rosemeadow Estates), and near Melbourne. In recent years in both Australia and the UK demolitions have taken place to start over and erase old Radburn-design areas. Radburn’s legacy seems to be a cautionary tale for unfettered planning optimism (PDF). Radburn, NJ, however, is still a working community and “a town for the motor age.”

Freeways Without Futures

Afroblanco — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 10:02:22 -0800

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.

So, it wasn't the Happiest Town on Earth?

amberglow — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:54:55 -0800

Remember the Town Disney Built? -- 50% of the homes in Celebration, Florida are up for sale. A failure of corporate-owned and -planned Community™? or just a fallout of the bursting of the housing bubble? And whither New Urbanism? Celebration's Front Porch (home page) a neo-traditional architectural view: The Celebration Controversies

Nikos Salingaros, Architecture Theorist

jayder — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 09:38:52 -0800

Nikos Salingaros is a mathematics professor and architecture theorist. His career has crossed disciplines: after starting out as a painter, Salingaros earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and published work in mathematics and physics. In 1983 Salingaros helped edit Christopher Alexander's book The Nature of Order (here are Salingaros' notes on the book), and thereafter began a career as a noted architecture theorist in his own right. Salingaros is an advocate for "new urbanism" in architecture, and he champions the ideas of architect Léon Krier (the "godfather of new urbanism") with the "pattern language" theory of Christopher Alexander ^(wiki). The excellent arts blog 2Blowhards conducted a fascinating five-part interview with Salingaros: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Salingaros just published a new book, A Theory of Architecture (2Blowhards discusses it here) with a preface written by HRH the Prince of Wales ^(wiki).