MetaFilter posts tagged with urbanplanning

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.

The body of the city

Horace Rumpole — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:29:48 -0800

Visualizing Early Washington. A project at the Imaging Research Center of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County has reconstructed the original landscape of Washington DC before its radical transformation into a modern capital city. Be sure to view the animation either embedded in the WaPo story or (sans advertising) at the "reconstructed the original landscape" link. (via)

If not in your backyard, then whose?

desjardins — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:54:54 -0800

Newcomers, with the zeal of recent converts, are often the most vocal in resisting change to the neighborhood they have just discovered. An exploration of NIMBYism. If not in your backyard, then whose? Probably a low-income minority group. Opposition to affordable housing is often thinly-veiled racism. How NIMBYism affects a seven-year old boy on LA's skid row. African-Americans fight back against environmental injustice. A Latina activist blogs about gentrification. There's also YIMBYs (Yes In My Backyard).

Greening the Ghetto

homunculus — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:04:57 -0800

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. Carter was an Olympic torchbearer in San Francisco, but when she tried to display a Tibetan flag during her run, the Chinese police and the SFPD expelled her from the relay.

We should all live in Manhattan

storybored — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:56:48 -0800

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

Gathering mountains

Abiezer — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 01:04:20 -0800

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.

Peak Suburbia

chunking express — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:13:35 -0800

Peak Suburbia.

Secrets of the ancients, revealed! ... or never bring a knife to a nanotube fight.

blahblahblah — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:12:03 -0800

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!

Percentage of citys households with digital receivers- 11

beaucoupkevin — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 07:37:53 -0800

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."

Urville: The Imaginary City

jimmythefish — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 19:31:28 -0800

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.