October 26, 2009 – 8:43 am
Polis on the suburbanization of Cairo; not surprising, I suppose, given that suburbanization (particularly the growth of the past decade, pre-recession) partly proceeded from the collusion of governmental and corporate interests in America’s relatively transparent political system, that suburbanization in a country with a more corrupt political system would proceed from even thicker, more direct […]
October 23, 2009 – 9:13 am
Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic on architecture and the reconstruction of New Orleans: Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to […]
October 20, 2009 – 10:25 am
[photograph by Maximilian Haidacher, via polar inertia] The few of you who may have followed my rather undirected ramblings at eatingbark before the launch of mammoth will be aware that I’ve long been rather fascinated by the notion that sport fields, in general, and soccer fields (football pitches for the non-North Americans), in particular, are […]
October 9, 2009 – 12:32 pm
Adam Greenfield, as usual critically interrogating the potential of the networked city, in the unedited version of a piece that’s running in this month’s Wired UK: …the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis. In fact, it’s surpassingly […]
October 9, 2009 – 11:31 am
City of Sound’s Dan Hill comments on the Architecture League’s exhibition “Toward the Sentient City”, at the Sentient City website. While he praises the intent and content of the exhibition, he wonders if it doesn’t go far enough in several ways. The last of these, “the positioning of architecture itself”, is particularly relevant to themes […]
October 8, 2009 – 9:28 am
[apartment blocks in Zibo, via google maps] A photo essay on the Chinese city of Zibo, in four parts (Zibo I, Zibo II, Zibo III, Zibo IV — best viewed in IE/Safari/Chrome, as some script there tends to upset Firefox), from Moving Cities, who are doing some fascinating research on urbanism in China. Zibo is […]
September 29, 2009 – 1:45 pm
Adam Greenfield wrote a post about a week ago using Berlin’s Allianz Arena as a test case for a general shift in urbanism from “constant” to “variable”, which is one of the shifts he’s previously identified as composing a condition he calls “networked urbanism”. Greenfield speculates about how the Arena’s current, relatively limited ability to […]
September 23, 2009 – 4:14 pm
There’s a discussion about the economics and politics of urbanizing suburbia taking place between economics bloggers Ryan Avent and Tyler Cowen right now (if you’re not familiar with the two, Avent is roughly liberal and Cowen is roughly libertarian, though both are more or less independent thinkers). It begins with this Washington Post article which […]
September 10, 2009 – 1:41 pm
A fascinating talk by Danah Boyd, transcribed at alternet, first presenting the evidence of class divisions in social media, and then addressing what the implications of that presence are: How many of you currently use Facebook? [90 percent-plus of the audience raises their hands.] How many of you currently use MySpace? [A few lone figures […]
August 13, 2009 – 3:12 pm
Though I’m on vacation at the moment, I thought I’d chime in with a couple comments on our reburbia entry (posted by Stephen below) and perhaps articulate more fully some of the thoughts behind it: 1. We were as interested in articulating a series of comments on the relationship between designers and suburbia as we […]
August 3, 2009 – 11:50 am
Worldchanging has a nice feature extrapolating the future of suburbia from current trends, which has long been one of Stephen and I’s favorite pastimes. Excited to see what further ideas for said future(s) may percolate out of the Reburbia design competition, which just concluded this past Friday (results should be posted within a week or […]
Somewhere, Louis Kahn is blushing. HOW DARE THEY. Is this Landscape Urbanism? Or is this? More on Seoul here. And here.
Article at the New York Times on the value of bus rapid transit systems, particularly Bogota’s Transmilenio.
A great post by Felix Salmon discusses externalities, congestion pricing, and a spreadsheet by Charles Komanoff. The comparison of the way the resulting costs from congestion pricing fall, depending on which scheme is used, is particularly important, as the original NYC plan would have disproportionately hit middle-class commuters from Brooklyn and Queens. Congestion pricing is […]
I found this project by Andrea Brennen, which Rob highlighted here, incredibly refreshing. Considering the vital role money plays in Getting Stuff Built, discussion of financing and its repercussions is absurdly rare in critical discourse on architecture and urbanism. This is problematic – it’s not as if designs are hatched in a capital vacuum, funding […]
By Stephen
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Posted in architecture, finance, infrastructure, the-expanded-field, urbanism
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Also tagged architectural-criticism, architecture, finance, incremental-urbanism, informality, infrastructure, microfinance
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Pruned asks: “Has there ever been an ideas competition of any kind for Mexico City and its water crisis?”, in response to this post at the Guardian outlining that crisis. While I’m not aware of a competition, the unrealized project that immediately comes to mind is Kalach and de Leon’s The City and the Lakes, […]
More on freeway interchanges from James Fallows. [I accidentally deleted this post last night, losing robs comment and potentially any links to it folks might have saved – sorry. I don’t suppose anyone knows how to recover posts foolishly deleted on the wordpress platform?]
From the beginning of last week, A Field Guide to Freeway Interchanges (part one // part two) on Infrastructurist. Below, one of my favorite interchanges, the interbreeding of I-95, I-295, and I-395 over the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River in Baltimore.
Another addendum: a dialogue at the New York Times asks various urbanists and authors, including Rybczynski and Hayden, “Is [going carless] a realistic goal in a culture like ours?”, as an extension of the article Stephen mentioned.
Carfree suburban living in Germany, as described in the New York Times.
