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inhabitat.com May 29, 2017
Light-filled library doubles as a home-like environment in Shanghai

There’s nothing quite like curling up with a good book. Brooklyn-based nARCHITECTS imbues those feelings of comfort into their design of “Library As Home,” the winning entry in the 110,000-square-meter Shanghai Library East Hall competition held by the city government.
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inhabitat.com May 29, 2017
German community bands together to convert old WWII bunker into a ‘green mountain’

Hamburg residents are taking their community’s urban design into their own hands – and the results are amazing. A team of local residents and architects are planning to convert a WWII bunker into Hilldegarden, a mixed-use community space topped with a rooftop garden covered in lush greenery.
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theguardian.com May 26, 2017
The empathy machine: can VR stop bad city developments before they happen?

From ‘meeting’ a resident affected by HS2 to ‘cycling’ along a proposed bike lane through the city, VR can have a powerful impact in the real world From ‘meeting’ a resident affected by HS2 to ‘cycling’ along a proposed bike lane through the city,
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science.sciencemag.org May 26, 2017
Do not publish

You are currently viewing the summary. Biologists have long valued publishing detailed information on rare and endangered species. Until relatively recently, much of this information was accessible only through accessing specialized scientific journals in university libraries.
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thehill.com May 24, 2017
Carson calls poverty ‘a state of mind’

Carson added that a “defeatist attitude” could prevent people from escaping poverty. Carson made the comments during a town hall recorded Tuesday that will air in full late Wednesday.
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theguardian.com May 19, 2017
A garden bridge that works: how Seoul succeeded where London failed

Seoul’s ambitious Skygarden revives a disused elevated 1970s highway with 24,000 plants – and is open to all, 24 hours a day Seoul’s ambitious Skygarden revives a disused elevated 1970s highway with 24,000 plants – and is open to all, 24 hours a day Cities is supported
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foxnews.com May 24, 2017
Carson calls poverty a 'state of mind' in radio interview

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has a way with words - the pediatric neurosurgeon-turned politician, no stranger to stirring up controversy with his comments, called poverty a "state of mind" in a just-released radio interview.
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usatoday.com May 24, 2017
HUD Secretary Ben Carson: Poverty is caused by a 'state of mind'

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson appears on SiriusXM's Town Hall hosted by Armstrong Williams at SiriusXM DC Performance Space on May 23, 2017 in Washington, DC. What causes poverty?
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brainpickings.org November 15, 2012
What Makes a Great City: A General Theory of Walkability

“I walk everywhere in the city. Any city. You see everything you need to see for a lifetime. Every emotion. Every condition. Every fashion. Every glory,” Maira Kalman observed in considering the creative capacity of walking.
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citylab.com September 16, 2013
How to Design a City for Women

In 1999, officials in Vienna, Austria, asked residents of the city's ninth district how often and why they used public transportation. "Most of the men filled out the questionnaire in less than five minutes," says Ursula Bauer, one of the city administrators tasked with carrying out the survey.
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fastcoexist.com December 7, 2016
Women And Men Use Cities Very Differently

In 1999, officials in Vienna handed out a questionnaire about how people in the city used transportation. The men filled it out in five minutes: go to work in the morning, come home at night. The women couldn't stop writing.
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fastcoexist.com August 24, 2016
50 Reasons Why Everyone Should Want More Walkable Streets

As more cities try to improve walkability—from car-free "superblocks" in Barcelona to heat-protected walkways in Dubai—a new report outlines the reasons behind the shift, the actions that cities can take to move away from a car-centric world, and why walkability matters.
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theatlantic.com February 21, 2014
A Dictator's Guide to Urban Design

Ukraine's Independence Square, and the revolutionary dimensions of public spaces. Ukraine is the size of Texas, but for the last three months its burgeoning protest movement has largely crowded into the space of 10 city blocks.
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theatlantic.com April 19, 2015
Nice Downtowns: How Did They Get That Way?

I had anticipated some of the rewards and discoveries of visiting cities in the process of economic and cultural recovery and re-invention.
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speedbird.wordpress.com December 3, 2012
The City Is Here For You To Use: 100 easy pieces

Deprecated 20150101. On the first of January, 2008, I promised you a book about the things I saw happening at the intersection of emerging networked information technologies with urban place.
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fastcompany.com April 8, 2016
Paris Is Redesigning Its Major Intersections For Pedestrians, Not Cars

Right now, the Place de la Bastille in Paris is basically a traffic island: A huge memorial sits in the middle of a road packed with cars. There’s no way to easily cross the street on foot. But that will soon change.
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america.aljazeera.com December 28, 2014
The architecture of dissent

On Dec. 13, the largest of the recent waves of protests against racist, aggressive and militarized policing tactics — spurred by the failure to indict the officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner — took place across the United States.
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fastcodesign.com October 11, 2016
The 27 Most Innovative Spaces And Places Of The Year

How can cities build infrastructure today to support tomorrow's rapidly increasing urban population, which the UN says will only increase in the coming decades? Over the past year, we saw designers, architects, and urban planners hard at wor
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qz.com July 17, 2016
The secret of anti-terror architecture: Your city is probably safer than you realize

No one wants to live behind barricades and barbed wire, but everyone wants to feel safe, particularly in the wake of horrifying, unforeseeable massacres like last week’s July 14 truck attack in Nice, France.
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bostonglobe.com May 19, 2013
The too-smart city

Parking in Boston can be a grueling experience, but Christos Cassandras envisions a way to make it almost effortless: Have the city itself sense when spaces are opening up, and guide drivers to the most efficient spot.
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fastcodesign.com July 18, 2016
How Urban Design Perpetuates Racial Inequality—And What We Can Do About It

Cities are complex organisms shaped by myriad forces, but their organization bears the fingerprints of planners and policy makers who have shaped them for decades. At the root of many of these practices is racism, and modern cities bear the legacy of that discrimination.
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vox.com April 22, 2017
Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars

Modern cities are ruled by cars. Streets are designed for them; bikers, pedestrians, vendors, hangers-out, and all other forms of human life are pushed to the perimeter in narrow lanes or sidewalks. Truly shared spaces are confined to parks and the occasional plaza.
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citylab.com June 12, 2014
How Urban Design Could Help Reduce Rape in India

After the horrendous gang rape and murder of “J,” a 23-year-old doctor, in the Munirka neighborhood of southwest Delhi in December 2012, New Delhi gained the disgraceful distinction of being India’s “rape capital.
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fastcodesign.com July 11, 2016
5 Rules For Designing Great Cities, From Denmark's Star Urbanist

The web of pedestrian streets, narrow alleys, and picturesque canals in Venice have lured tourists to the Italian port city for hundreds of years.
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curbed.com November 23, 2016
101 books about where and how we live

This year’s election made clear that, perhaps more than at any other time in American history, where we live determines much about what we know. As people who write about cities, we realized this presented a remarkable opportunity.
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planetizen.com November 10, 2014
Open Letter to a Car-Addicted City

It's rare for a newspaper to dedicate two stories in the same issue to the planning, design, and transportation challenges of a city, and even more rare for a newspaper to ask for an additional op-ed piece from a visiting city planner to tie it all together.
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299 saves
jamessrussell.net April 8, 2015
Placemaking is Mainly Bogus

Is this placemaking? The Campbell Fitness Center at Columbia University’s sports complex at the northern tip of Manhattan looks strange to a lot of people.
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bostonglobe.com July 20, 2014
What ‘urban physics’ could tell us about how cities work

What does a city look like? If you’re walking down the street, perhaps it looks like people and storefronts. Viewed from higher up, patterns begin to emerge: A three-dimensional grid of buildings divided by alleys, streets, and sidewalks, nearly flat in some places and scraping the sky in others.
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collectorsweekly.com April 8, 2016
Why Are America’s Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?

When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, patting themselves on the back for yet another example of “innovation.
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atlasobscura.com May 5, 2016
The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile

None-too-subtle spikes at the 18th-century Miles Brewton House in Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo: Spencer Means/CC BY-SA 2.0) There’s a fearsome fence surrounding the Miles Brewton House in Charleston, South Carolina.
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nytimes.com October 10, 2016
What New York Can Learn From Barcelona’s ‘Superblocks’

BARCELONA — Imagine if streets were for strolling, intersections were for playing and cars were almost never allowed. While it sounds like a pedestrian’s daydream, and a driver’s nightmare, it is becoming a reality here in Spain’s second-largest city, a densely packed metropolis of 1.
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archdaily.com March 14, 2016
5 Steps to Creating High-Performance Communities

Save this picture! As we become a planet of city-dwellers, planners and urban designers have an imperative to design communities that perform better than ever before.
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159 saves
citylab.com December 23, 2016
How Urban Planning Can Support Mental Health

The Tokyo-based psychiatrist Layla McCay founded the Center for Urban Design and Mental Health over a year ago, and it’s grown at a more rapid pace than she expected. “Be careful of finding an unmet need,” she jokes, noting that much of her time is now spent running the center.
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nybooks.com April 7, 2016
The Craving for Public Squares

The twenty-first century is the first urban century in human history, the first time more people on the planet live in cities than don’t. Experts project that some 75 percent of the booming global population will be city dwellers by 2050.
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curbed.com October 24, 2016
Chicago’s new Riverwalk offers a vision of the future of urban parks

Chicago’s Lakefront Trail is arguably one of its finest civic asset, a cherished 18.5-mile linear park that showcases the beauty of Lake Michigan. Grant Park, which sits adjacent to the Lake at the center of the trail network, is often called Chicago’s front yard.
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curbed.com September 22, 2016
101 small ways you can improve your city

Sometimes the smallest things we can do for our neighborhoods can have the biggest impact. At Curbed, we know the power of a vegetable garden planted in a vacant lot or a library installed on a sidewalk.
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mashable.com February 23, 2015
How the Internet of Things is affecting urban design

The Internet of Things is coming to a city near you.
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inhabitat.com February 5, 2017
How Barcelona “superblocks” return city streets to the people

Air pollution and traffic jams are big problems for Barcelona, but the city’s new Urban Mobility Plan promises a pathway to greener, cleaner, and more pedestrian-friendly urban living.
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archdaily.com November 21, 2016
Gentrification's Image Problem and How It Has Been Villified

Save this picture! The idea of revitalizing a public space by bringing improvement that brings people together should not generate suspicion or fear. However, specific examples of places that have seen the cost of living greatly increase after their revitalization have been creating paradoxes.
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failedarchitecture.com June 3, 2016
The Tyranny of the Filter Bubble and the Future of Public Space — Failed Architecture

While using online platforms, we are generally served up information suggested by algorithms that is based on traces of our previous searches, conversations, purchases and locations. A simple example: “hey, you might want to follow ArchDaily on Twitter, since you already follow Dezeen.”
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theguardian.com December 8, 2014
Is Jan Gehl winning his battle to make our cities liveable?

Ahead of a special Guardian Cities event, the renowned urban ‘rethinker’ says cities should be six or seven storeys high, Helsinki is on the verge of revolution, and that he’s sceptical of London’s cycle superhighway plansWhat makes your city liveable? Share pictures with GuardianWitness
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nytimes.com January 1, 2016
What Tech Hasn’t Learned From Urban Planning

SAN FRANCISCO — The tech sector is, increasingly, embracing the language of urban planning — town hall, public square, civic hackathons, community engagement. So why are tech companies such bad urbanists?
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wired.com April 19, 2017
The Brilliant Simplicity of New York’s New Times Square

Times Square starts at 42nd Street, between the H&M and the Walgreens, and stretches north for five blocks. I stood there a few days ago, illuminated by the glow of a canary yellow ad for Spectacles by Snap. I found the ads as colossal as ever, but the space had changed since my last visit.
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nytimes.com February 14, 2014
Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All

In September 2008, two graduate students working for Keith Hampton, a professor at Rutgers, raised a camera atop a 16-foot tripod to film down into Bryant Park, the sprawling green space behind the main branch of the New York Public Library.
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nextcity.org May 18, 2016
How Community-Engaged Design Is Changing Development

Houston’s Third Ward is changing and to many residents of the historic African-American neighborhood, the place it is becoming doesn’t feel like home.
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citylab.com January 4, 2017
How Cities Are Using Coziness to Make Winter Wonderful

Cities excel in balmy weather. Summer is the season of desultory bike rides, of food truck festivals and concerts in the park, of long walks and dinners on the patio at the cafe.
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citylab.com November 4, 2014
Moving Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Cities

Before Darwin, science tried to make sense of the natural world through a slew of systems of classification. Linnaeus' taxonomy, for example, grouped living things together based on their appearance, or "morphology," in kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, and species.
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citylab.com December 9, 2014
At MoMA, How 'Tactical Urbanism' Can Preserve the Future of Cities

In the overcast light of a Mumbai slum, six men surround a rectangular frame that has been set on the ground.
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citylab.com September 19, 2014
5 Key Themes Emerging From the 'New Science of Cities'

In the past few years, a remarkable body of scientific research has begun to shed new light on the dynamic behavior of cities, carrying important implications for city-makers.
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theguardian.com May 5, 2016
Story of cities #36: how Copenhagen rejected 1960s modernist 'utopia'

While concrete was being poured across Europe’s cities, Denmark’s capital found itself at a crossroads: would it follow the car-centric vision of grand boulevards and streets in the sky – or keep its citizen-focused design?
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citylab.com October 8, 2014
The Carless Commute Ranking to End All Carless Commute Rankings

The Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota has released the most useful transit commute rankings you're likely to see for some time. "Access Across America: Transit 2014" ranks 46 of the biggest U.S.
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theguardian.com October 13, 2016
Why aren’t we designing cities that work for women, not just men?

Bad town planning can impact women’s safety, movement and even income. Research led by the people most affected should inform a new approach Bad town planning can impact women’s safety, movement and even income. Research led by the people most affected should inform a new approach
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theguardian.com December 12, 2014
50 years of gentrification: will all our cities turn into 'deathly' Canberra?

The drive to make cities more ‘liveable’ means parks, plazas and happy pedestrians. But the reality is ever more sterile, identikit cities where public space isn’t public at all The drive to make cities more ‘liveable’ means parks, plazas and happy pedestrians.
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theguardian.com April 30, 2017
Street fighter: how Jane Jacobs saved New York from Bulldozer Bob

Robert Moses was the despotic planner hellbent on building four-lane highways through neighbourhoods. She was the cyclist who stopped him. A new film, Citizen Jane, revisits their David and Goliath struggle for the soul of New York
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gizmodo.com July 14, 2016
Why Is New Urbanism So Gosh Darn Creepy?

I remember looking toward the edge of town and thinking that something seemed off. We had stopped here before crossing the Continental Divide, in one of those typically charming Colorado mountain communities.
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archdaily.com February 23, 2017
6 Low-Cost Techniques to Activate Underused Urban Space

“Public space is the new backyard,” says Hamish Dounan, Associate Director of Street Furniture Australia. “Great landscape architecture projects can actually get people out of their apartments and going for walks.
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planetizen.com December 13, 2013
The 100 "Best" Books on City-Making Ever Written?

I usually don't associate happiness with things, "stuff," material goods, but I have to admit that there are few things that make me happier than my books.
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pps.org May 10, 2016
8 Placemaking Principles for Innovation Districts

PPS staff Nate Storring and Meg Walker reflect on the possibilities and challenges of placemaking in innovation districts. This article is part of the Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking, a collaboration between PPS and the Brookings Institution.
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theguardian.com May 13, 2016
Story of cities #42: Medellín escapes grip of drug lord to embrace radical urbanism

Twenty-five years ago, Medellín was the most dangerous city on earth. Yet its most infamous criminal, Pablo Escobar, also helped create the conditions that sparked an extraordinary revival – by taking the city to the brink of collapse “I’d never been to that neighbourhood before.
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theguardian.com February 4, 2014
Cities and their psychology: how neuroscience affects urban planning

The study of metropolitan areas and how their inhabitants interact with them is key to planning our future as a species Cities is supported by About this content 03.00 EST First published on Tuesday 4 February 2014 03.
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placesjournal.org
Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019

The observation deck won’t be finished for a few years yet. If you want to see the future of New York, walk north along the High Line, round the curve at the rail yards, and turn your back to the river.
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theguardian.com January 24, 2017
Tinder for cities: how tech is making urban planning more inclusive

Having a say in what your city or neighbourhood should be like is often complicated, time-consuming and full of confusing jargon. A new wave of digital tools are trying to make the process transparent and interactive
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nytimes.com March 21, 2017
The Kind of Thinking Cities Need

Quito, Ecuador — Day after day, under a bright sun, hourslong security lines snaked out of El Ejido Park into the surrounding streets. Enterprising women in multicolored skirts and brown hats sold water and folding umbrellas for shade.
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slate.com April 11, 2017
Fantastical Maps

What is wrong with America? For urbanist Richard Florida, a key answer lies in our malfunctioning cities, where the clustering of people and capital is “at once the main engine of economic growth and the biggest driver of inequality.” That is the Janus face of the modern American metropolis.
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citylab.com February 19, 2015
Kids Mapping Their Slums in India Are Influencing Urban Planning Policies

Every kid likes to draw. But in India, young people living in slums are using their sketching skills to spur urban change.
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theatlantic.com February 25, 2016
What Computer Games Taught Me About Urban Planning

And what they didn’t. Like most city lovers of a certain age, I spent many hours as a kid playing SimCity. For readers who are tragically uninitiated, SimCity is one of the iconic computer games of the 1990s, though newer versions have been released as recently as 2013.
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theguardian.com April 21, 2016
Soviet squares: how public space is disappearing in post-communist cities

Privatisation is stripping cities in Russia and Eastern Europe of their public assets, leaving a chaotic mix of advertising, dilapidation and new development Cities is supported by About this content 05.42 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 13 July 2016 12.
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theatlantic.com November 25, 2015
Highways Destroyed America's Cities

Can tearing them down bring revitalization? America loves its freeways.
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archdaily.com July 29, 2015
Why Landscape Designers Will Be Key to the Future of Our Cities

Save this picture! For most people, spending time outdoors in well-designed public spaces is one of the highlights to city life.
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180 saves
placesjournal.org
The Multilevel Metropolis

The grade-separated pedestrian systems built in the 20th century have a variety of names: skyways, skywalks, pedways, footbridges, the +15, and the Ville Souteraine. But they have one thing in common — they have radically altered the form and spatial logic of cities around the world.
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placesjournal.org February 13, 2017
Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning

And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. — T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
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fee.org March 20, 2017
How Spontaneous Order Keeps Houston Affordable

A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens. … Cities don’t lure the middle class. They create it.
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cnu.org January 17, 2017
Ten reasons to build community through urban design

We build cities that bring us together or push us apart. "Gated communities" are an obvious example of building to isolate, but other methods are also common. Streets that are too wide, with fast moving traffic, divide us. So do zoning codes that separate uses and housing types.
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citylab.com December 11, 2014
Walkability Is Good for You

Ever since Jane Jacobs' classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urbanists have extolled the ideal of the dense, mixed-used, walkable neighborhood, contrasting it with the dull and deadly cul-de-sacs of car-oriented suburbs.
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215 saves
theguardian.com August 24, 2016
A 'radical alternative': how one man changed the perception of Los Angeles

In the 1960s, British architectural critic Reyner Banham declared his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals hated. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world perceived it – but what would he think of LA today?
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post.at.moma.org March 24, 2015
Is “Tactical Urbanism” an Alternative to Neoliberal Urbanism?

What can “tactical urbanism” offer cities under extreme stress from rapid population growth, intensifying industrial restructuring, inadequate social and physical infrastructures, rising levels of class polarization, insufficiently resourced public institutions, proliferating environmental disa
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147 saves
wired.com September 30, 2014
7 Simple Ways to Make Every City Friendlier to Pedestrians

San Jose is expected to grow faster than any city in the Bay Area in the next few decades. The local government is working to meet that demand with mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods.
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canadianbusiness.com April 21, 2016
How booming cities made urban planning Canada’s hottest job

In August 2014, construction crews in Waterloo, Ont., began building the so-called Ion light rail transit line, an $818-million megaproject that will connect a disparate region known for its tech sector, insurance companies and Mennonite farms.
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theatlantic.com November 22, 2013
Why We're Sometimes Kind Without Reason

Our brains are constantly, subtly being primed in fascinating ways by our physical surroundings. The eminent sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that life is a series of performances, in which we are all continually managing the impression we give other people.
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archdaily.com December 16, 2016
Jan Gehl's 5 Rules for Designing Great Cities

Save this picture! Danish architect Jan Gehl is a world renowned expert in all things related to urban design and public spaces.
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newyorker.com November 5, 2015
Cars vs. Bikes vs. Pedestrians

We’ve all been there. You’re walking down the sidewalk, minding your own business, when, hurtling toward you, threatening public peace, safety, and sanity, is that horror of all horrors: a bicyclist.
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874 saves
archdaily.com February 24, 2014
The Fear Sustaining Sustainable Urbanism

In this article, originally published on the Australian Design Review as "Longing For a Greener Present", Ross Exo-Adams examines the fear that lies behind the trend toward sustainable urbanism, and finds that the crisis we find ourselves in might not only be confined to an ecological one.
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fastcodesign.com August 12, 2014
The Hidden Ways Urban Design Segregates The Poor

A few weeks ago, news emerged that a New York building was planning a separate entrance for residents of its low-income units—"poor doors." Outrage ensued, but the truth is, urban design that tries to segregate well-off from welfare is nothing new.
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nytimes.com April 27, 2017
The Future of Retirement Communities: Walkable and Urban

FEW people in America walk to work. Most of us drive to the supermarket. But more older people these days are looking for a community where they can enjoy a full life without a car. Ben Brown and his wife, Christine, say they weren’t thinking about retirement when they moved to Franklin, N.C.
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citylab.com April 5, 2017
The Graphic Novel Teaching Chicago Teens About Urban Planning

Two years ago, Gabrielle Lyon, the vice president of education and experience at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, started using Wacker’s Manual, a 1911 textbook fashioned from Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan of Chicago, with CAF’s teen fellows—local high school students who attend weekend s
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271 saves
nextcity.org September 18, 2015
Hacking Public Space With the Designers Who Invented Park(ing) Day

In the winter of 2005, I, along with a few colleagues from the Bay Area urban design collective Rebar, liberated a parking space for human use. We transformed a single metered spot into a temporary public park and called it Park(ing). My Rebar co-conspirators and I were prepared for the worst.
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142 saves
99percentinvisible.org February 5, 2017
Civic Superblocks: Barcelona’s Urban Redesign Returns Streets to Residents

A series of “superblocks” underpin a forward-thinking and pedestrian-oriented urban design strategy being deployed in Barcelona. These innovative block configurations are designed to reduce car-related traffic, noise and pollution.
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181 saves
planetizen.com January 6, 2016
Top 10 Websites - 2015

When Planetizen first began compiling lists of top websites in 2002, we included 50 websites on the list. Even with that many sites on the list, the collection offered very little of the variety and innovation available online in 2015.
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thisiscolossal.com July 29, 2014
Urban Jewelry: Lace Street Art by NeSpoonby Christopher Jobson on July 29, 2014

Warsaw-based artist NeSpoon uses ornate lace patterns in her unique brand of street art that translates into ceramics, stencils, paintings, and crocheted webbing installed in public spaces.
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103 saves
theguardian.com April 18, 2016
'We have lost the science of building cities' – meet Joan Clos, the unofficial world leader for cities

Unaffordable housing, corruption, the lack of public space … can UN-Habitat improve the lot of the billions of people living in cities around the world? Mike Herd talks to Dr Joan Clos ahead of this year’s Habitat III summit
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fastcompany.com May 1, 2017
A Courtroom Designed For Fairness, And Other World Changing Urban Designs

It takes an average of 37 seconds for a judge in Chicago’s Cook County to set bond: the amount of money a defendant must pay to stay out of jail before trial. When that sum is unaffordable, defendants might spend months in jail, even if they’re accused of non-violent, low-level crimes.
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fastcompany.com August 24, 2016
50 Reasons Why Everyone Should Want More Walkable Streets

As more cities try to improve walkability–from car-free “superblocks” in Barcelona to heat-protected walkways in Dubai–a new report outlines the reasons behind the shift, the actions that cities can take to move away from a car-centric world, and why walkability matters.
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174 saves
nextcity.org February 1, 2016
Even Copenhagen Makes Mistakes

“If someone comes up to you every day for eight years and says, ‘My god — you’re gorgeous!’ it’s going to affect you. You’re going to start thinking you don’t need to invest in new clothes.
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archdaily.com April 21, 2013
Ten Ways to Transform Cities through Placemaking & Public Spaces

Save this picture! In 2011, UN-HABITAT and Project for Public Spaces (PPS) signed a 5-year cooperative agreement to aspire to raise international awareness of the importance of public space in cities, to foster a lively exchange of ideas among partners and to educate a new generation of planner
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166 saves
pps.org October 12, 2016
Toward Place Governance: What If We Reinvented Civic Infrastructure Around Placemaking?

Governance, on every scale, is not set up to create great places. Indeed, the current culture and structure of government and civic infrastructure may actually be the greatest obstacle (more than money, ideas, talent, infrastructure, etc.) to successful Placemaking.
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arstechnica.com February 2, 2016
Want your kids to be better off than you? Move to a high-density city

Imagine a high-density city, and you probably think of something like Mega-City One, full of pollution, poverty, and huge, ugly housing projects. But the reality, according to new research in urban studies, is that high-density city plans offer residents more economic opportunities.
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pps.org April 21, 2015
Ten Strategies for Transforming Cities and Public Spaces through Placemaking

What defines the character of a city is its public space, not its private space. -Dr. Joan Clos, Executive Director, UN Habitat Building inclusive, healthy, functional, and productive cities is perhaps the greatest challenge facing humanity today, and there are no easy solutions.
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nacto.org
Urban Street Design Guide

Streets comprise more than 80% of public space in cities, but they often fail to provide their surrounding communities with a space where people can safely walk, bicycle, drive, take transit, and socialize.
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citylab.com May 21, 2015
What Designers and Urban Planners Can Actually Do to Reduce Police Violence

police officers were routinely harassing them. Some incidents were captured on video by the apartment complex’s owners. Here’s some of the law enforcement behavior listed in the legal complaint:
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archdaily.com September 4, 2015
Before & After: 30 Photos that Prove the Power of Designing with Pedestrians in Mind

Save this picture! Providing more public space for pedestrians is one of the main goals of urban renewal projects taking place in cities around the world.
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news.harvard.edu January 9, 2017
Why city blocks work

Conventional wisdom says that smaller city blocks are better for pedestrians. Research on urban form has traditionally suggested that smaller city blocks are better for foot traffic, and prominent urbanists have advocated them as key promoters of pedestrian access.
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vox.com May 4, 2016
Jane Jacobs believed cities should be fun — and changed urban planning forever

When Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, she was a lone voice with no credentials speaking up against the most powerful ideas in urban planning.
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slate.com May 4, 2016
Bulldoze Jane Jacobs

Wednesday is the 100th birthday of Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist whose 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, changed the trajectory of New York and cities everywhere.
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