Measuring things: not for morons.

These files were compiled from Census 2000 responses to the long-form (sample) questions on where people worked. The files provide data at the county level for residents of the 50 states and the District of Columbia (DC). Similar files containing data for county subdivisions (MCDs) in 12 states and counties in the other 38 states, DC, and Puerto Rico...

Yes to 30 foot ROWs. A thousand times yes.

mapping New York City's storefronts.

"What’s remarkable about all spontaneous urban plants is the fact that they require no human assistance to assert and maintain themselves in extreme, often volatile urban conditions, while providing the same ecologically performative benefits of traditional landscape plants and street trees. Rather than seek to discard and eradicate them, we now have an opportunity to harness their benefits and tell their histories."

Only at point 1 of 8, already wish I was back at the GSD: "Urban studies has failed to investigate its own subject."

NYU CUSP?

great. Could benefit from scaling geographies by population.

"we have to find fast, creative, profitable ways to capitalize on local ingenuity and turn public spaces into treasured community places."

(does anyone else find PPS kinda annoying?)

CUP relaunched their website with a new name! yay! Finally!

on white gentrification in black neighborhoods

Using calcium phosphate to remediate lead in contaminated soil.

"Cities versus suburbs? Get over it. Welcome to the metropolitan century."

Pinoy convenience store/restaurant near Red Hook Cruise Terminal, catering to ship workers. Grows from car to van to storefront:
"This is more of a bootstrap story, of finding opportunity in the negative spaces"

One of several good questions to ask about zoning.

Tommy Camp lays out the sad decline of physical planning and the marginalization of a profession. 

"There’s two maps of New York overlapping here. The map of places that are somehow forgotten and beautifully mysterious, and the map of people that are forgotten."

South Sudan considers a new capital.

"Another beekeeper, according to apiarist lore, lived near a candy factory in Syracuse, and his bees produced a lovely, delicate spearmint- and winter mint-flavored honey"

"Sam directed me to the corner of Kitchener and Essex streets, on Detroit’s East Side, where there is now a mini-swamp or bog, roughly the contour of a basement to a house that no longer exists"

"youarethecity is a research, design and planning practice interested in creating dialogue about the urban environment."

Step by step. Terrif.

from AboutMcDonalds.com (official McDo site).
Just under 1 ac, 71 parking spots.
Their criteria:
"Corner or corner wrap with signage on two major streets. / Signalized intersection. / Ability to build up to 4,000 sq. ft. / Parking to meet all applicable codes. / Ability to build to a minimum height of 23' 4"."

"Stormwater Infrastructure Matters (S.W.I.M.) is a coalition dedicated to ensuring swimmable waters around New York City through natural, sustainable stormwater management practices in our neighborhoods."

Biological statistical models work for the built urban environment, but not urban social-economic systems. [Their Jacobs metaphor is broken, tho]

Suburbia is not as built out as it seems. Consider the mapping of 8,300 acres of opportunity – vacant parcels and parking lots – in the many small downtowns of the country’s “first suburbs” on Long Island. On the occasion of the release of these revealing new interactive maps, the Long Island Index invites all architects, urban designers, planners, students, visionaries and everyone else interested in shaping our suburbs’ future to help us “Build a Better Burb.” This ideas competition seeks bold design proposals for retrofitting underutilized asphalt in suburban downtowns into innovative and surprising new uses, forms and urbanisms.

Mapping tool from CNT for doing side-by-side comparisons of carbon/expenses/density/etc for US metro areas. Pretty snazzy.

new podcast from NAC: "Each month Next American City and the Brookings Institution deliver insightful analysis of the latest news and trends in cities in a 15-minute podcast called Metro Matters. Produced by Sarah Kate Kramer."

Where are your stadia?

"dedicated to revitalizing, restoring and revealing Newtown Creek."

scrapworm. ridiculous image-based interface, but some good projects on space, history & art lurk within

Bruce Katz suggests reinvesting in Detroit's industrial R&D, focusing redevelopment along a key corridor, and building large new parks

windsor on art group. projects include a 72 hr micro residency

run down of gov't data sharing and new apps that run off of it.

learning to live on the internet/learning to live in a city

"vengeful sect that attempts to summon the spirit of Robert Moses every December 18th by smashing two chunks of macadam over a flaming can of Pennzoil"

drawn history of a block of Eldridge St on the LES from 1700s-present.

"Located in the very heart of New York City, this Brooklyn neighborhood encapsulates many of the ways life has changed in the Bloomberg era."

there is no client.

been trying to ignore this wretched "cities are battlesuits" meme. This post is mostly spot on: "It's not a battle."

2009 summit. can we please be over websites that are images. lame. good speakers, tho.

"The fifty largest metro areas (in blue), disaggregated from their states (in orange), scaled and sorted by population."

Peter Del Tredici's plant site: "We vilify as weeds those organisms that flourish in the urban environment without our approval or assistance. It is these plants-the spontaneous vegetation of the urban environment-that are the subject of this website."

"The subject of the thesis is a section of Aleppo, Syria's second city. Atta describes decades of meddling by Western urban planners, who rammed highways through the neighborhood's historic urban fabric and replaced many of its once ubiquitous courtyard houses with modernist high-rises. Atta calls for rebuilding the area along traditional lines, all tiny shops and odd-angled cul-de-sacs. For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project to restore the Islamic culture of the neighborhood, a culture he sees as threatened by the West. 'The traditional structures of the society in all areas should be re-erected,' Atta writes in the thesis, using architectural metaphors to describe his reactionary cultural project. In Atta's Aleppo, women wouldn't leave the house, and policies would be carefully crafted so as not to 'engender emancipatory thoughts of any kind,' which he sees as 'out of place in Islamic society.'"

forum on cities in comics:
"I kind of think of Gotham as NYC in the 1970s, and Metropolis as NYC in some optimistic urban planner's CGI simulation."

Sarkozy abandons local govt restructuring and grand planning schemes, goes for transport infrastructure.

"Amsterdam is undergoing a historic process of regeneration. Much of the city's reserve of social housing is being transformed into luxury accommodation for the growing numbers of "creative economy" employees. Meanwhile, waiting lists for the remaining social housing are flooded by former occupants forced out of their homes and neighbourhoods by renovation programmes. Merijn Oudenampsen describes a process of urban "rebirth" through place branding and social cleansing."

Capital & "Creativity" at work in Amsterdam.

Good interview about urban design with the editor of HDM but utterly undercut by Saunders speaking highly for Chicago's leadership.

Official site of the largest development underway in Amerstdam. 28.000 housing units on a number of artificial islands.

"project is to build communities equipped for the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil." Local food, renewable energy, more self-production. Welcome to the new medieval!

Decrying the closed planning process in the NL, with a somewhat confused idea of the role of design and art. "I never heard of a competition where the least talented designer was given the commission"

"The bus lanes in particular, in which no other traffic is allowed, form incomprehensible, empty and as often as not dead fenced-off barriers between and even in the middle of neighbourhoods. There are no landmarks, no stand-out buildings. Noise barriers and roadside greenery for that matter block the view of what lies behind."

Central city residents produce far less carbon than suburbanites, Californian cities have small carbon footprints. Development restrictions are higher in metro areas with lower carbon footprints. More towers in SF, SJ, SD, LA, less development in ATL, TX, etc. Glaeser is lukewarm to a carbon tax, but his proposal mixes (inter)national policy and local implementation, which is unrealistic. Carbon tax seems a good way to go.

Learning from slums. Very clever to present the crossover between Prince Charles, Teddy Cruz and Christian Werthmann.

woooo technology is going to make everything better and interconnected, and you will be able to walk by a bridge. Lots of good tidbits, but a depressingly shallow analysis of what goes into making cities tick. I'm not surprised that a Nokia employee thinks that outfitting cities with a(nother) new electronic infrastructure is a good idea. And getting novel information from unusual sources is undoubtably a Good Thing. But does it make cities more just/sustainable/beautiful?

on the growth of Almere

Response to the Richard Florida piece in the Atlantic. I almost bought the magazine to read the article. The fact that I didn't, and am instead bookmarking a blog post about it, goes to Varnelis' point.

on the open planning project and technology in transpo and community planning

competition to re-imagine Grand Concourse on the occasion of its centennial. Sponsored by the Bx Museum and Design Trust for Public Space.

regional gov't in Amersterdam - what they say they do

Urban farming doing well in Cuba. In other news, a poor country with high unemployment and poor agricultural production turns to gardening to feed itself.

"If Masonville Cove is anything, it is a place without original conditions"

Wrong on so many details, but point taken. "Thirty years after the premiere of Star Wars, the strange chimpanzee crossed another threshold. For the first time in fifty-five hundred years of building cities, more of humanity now lives in them than in rural settlements. In the coming years there will be countless master plans for new mega-cities in Africa, Asia, and South America. We can only hope that these plans will be drawn by disciples of Jane Jacobs, students of Robert Morris, admirers of Robert Smithson, and fans of Star Wars."

Newark Brownfields & Superfund sites.

Open call for the presentation of projects on data visualization applied to the city context. todo in next 3 hours?

Martin Krieger, physcist planner and photographer. "The city is an archive of its past." Cross-sectional documents of storefront churches, nail parlors, power substations, auto body shops in LA.

"Landscape artist Alan Sonfist (1946- ) created Time Landscape as a living monument to the forest that once blanketed Manhattan Island. He proposed the project in 1965. After extensive research on New York’s botany, geology, and history Sonfist and local community members used a palette of native trees, shrubs, wild grasses, flowers, plants, rocks, and earth to plant the 25' x 40' rectangular plot at the northeast corner of La Guardia Place and West Houston Street in 1978. The result of their efforts is a slowly developing forest that represents the Manhattan landscape inhabited by Native Americans and encountered by Dutch settlers in the early 17th century."

"While the stockyards are gone, Bubbly Creek remains in its contaminated state. Accumulated sediments fill most of the channel and continue to produce gases, which foul the air and contribute to global warming. The headwaters of the creek are no longer the drainages of the two small tributary swales but, rather, a combined sewer pumping station.
Today, Bubbly Creek is an opportunity, not the monstrous liability made famous by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The creek could support a new kind of urban environment, one that brings beauty and wildlife into the city, provides high quality recreational opportunities, encourages and maintains economic development, and safely processes urban stormwater. Rehabilitation of Bubbly Creek is long overdue."

"The Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) conducts research on metropolitan Baltimore as an ecological system. The program integrates biological, physical, and social sciences. As a part of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research Network, BES seeks to understand how Baltimore's ecosystems change over time. The ecological knowledge created by BES supports educational and community-based activities, and interactions with the Baltimore community"

FERAL CITIES

Disturbed sites, chain link, rubble, weed trees, entropic succession