Pinboard: bookmarks for robertogreco tagged 'density'

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"Maps should not be understood only in extension, in relation to a space constituted by trajectories. There are also maps of intensity, or density, that are concerned with what fills space, what subtends the trajectory… It is always an affective constellation… Pollack and Sivadon have made a profound analysis of the cartographic activity of the unconscious, perhaps their sole ambiguity lies in seeing it as a continuation of the image of the body. On the contrary, it is the map of intensity that distributes the affects, and it is their links and valences that constitute the image of the body in each case—an image that can always be modified or transformed depending on the affective constellations that determine it. A list or constellation of affects, an intensive map, is a becoming." - Gilles Deleuze

density bobbygeorge trajectory place space cartography constellationalthinking constellations intensity maps deleuze gillesdeleuze from delicious
19 days ago by robertogreco

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Reading L.A.: The once and future Plaza, nature in the city - latimes.com

"Promoting more events like ArroyoFest seems crucial in helping Angelenos define mobility in a new way. And, as Gottlieb points out, the kind of thinking that will be required to reimagine the freeway for 21st century Los Angeles is the same kind of thinking that helped create the city and its infrastructure in the first place. He reminds us in the book that the great Carey McWilliams -- one of the first authors we met in Reading L.A. -- described Los Angeles as "a land of magical improvisation."

Redefining or even repurposing the freeways of Los Angeles -- on a permanent rather than merely temporary basis -- may require the biggest and most creative improvisation of all."

improvisation density socal change transmobility personalmobility mobility future urbanism urban 2012 history books cities losangeles from delicious
january 2012 by robertogreco

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The Struggle to Define L.A.'s Transitional Moment - Design - The Atlantic Cities

"“If we can agree that the city has been linked with suburban development and private mobility, and those two things are both either being called into question or breaking down to some degree, what happens next? How do we establish some kind of identity for a post-suburban future?” Hawthorne says. “And that doesn’t mean the freeways are going away or cars are going away or single family houses for that matter, it just means that those things won’t define the character of the city in the way that they have.”

Just what that character will be is as much shaped by the transition underway as by our understanding of the city. For Hawthorne, this year-long literary trip has bolstered his perception of the city as a product of its past. But, he says, even the most overarching studies of the city can’t and don’t describe what is emerging in the L.A. of today."

urbanism change density transportation cities urban books christopherhawthorne 2012 transition socal transmobility personalmobility future history nateberg losangeles from delicious
january 2012 by robertogreco

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Debunking the Cul-de-Sac - Design - The Atlantic Cities

"Safest cities in America are the ones incorporated before 1930, when streets were laid out in grids. Fashion and regulation shifted then to favouring winding streets and cul-de-sacs. Which turn out to be inefficient and dangerous"

safety urbandesign urban urbanism cities suburbs suburbia density cars transportation cul-de-sac california research normangarrick wesleymarshall patterns comparison grids traditionalgrid fha design urbanplanning 2011 from delicious
september 2011 by robertogreco

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Preserving the Environment with Cities, Not In Spite of Them - Design - The Atlantic Cities

"We cannot allow the future to mimic the recent past. We need our inner cities and traditional communities to absorb as much of our anticipated growth as possible, to keep the impacts per increment of growth as low as possible. And, to do that, we need cities to be brought back to life, with great neighborhoods and complete streets, with walkability and well-functioning public transit, with clean parks and rivers, with air that is safe to breathe and water that is safe to drink. 
 
This, I believe, leads to some imperatives: where cities have been dis-invested, we must rebuild them; where populations have been neglected, we must provide them with opportunity; where suburbs have been allowed to sprawl nonsensically, we must retrofit them and make them better. These are not just economic and social matters: these are environmental issues, every bit as deserving of the environmental community’s attention as the preservation of nature."

cities urban urbanism environment sustainability economics kaidbenfield us innercities people humans edwardglaeser davidowen density energy civilization classideas urbanization builtenvironment infrastructure society libraries parks publictransit transportation mobile schools education growth population 2011 from delicious
september 2011 by robertogreco

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‪Teddy Cruz Presentation‬‏ - YouTube

"We can be the producers of new conceptions of citzenship in the reorganizing of resources and collaborations across jurisdictions and communities…We could be the designers of political process, of alternative economic frameworks." 
 
[via: http://www.diygradschool.com/2010/06/professor-teddy-cruz-ucsd.html ]

teddycruz cities citizenship sandiego tijuana watershed conflict borders community communities militaryzones military environment infromal formal collaboration 2009 housing crisis density sprawl natural political art architecture design urban urbanization urbanism recycling openendedness open vernacular systems construction economics culture pacificocean exchanges flow landuse neweconomies micropolitics microeconomies local scale interventions intervention communitiesofpractice crossborder from delicious
july 2011 by robertogreco

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Are We There Yet? Passage of the transportation reauthorization bill would finally shift us toward more environmentally sustainable communities.

"Environmentalists' interest in the transportation bill is clear. Transportation accounts for more than two-thirds of the nation's oil use and about 25 percent of its carbon-dioxide emissions…Americans will be hooked on oil until they have workable alternatives to the automobile. Investing in urban light rail & regional high-speed rail networks; boosting funds for bus systems; constructing bike lanes; & focusing on repairing existing roads instead of building news ones are a first step in changing, at a fundamental level, how we move around. If we want Americans to ditch their cars, that will require giving them choices, and that means creating a mass-transit system that makes the car -- and not the bus -- look like a pain… 
 
Reducing the reliance on our cars, of course, also serves U.S. national-security interests."

us transportation policy infrastructure masstransit buses lightrail rail highspeed trains density publictransit 2011 environment cities cars carfree sustainability politics peakoil oil energy from delicious
july 2011 by robertogreco

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Mule Design Studio’s Blog: Density and Difference

Putting screenshots of Google+ and Twitter next to each other you’ll notice two things.…One…more density on the Twitter side… 
 
Secondly, take a look at how each service shows you the difference between things. In twitter’s ordered world there’s a basic unit of measurement: a tweet. Highly restrictive by nature. The differences are easy to spot. Some have links, some are retweets, faves, etc. But because the basic unit itself is so uniform, the stream is incredibly easy to scan, even read. The differences between each unit are things you catch out of the corner of your eye. 
 
Google+, on the other hand, wants you to know that these objects are different types. It’s all about leading with the differences, rather than creating a scannable, understandable whole. It’s function over form. Cognitively, I have to figure out what type of object it is before I can read it."

design social twitter google facebook google+ 2011 density scanning interface interfacedesign reading difference from delicious
july 2011 by robertogreco

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BLDGBLOG: Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond

"In many ways, then, the book is astonishingly extroverted. It's a book by an architecture office about the city it works in, not a book documenting that firm's work; and, as such, it serves as an impressive attempt to understand and analyze the city through themed conversations with other people, in a continuous stream of partially overlapping dialogues, instead of through ex tempore essayistic reflections by the architects or dry academic essays." 
 
Comment from Robert Farrell: "Perhaps the answer to the traditional architectural monograph lies in the above discussed book. How boring it is to see glossy image after glossy image of an architects portfolio put on bookshelf. It seems at a time when most architects are not building much, that investigation should take the lead."

losangeles bldgblog michaelmaltzan architecture urban urbanism cities books 2011 monographs portfolios identity infrastructure landscape resources experience density polity economics community institutions nomoreplay photography meaning hatjecantz place olebouman iwanbaan context charlesjencks qingyunma edwardsoja charleswaldheim jamesflanigan sarahwhiting mirkozardini catherineopie geoffmanaugh jessicavarner from delicious
may 2011 by robertogreco

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No More Play: Los Angeles on the verge of a new era: Places: Design Observer

"Los Angeles has been compared to a laboratory — an urban ground for experiments both prescribed and accidental. Laboratory is a perfect word. Enveloping, chaotic and mutable, LA is a nocturnal workshop where the constant experiments leave no time to tidy up and reset the data in order to start fresh in the morning. In LA, you are both the experiment and the scientist. One is forced to be the object of fascination and fray, while simultaneously judging and monitoring the urban experiment… 
 
what is the new identity for a city whose entire life has been marked by its ability and desire to endlessly expand? Perhaps the lack of perceptible hierarchies — or, likely, the reality that traditional thresholds and boundaries in this city are hidden and constantly transgressed — makes LA a difficult case study in the urban milieu… 
 
As an evolving being, its dynamics make description difficult. Perhaps it is not a city — perhaps it can only be described as Los Angeles."

psychogeography losangeles hierarchy hierarchies cv michaelmaltzan architecture urban urbanism history cities sprawl 2011 1992 limits change experimentation maturation density levittown future present design jessicavarner nomoreplay iwanbaan from delicious
may 2011 by robertogreco

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Geographically densest Wikipedia coverage

"Wikipedia articles can be tagged with latitude/longitude coordinates. I was recently curious to know: which areas have the most coverage? It's important not to read too much into the answer, because the density of coordinates is due to a mixture of: how active different Wikipedia language projects are, how active at geo-tagging they are, which regions have had lots of short articles mechanically imported (e.g. on small towns, or metro stations), and finally, the actual landmark density (e.g. dense urban cores versus sprawling suburbs). But nonetheless it might be interesting to know. 
 
So, here are the most densely Wikipedia-article-populated parts of the world, at several scales."

history cities maps mapping visualization density wikipedia openstreetmap osm 2011 michalmigurski from delicious
may 2011 by robertogreco

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FT.com / House & Home - Liveable v lovable

"“These surveys always come up with a list where no one would want to live. One wants to live in places which are large and complex, where you don’t know everyone and you don’t always know what’s going to happen next. Cities are places of opportunity but also of conflict, but where you can find safety in a crowd." 
 
"What makes a city great: *Blend of beauty and ugliness – beauty to lift the soul, ugliness to ensure there are parts of the fabric of the city that can accommodate change…*Diversity…*Tolerance…*Density…*Social mix – the close proximity of social and economic classes keeps a city lively…*Civility…"

cities rankings vancouver nyc losangeles london joelkotkin rickyburdett joelgarreau tylerbrule edwinheathcote 2011 livability diversity density tolerance society vitality social economics civility beauty ugliness janejacobs crosspollination opportunity dynamism conflict classideas from delicious
may 2011 by robertogreco

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Week 16: Busman’s holiday | Urbanscale [Oh, the implications for our education system as well: swarm-like behavior, informal solutions, tech integration, light touch of government…]

"…despite South Africa’s clear desire to benefit from so-called “South-to-South” knowledge transfer, Curitiba- or Bogota-style BRT strategies have proven untenable…more supple solutions have appeared, notably rise of informal transportation sector… 
…swarm-like behavior…relatively effortless way in which taxi operators have incorporated tech…endlessly fascinating…But SA government’s pragmatic response to rise of informal transit…particularly clever & inspiring…[explained]…This kind of light touch on part of gov extends at least some basic protections to riders, w/out imposing laggy top-down planning on system as whole. 
Pieterse really got me thinking about potential of informal transit for my own city…seems to be one of those areas where architecture of safety regulation, labor laws, & other protective measures we embraced in society—for good & sufficient reason!—also inhibits emergence of more flexible & potentially more effective & sustainable modes of getting around."

adamgreenfield urbanscale transit mobility informal lcproject toapplytoeducation policy flexibility sustainability southafrica density laborlaws society startingover leapfrogging regulation diggingoutfromunderweightoflegallayers safety 2011 technology informalsystems grassroots thecityishereforyoutouse pragmatism johannesburg edgarpieterse from delicious
april 2011 by robertogreco

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The Tyee – A Year Later, Why Go Downtown?

"Hern and Berelowitz continue their back and forth on post-Olympics Vancouver. Today: bike lanes, towers, and more."

urbanplanning density vancouver britishcolumbia bc matthern lanceberelowitz urban urbanism cities bikes biking towers transportation from delicious
april 2011 by robertogreco

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Volunteered Geographic Information » ‘Compactness’ in Zoning: the circle as the ideal.

"I saw a thought provoking presentation recently, given by Wenwen Li of the University of California Santa Barbara, the talk was a wide ranging insight into Cyber Infrastructure, its uses for geospatial information, and some of the computational techniques that underpinned the project. One element of the project involved zone design for the greater Los Angeles region, and involved the implementation of an algorithm that was intended to aggregate small areal units into larger zones whilst meeting a number of conditions, principle among these conditions was ‘compactness’. The output looked very much like a single hierarchy of Christaller hexagons, and this got me thinking about the nature of space and compactness."

compactness density cities losangeles geography hexagons circles zoning clustering python builtenvironment demographics infrastructure space centralplacetheory wenwenli ucsb cyberinfrastructure geospatial information from delicious
february 2011 by robertogreco

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Per Square Mile

"Per Square Mile is a blog about density. It’s about what happens when people live like packed sardines. It’s also about what happens when people live so far apart they can go days without seeing another soul. It’s about living amongst trees and prairies, and living in places miles away from them. It’s about the trees and the prairies, too. And lakes and streams and animals and insects. In short, this is a blog about density of all types."

maps geography urbanism planning density mapping infographics statistics demographics classideas sustainability from delicious
february 2011 by robertogreco

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A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com ["According to data, when a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity increases by approximately 15% per capita.]

One quote“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”

urban urbanism geoffreywest cities corporations growth physics modeling models energy density efficience freedom remkoolhaas planning policy economics self-control short-termmemory memory architecture design urbantheory urbanscience theory science data census walking transportation patternrecognition patterns math mathematics infrastructure jonahlehrer organic organisms consumption metabolism sustainability interaction janejacobs collaboration crosspollination robertmoses efficiency from delicious
december 2010 by robertogreco

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490 - Map of the World's Countries Rearranged by Population | Strange Maps | Big Think

"What if the world were rearranged so that the inhabitants of the country with the largest population would move to the country with the largest area? And the second-largest population would migrate to the second-largest country, and so on? 
 
The result would be this disconcerting, disorienting map. In the world described by it, the differences in population density between countries would be less extreme than they are today. The world's most densely populated country currently is Monaco, with 43,830 inhabitants/mi² (16,923 per km²) (1). On the other end of the scale is Mongolia, which is less densely populated by a factor of almost exactly 10,000, with a mere 4.4 inhabitants/mi² (1.7 per km²)."

geography visualization population maps mapping world density populationdensity via:kottke from delicious
november 2010 by robertogreco

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A City in the Cloud: Living PlanIT Redefines Cities as Software | Fast Company

"Living PlanIT (pronounced “planet”) is the brainchild of Steve Lewis and Malcolm Hutchinson, a pair of IT veterans who met when Lewis was still a top executive on the .NET team at Microsoft. Their ambition is twofold: to build a prototype smart, green city in Portugal that can be rolled out worldwide, and to drag the construction industry into the 21st century. 
 
The latter may be the more audacious of the two. While plenty of companies have jumped on the smarter city bandwagon (as I’ve written about ad nauseum), no one has sought to make the construction business look more like the technology one."

architecture urban urbanism cities planning technology livingplanit stevelewis malcolmhutchinson construction portugal green density sustainability smartcities via:cityofsound from delicious
august 2010 by robertogreco

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How Mobile Devices Could Lead to More City Living - Science and Tech - The Atlantic

"mobile devices tapping on wireless networks can exert a powerful social influence, as we've all noticed. They could help tip the scales towards denser city living, or at least shorter commutes, for the wired workforce."

alexismadrigal transmobility cars commuting masstransit density cities urban urbanism mobile phones mobiledevices transportation media technology from delicious
august 2010 by robertogreco

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Economic View - Why Free Parking Comes at a Price - NYTimes.com

"In his book, Professor Shoup estimated that the value of the free-parking subsidy to cars was at least $127 billion in 2002, and possibly much more. 
 
PERHAPS most important, if we’re going to wean ourselves away from excess use of fossil fuels, we need to remove current subsidies to energy-unfriendly ways of life. Imposing a cap-and-trade system or a direct carbon tax doesn’t seem politically acceptable right now. But we can start on alternative paths that may take us far. 
 
Imposing higher fees for parking may make further changes more palatable by helping to promote higher residential density and support for mass transit. 
 
As Professor Shoup puts it: “Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist.”"

parking cities urban transport economics environment transportation density costs subsidies cars driving us tylercowen from delicious
august 2010 by robertogreco

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Horror vacui - Wikipedia [Follow-up to: http://www.waywordradio.org/spendthrift-snollygosters/]

"In visual art, horror vacui (literally: fear of empty spaces, perhaps represented by white spaces, also known as cenophobia) is the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with detail."

horrorvacui emptiness fear horror surrealism outsiderart painting density definition art aristotle philosophy psychology insanity from delicious
august 2010 by robertogreco

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suckerPUNCH » barrio de los paracaidistas [via: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=10232]

"anthony STAHL + david LEE: This tower is a frame-work for a new vertical city. Containing roadways, open plazas and parks; the nature and function of the ‘tower’ is to provide unlimited potential for new urban and vertical environment. By respecting the communal aspects of the city while 
allowing growth, this new urban frame-work challenges the frozen and static quality of current tower typology. The architecture within the tower develops over time, creating a dynamic composition of vertical neighborhoods that grow around and into one another. Sub-public and private spaces evolve organically, creating complex urban spaces similar to those of historic Mexico. The meaning of the tower is a living being that breathes in the city and is truly defined by Mexican culture and people."

architecture design barriodeparacaidistas mexico mexicodf df losangeles lego vertical density from delicious
august 2010 by robertogreco

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suckerPUNCH » barrio de los paracaidistas [via: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=10232]

architecture design barriodeparacaidistas mexico mexicodf df losangeles lego vertical density from delicious
august 2010 by robertogreco

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New Visions of Home: Change Observer: Design Observer

"The world is tumbling over the precipice of a major demographic shift. By 2030, it is estimated that 25 percent of the developed world’s population will be over 65 — an unprecedented proportion in human history. A century ago, that number was a mere 3 percent. In the U.S., the population over 65 is expected to double to 71.5 million in the next 15 years. Investment firm T. Rowe Price now advises retirement savings until age 92. ...

aging architecture housing europe trends us design retrofitting cohousing multigeneration vertical density denmark small smallhomes lifelonglearning seniors affordability world population urban urbanism switzerland portland oregon leed designobserver australia uk
july 2010 by robertogreco

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Urban density and transport-related energy consumption - Maps and Graphics at UNEP/GRID-Arendal

Sheesh. Even NYC is above all the non-US cities in this graph.

mobility planning transportation urban sprawl density us northamerica australia asia europe
june 2010 by robertogreco

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Locals and Tourists - a set on Flickr

"Some people interpreted the Geotaggers' World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in piaces that tourists don't visit.

mapping maps geotagging geography flickr infographics information visualization tourists tourism photography cities infographic culture data density design graphics travel experience
june 2010 by robertogreco

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Human Transit: vancouver: an olympic urbanist preview

"What's special about Vancouver? It's a new dense city, in North America...closest NA has come to building substantial high-density city - not just employment but residential - pretty much from scratch, entirely since WWII. I noted in an earlier post that low-car NA cities are usually old cities, because they rely on development pattern that just didn't happen after advent of the car. In 1945 Vancouver was nothing much: a hard-working port for natural resource exports, with just a few buildings even ten stories high. But look at it now.

vancouver britishcolumbia bc cascadia canada via:cityofsound development density cities northamerica urban urbanism planning transit transportation geography
march 2010 by robertogreco

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Todo cabe en una cajita… | Ciudad Posible

"Esta imagen...muestra las áreas construidas de Atlanta y Barcelona (1990). Ambas urbes están representadas a la misma escala, y tienen aproximadamente la misma población. Sin embargo el contraste en su manera de utilizar el suelo es increíble: resulta que podrían caber 26 Barcelonas en el área que hoy ocupa Atlanta.

paris barcelona atlanta phoenix sprawl cities urban suburban density diversity urbanism nyc manhattan rome sanfrancisco sunbelt
february 2010 by robertogreco

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How slums can save the planet « Prospect Magazine

"Sixty million people in the developing world are leaving the countryside every year. The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living"

mikedavis economics poverty demographics sprawl urbanism infrastructure population climatechange green environment urban cities energy slums density stewartbrand
february 2010 by robertogreco

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David Byrne’s Perfect City - WSJ.com [via: http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/09/12/david-byrne-urbanism/]

"There’s an old joke that you know you're in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it's the other way around you're in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I'd take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney's with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it's not really possible to cherry pick like this—mainly because a city's qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place's cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream."

davidbyrne bikes biking books urbanism planning urbanplanning urban cities design janejacobs failure creation energy glvo size density chaos danger serendipity security attitude scale human parking boulevards mixed-use publicspace architecture culture sociology travel
september 2009 by robertogreco

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MIT engineers find way to slow concrete creep to a crawl - MIT News Office

"In their PNAS paper, the researchers show experimentally that the rate of creep is logarithmic, which means slowing creep increases durability exponentially. They demonstrate mathematically that creep can be slowed by a rate of 2.6. That would have a truly remarkable effect on durability: a containment vessel for nuclear waste built to last 100 years with today's concrete could last up to 16,000 years if made with an ultra-high-density (UHD) concrete." [via: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/parking-lot-to-last-16000-years.html]

materials concrete longevity engineering structures density
june 2009 by robertogreco

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cityofsound: Postopolis! LA, day two / Los Angeles

"By the time we’re back in Downtown, the traffic is building up and Broadway is a chaotic, honking mess of slow-moving steel. By this time, though, the city has won me over. Its constant contradictions - the very contradiction of it being here in the first place - have little negative effect now, only continually beguiling. Despite everything, this city continues to grow. As the Carey McWilliams poem from 1946 says:

losangeles cities us urbanism cars density reynerbanham danhill cityofsound bencerveny
april 2009 by robertogreco

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The City Is A Prototyping Engine - there is a lot to say, of this we are sure

"The best cities - usually also the largest - are prototyping engines that use the abundance of their density to ceaselessly test new ideas for material accumulations (buildings, vehicles, things), abstract systems (laws, regulations, even languages), and ways of life. This, I argue, is the source of the effervescence that any good city exhibits. The city is exciting because it's always new in a million little ways. In a similar way the non-city, the rural, is exciting because its vaccuum presents persistant challenges. If the mode of the city is becoming, the mode of the rural is a constant overcoming."

cities urban urbanism change innovation via:adamgreenfield bryanboyer complexity prototyping architecture design learning rural density consumption
february 2009 by robertogreco

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Charles declares Mumbai shanty town model for the world | Art and design | The Guardian [see also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/06/prince-charles-architecture]

"The Mumbai shanty town featured in the film Slumdog Millionaire offers a better model than does western architecture for ways to house a booming urban population in the developing world, Prince Charles said yesterday. Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 residents are crammed into 520 acres, contains the attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world's increasingly urban population, he said. The district's use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to "an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to 'warehouse' the poor".

dharavi mumbai india architecture design poverty slums sustainability urban urbanism density economics politics
february 2009 by robertogreco

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Steven Johnson on the Web as a city | Video on TED.com

"Outside.in's Steven Johnson says the Web is like a city: built by many people, completely controlled by no one, intricately interconnected and yet functioning as many independent parts. While disaster strikes in one place, elsewhere, life goes on."

ted stevenjohnson nyc cities janejacobs technology web networking density internet emergence
october 2008 by robertogreco

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Homesteads - Housing Stack - NYTimes.com

"With Pile Up, an apartment-building design concept patented both in Europe and in the United States, the 78-year-old Swiss architect Hans Zwimpfer has come up with what he thinks is a solution to the problem of suburban sprawl and the long commutes and pollution that come with it. Take single-family houses, whose benefits — space, privacy, light, a yard — suburbanites are loath to give up. Then simply stack the houses, one on top of another. Voilà: The comforts of suburban living, with the convenience and ecological benefits of urban density."

homes housing architecture design density suburban urban
october 2008 by robertogreco

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The Green Issue - The New York Times Magazine

"Some Bold Steps to Make Your Carbon Footprint Smaller: Act, Eat, Invent, Learn, Live, Move, Build"

design ecology energy environment food globalwarming green nytimes sustainability homes housing transportation schools schooldesign teaching learning activism life simplicity conservation 2008 walking cars density cities gardening leed solar efficiency emissions
april 2008 by robertogreco

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Redesigning cities | Tackling the hydra | Economist.com

'Its politicians are determined to turn Los Angeles into a normal city...original metropolitan miscreant is now trying to reform itself so fundamentally that Joel Kotkin, an urbanist at Chapman University, compares it to rewriting a DNA code."

housing traffic politics transport urbanism sprawl losangeles density urban cities transportation planning metro subway trains
april 2008 by robertogreco

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Is Home Ownership a Good Thing? : TreeHugger

nice compilation of articles by James Surowiecki, Richard Florida, and Matt Yglesias highlighting the disadvantages of home ownership...some interesting bits in the comment thread too

homes housing neo-nomads nomads flexibility trends work economics cities environment sustainability density materialism business growth transportation finance
april 2008 by robertogreco

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Governing: Assessments/February 2008: The Walkability Revival

"Will more people who can afford suburban privacy be attracted to the noise and bustle of the urban street?"

walking urbanism transportation sustainability suburban density trends change cities suburbs urban
march 2008 by robertogreco

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The cosmopolitan ecologist: LA is not denser than New York: true density measures

"persistent myth floating around Internet that LA is denser than NYC...variation worked its way into Washington Post...I’ve known forwhile that while these factoids are technically true...finally got around to getting the appropriate data"

density losangeles nyc myth cities urban
march 2008 by robertogreco

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LA Weekly - City Hall's "Density Hawks" Are Changing L.A.'s DNA

see also discussion here: http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=72060_0_24_0_C

losangeles cities planning zoning density politics policy urban urbanism future
march 2008 by robertogreco

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Learning From Tijuana: Hudson, N.Y., Considers Different Housing Model: Teddy Cruz - Architecture - New York Times

"great achievement here has less to do with aesthetic experimentation than with creating a bold antidote to the depressing model of ersatz small-town America embraced by so many suburban developers in recent years."

teddycruz tijuana sandiego housing hudsonny hudson design architecture class community identity gentrification urban landscape gardens redevelopment playgrounds affordability density green environment public private urbanism planning
february 2008 by robertogreco

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AHI: United States » The ultimate future city: the world inside

"So unless we are all to be obsessed voyeurs of each other, we might as well shed our historical prudery and accept that anything about us can become visible to all of us. We today may not like such a world, but it is coming upon us whether we like it or

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january 2008 by robertogreco

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AndrewBlum.net: Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change

"Jacobs wrote that “word does not move around where public characters and sidewalk life are lacking.” Now it does. There are the people paused at the top of the subway stairs, occupying two spaces at once, one physical, one virtual."

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november 2007 by robertogreco

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Sprawl Brawl

"Critics square off over a statistic that suggests Los Angeles is denser than New York."

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october 2007 by robertogreco

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Why you'll soon be avant-gardening | Reviews | Visual Arts | Arts | Telegraph

"Why you'll soon be avant-gardening Last Updated: 12:01am BST 16/06/2007 By 2030, two thirds of the world's population will live in cities. A new show at Tate Modern shows what their lives will be like."

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june 2007 by robertogreco

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Tate Modern | Current Exhibitions | Global Cities

"Global Cities looks at changes in the social and built forms of ten large, dynamic, international cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo."

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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Feeling the pinch of compact cities

"High density "compact cities" are the favoured model for sustainable living in the 21st Century. But there are drawbacks because losing urban green spaces will reduce people's quality of life and drive out wildlife that have also made their homes in citi