ASUD

Disclaimer: This web site contains data tables, figures, maps, analyses and technical notes from the 2010 Revision of the World Population Prospects. These documents do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

The Codes Project, developed under the guidance of Prof. Emily Talen at Arizona State University, is an impressive attempt to gather the variety of codes throughout history that have regulated land use into one useful directory. From the Code of Hammurabi to Seaside, Florida's Urban Code, you can download PDFs and compare these landmarks of regulation. You can even complete a "Synoptic Survey" and perform an urban analysis on your own town. An excellent, easy-to-use reference.

New York City's Department of Transportation created this blog as a campaign to re-brand the city's poor reputation when it comes to fixing potholes. The site is simply and irreverently designed to get the point across in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. The department is busy everyday filling thousands of potholes, and this site makes that number abundantly clear. The blog also provides a form for reporting potholes.

Besides its appeal to a longue durée analysis, the topic of urbanism and utopia - and their links, of course - is today rather fashionable, whether one speaks of current exhibitions, critical insights on the idea of a capitalist Utopia, or even indirectly among the latest parliamentary reports.  In this series of three guests posts we will explore the definition of a Post-Utopian Urbanism, on the basis of various readings ranging from Lefebvre to recent writings of Jameson and Rem Koolhaas, and to a great extent indebted to David Harvey's seminal analysis of the links between capitalist transformation and our (post)modern perception of space and time (1989).

"n this series of three guests posts we will explore the definition of a Post-Utopian Urbanism, on the basis of various readings ranging from Lefebvre to recent writings of Jameson and Rem Koolhaas, and to a great extent indebted to David Harvey's seminal analysis of the links between capitalist transformation and our (post)modern perception of space and time (1989)."

Here are some tips for how you can enliven this site with your inspiration, stories, and projects.This site is most fundamentally about-city dwellers, urban entrepreneurs, organizers, dreamers, doers.

In a piece called The Beauty of Urban Planning from Space, the Sustainable Cities Collective highlights views from space of uniquely designed street pattern designs in various cities around the world. There are ten examples that illustrate the zenith of urban planning. As attractive as the street patterns are, they highlight the inevitable inability of designers, or anyone else for that matter, to influence much more than small changes in the overall urban form.

Density. For planners and urban designers helping to create transit-oriented developments (TODs), density is the crucial factor in achieving a critical mass for ridership and a mixed-use walkable environment that will entice people out of their cars. In many cases if planners can't reach that threshold of density than transit is the baby that gets thrown out with the bath water.

Thirty years ago, Curitiba, Brazil unveiled a master plan to address urban issues with environmentally-friendly public transit and social programs. FRONTLINE/World Fellow Tim Gnatek took to the busses, walkways and streets of the now world-renowned city for a second look at what urban planners and environmentalists around the globe point to as a world model.

Informal areas have largely been responsible for absorbing most of Egypt's growing urban population for the past 30 years. But most Cairenes didn't notice these areas - or ashweyat, as the areas with red-brick buildings and narrow, unpaved streets are loosely called - until the Ring Road was built around the formal city limits about 10 years ago. The road exposed neighborhoods that many residents had never seen before, showing them for the first time that formal Cairo had been completely surrounded by kilometer after kilometer of informal building.

THIS blog often makes the argument that Britain's planning laws all too often restrict and prevent investment which might create economic growth. It is worth remembering occasionally that things were once much worse. For proof of that, see this fascinating post on Birmingham's economy in the 1950s and 1960s, by Henry Overman, of the LSE's Spatial Economics Research Centre. It's worth reading the whole thing, but a cut down version of the post is copied below: