Group items tagged

thinking out of the box about urban planning

What can city planners and those who plan refugee and emergency camps learn from this mega pop-up city?

The continuing struggles of former manufacturing centers have fundamentally altered urban planning, traditionally a discipline based on growth and expansion.

Pratt Institute's Architecture School this fall plans to start a master's program in "Urban Placemaking and Management"...to be focused on creating successful public spaces based on community planning

I live just a few miles from where the Pop-UP MANGo happened. I can tell you that while the community-participation aspect of this kind of "planning" is terrrific, it undermines overall city planning in terms of space use, traffic mitigation, and access. What's the proper balance?

The pedestrian is an extremely fragile species, the canary in the coal mine of urban livability. Under the right conditions, this creature thrives and multiplies. But creating those conditions requires attention to a broad range of criteria, some more easily satisfied than others.

What might the office building of today look like, or be used for, tomorrow?

Acres of unused space in conventional office buildings may be transformed into hotel rooms, classrooms, theaters or retail uses, architects and urban planners say.   And museums? Exhibition spaces? Pop-up?

The Communist Party announced changes to their one-child policy to allow urban couple to have two children is both parents are only-children.  China's population is aging rapidly and they face looming labor shortages before they can get a firm foothold on prosperity.

This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in Brooklyn and the walking-shed community associated with it. Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them. We applied two steps to generate the data displayed by the map. First, we used the Google Places API to locate all coffee shops in a given city. Second, for each point in the map we queried the walking route and distance to its nearest coffee shop using the Google Distance Matrix API. In the final map the colored areas represent a region which is walkable to a specific coffee shop (within one kilometer or 0.7 miles). The intensity of color at each point indicates its distance from its corresponding coffee shop.

A report aims to find a common global method for evaluating and addressing climate risk in response to the increasing frequency of catastrophic storms to use by cities in their redevelopment processes.

Newport News, Virginia's framework for 2030--museums are merely described, but in the context of city planning.

Not all of these are the usual suspects to be on such a list: Bogota, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Mexico City, Munich, Rio de Janeiro, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Every electric vehicle will need to have access to a charging station within its driving range. Charging stations will have to be distributed differently from gas stations.

great places ("you know them when you see them" as we say in our baseline report) are listed in 3 categories: neighborhoods, streets and public places.

Census Bureau defines "downtown," for lack of a better universal definition, as everything within a 2-mile radius of the local city hall.

Sit-able places are key, interdisciplinary focal points where the delight of "placemaking" and cultural traditions of "watching the world go by" merge with the sometimes conflicting domains of law and politics, economic development, public safety, gentrification and the homeless.

Three maps depicting the "walkingsheds" of cafes in Cambridge, San Francisco, and Brooklyn. An interesting look at the possible areas of influence of specific Third Spaces.

Gee, LA is still trying to get much of its underground transportation built, while London is looking to re-purpose old, unused tunnels. Among the possible uses imagined for these spaces is a National Fire Brigade Museum.

"Why don't cities count the long-term costs of suburbia?" asks author of report on sprawl.

The paper, Places in the Making, casts aside the idea of the monolithic expert, and argues clearly and cohesively for the importance of Placemaking as a vital part of community-building, rather than a fuzzy "extra."