Group items tagged

No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond

Really fascinating exhibit by MoMA on the future of urbanism in global cities. 

One of the trends described in TrendsWatch 2013 is urban renaissance. The article discusses a historic neighborhood in Bogota, but here in the US we can also see this trend. I see it here in Hayward, CA, where we hope that the building of the new downtown museum will play a role in the renewal of downtown.

thinking out of the box about urban planning

The repopulating of urban areas is certainly a trend that will affect museums.  But do you agree that the government should end the mortgage interest deduction because focus is shifting from suburbs to cities?  Don't people who buy condos in cities benefit from the same deduction as those buying houses in the suburbs?

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.

Interesting piece on urbanism, the "creative class," and class and economics in general.  Where to do museums fit into this "hip cool"? Burning money trying to become "cooler" ends up looking something like the metropolitan equivalent to a midlife crisis.

This has gotten lots o' buzz... w/ his intellectual enemy Joel Kotkin (?) stirring the fire... I look at museums as needing this creative class to drive buzz -and innovative efforts.... these are the 'First Friday' night party people...

Fun new ideas from UP SF re: DIY/urbanism.  Fruit fence, anyone? 

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?

"What happens when its customers are a generation that prefers urban living?"  same question could be asked by suburban museums. 

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.

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.

Each pod relies on another structure to provide them a place to sit and provides a private space for one person.

human infrastructure essential to successful urban places.

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.

The future consumer arena is urban.

For most of the individuals, low credit scores are something that makes borrowing a real tough thing. Unlike urban myths, having bad credit history is not the end of the world nowadays