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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists

My weekly curation of news and views for urbanists:

A Bicycle made of Lego. (Click on image for link)

The Value of Transportation Enhancements; Or, Are Walking and Cycling Really Transportation? An important current policy debate concerns whether the next U.S. federal surface transportation reauthorization should require spending on “enhancements,” which finance projects such as walkways, bike paths, highway landscaping and historic preservation. (Planetizen)

Planned Communities Are People, Too: The future of planned communities will involve lessons learned by the industry’s greenfield pioneers that can be applied to smaller, denser, and more complex projects in the urban core and inner ring. (Urban Land Institute)

The Canadian Government’s New Web 2.0 Guidelines: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly: For those uninterested in reading the 31 page, 12,055 word guidelines document here’s a review (David Eaves)

The Lure of the City—A Review by Edwin Heathcote: This collection of essays edited by Austin Williams and Alastair Donald mounts a defence of life in urban space. (Financial Times)

Building diverse communities: ‘Ethnic enclaves’ are raising concern all over the world, but can they be good for a city? (Calgary Herald)

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Friday Five: Articles for Urbanists [Nov 12th-18th]

This week’s round-up of articles for urbanists:

Satellite image of Dallas–Fort Worth. [Courtesy of NASA
Thinking of not voting? Think again: Casting your ballot for mayor, city council and trustees has a real effect on your daily life (Surrey Now)

Megapolitan America: Although they occupy only 17 percent of the contiguous 48 states’ land base, America’s megapolitan areas are more densely settled than Europe as a whole. (Design Observer Places Journal)

Jane Jacobs and the book that inspired a revolution: If cities are the greenest form of human settlement that we could possibly aspire to, Jane Jacobs left us the owner’s manual for how to build them. (Grist)

Why Food Policy is Urban Policy: Forward-looking urban policy must understand and incorporate food systems as a primary and foundational precondition to any and all growth. (CityLab)

Three Smart Ideas for Improving Our Urban World: The next breakthrough in architecture may not come from the likes of Frank Gehry, whose designs. It’s more likely to come from a chemist. (This Big City)

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists [Oct 29th-Nov4th]

This week’s collection of curated news and views for urbanists:

NBC Universal via Atlantic Cities

Making Local Government Funny in ‘Parks and Recreation’: Writer Dan Goor talks about turning bureaucracy into comedy (Atlantic Cities)
Better urban planning can reduce crime: How better urban planning decisions could dramatically break the cycle of crime in many neighbourhoods and help curb illegal activity on our streets. (Vancouver Sun)

Policies for a Shareable City: The Sharable website is about half way though a 20 part series that will cover 20 policy areas to inspire way to make the “common wealth” in cities accessible to all residents. (Sharable)

Anatomy of a Smart City [INFOGRAPHIC]: The 19th century was a century of empires, 20th century was a century of nation states and the 21st century will be a century of cities. (Urban Times)

Building Community: From Empty Spaces to Meeting Places: How will community be built in the 21st century? If you want to know the lie of the land, sometimes you must literally see how the land lies and what human beings have done to it. (Huffington Post UK)

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists [Oct 22nd-28th]

This week’s curated collection of news and views for urbanists:

Designing for Density Doesn’t Have to Be Ugly, or Scary: Few architects take the challenge of density done right as seriously—and creatively—as David Baker (Atlanctic Cities)

Public Participation: More than an “Orgy of Public Process” Criticism of participation is not new, but the increasingly strident tone of anti-participation sentiment should worry citizens and policy makers alike. (Next American City)

Encore for Vancouver: What started as a sawmill and railroad town now attracts urban planners from all over the world (At Lincoln House)

Jan Gehl on the Past 40 Years of Urbanism: Famed urbanist Jan Gehl looks back at the writing and thought on how people use the urban environment — including his own — over the past 40 years. (Planetizen)

The Citizen Experience Needs Us: Why UX practitioners should join the Government 2.0 movement: The idea that government is inefficient and unpleasant to deal with is almost axiomatic at this point, but it doesn’t have to be that way. (UX Magazine)

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists [October 8th-14th]

This week’s curation of insights and interviews for urbanists

The 50 Coolest Fictional Cities

Design: City As Lab: Everywhere, metropolises big and small are percolating with ideas on how to improve themselves, their apartment complexes, their bridges, their kindergartens, their beds.Here are some of the best. (New York Magazine)

The 50 Coolest Fictional Cities: Some of the most fantastic places only exist within the pages of books, the frames of films, the panels of comics, even the lyrics of songs. (Complex)

Richard Florida on the Economic Crisis, the Great Reset and Creativity: “Quality of place is going to be of growing importance in the coming era to keep cities vibrant and attracting talent and the ‘creative class.’” (MyCityWay Blog)

Back to the Future: James Howard Kunstler offers a road map for tomorrow’s cities. (Orion Magazine)

A Conversation With Allison Arieff, Writer and Editor on Sustainability: Arieff discusses how sustainability issues suffer when they’re thought of as trends; why Julius Shulman deserves to be in a sustainability hall of fame; and why she’s done writing about gorgeous Italian closets and kitchens. (The Atlantic)

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists [October 1st-7th]

This week’s wrap of good reads for urbanists:

Image by Spencer T. on Flickr

Cyclists? Pedestrians? Drivers? Who is to Blame for Urban Tension? As cities become more crowded, tension between pedestrians, cyclists and drivers will become impossible to ignore. (This Big City)

Civic Engagement as Art: A new exhibition explores the influence of public participation in society. (The Atlantic Cities)

Occupy Sprawl! and Occupy the Cul-de-Sac: Inspired by the recent popular discontent expressed so colorfully on Wall Street, Galina Tachieva offers some ideas for those who want to take on sprawl. (New Urban Network)

Messy street patterns boost city’s walkability: Cities that have the most complex and messy street patterns provide the most walkable and enjoyable experiences for visitors and residents. (Vancouver Sun)

Is Smart the Most Sustainable Car on the Planet? Fuel type is only one aspect of a car’s sustainability. (Tree Hugger)

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists [Sept 24th-30th]

This week’s selection of news and views for urbanists.

Retrofitting Gas Stations for Good: In disparate parts of the world, vacant gas stations are being repurposed to become places of entertainment, local entrepreneurship, and cultural productivity. (Pattern Cities)

Spreading ideas through the urban process: To see through the uncertainties of the future to realize profitable ideas and to overcome the challenges of product development, entrepreneurs need to live in urban areas. (Neighborhood Effects)

Density Limits Are Urban Protectionism: Timothy B. Lee explains why limits on density destroy wealth in exactly the same way that limits on free trade do. (Forbes)

Sustainable communities must embrace the familiar: If sustainable communities are to become mainstream, they must provide potential residents, workers, and visitors with as much familiarity – in buildings, in design, in components, in comfort – as possible. (Kaid Benfield’s Blog)

A Call for Urban Doctors: Much like the human body, cities are complex, dynamic systems. Continually treating the symptoms without addressing the systems and thinking that the same prescription will work for everyone, will never result in a healthy solution. (Huffington Post)

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists [September 17th-23rd]

This week’s news and views for urbanists… (and a few from last week too!)

Photograph courtesy Ian Lockwood, via Atlantic Cities

Debunking the Cul-de-Sac: The design of [North] America’s suburbs has actually made our streets more dangerous. (Atlantic Cities)

5 Things That Inspire Me: During these harsh economic times, planner Melissa Hege looks at 5 things that have inspired her inner planner. (Planetizen)

Five Solutions to the “War on Cars” Madness: Seattle city councillor Sally Bagshaw looks at some actions we can collectively take to promote détente. (The Stranger)

Digital Placemaking–Authentic Civic Engagement: Digital placemaking is the integration of social media into placemaking practices, which are community-centered, encouraging public participation, collaboration, and transparency. (Project for Public Spaces)

Modeling Open Source Cities: Peter Sigrist looks at the open source movement as a promising approach to urban development and governance. (Polis)

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists [September 3rd-9th]

Here is this weeks slate of articles for urbanists. It seems that kids weren’t the only ones going back to school this week. journalists and bloggers also picked up their game! It was really hard to keep it to just 5 this week.

Photography: Josie Withers | via Broadsheet Melbourne

A Dispatch from the World’s Most Liveable City: Melbourne, Vancouver, and the social benefits of an undefined identity. (Broadsheet Melbourne)

A cultural civics lesson: In order to change today’s gridlocked public dialogue, Gregory Rodriguez suggests skipping the town hall for the concert hall. (LA Times)

Reconsidering the City Since 9/11:An important lesson we can take from the history of 9/11 is that towns and cities are resilient. (Planetizen)

People Are Pedestrians By Design: People’s bodies and minds are designed to participate in a pedestrian lifestyle. (DenverUrbanism)

Demographics as Destiny: The new demographics are found in two generations deeply influenced by suburbia.

What was your favourite article this week? Please let me know in the comments.

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Friday 5: Long Weekend Reading for Urbanists

This week’s news and views for urbanists:

Where is the Center of a City? By blowing Google’s red markers up to “life-size” and physically planting them in real places, German artist Aram Bartholl brings attention to the blurring between real and virtual space. (Architizer)

MIT’s Place Pulse: A “Hot Or Not” For Cities, To Fix Broken Blocks: A website uses crowdsourcing to convert people’s perceptions of streets into a quantitative benchmark for measuring fuzzy qualities like how safe, rich, and unique a city feels. (FastCo Design)

A Vision of How People Should Live, From Desert Revelers to Urbanites: Rod Garrett, who laid out Burning Man, the annual festival of self-expression in Nevada, drew accolades for his approach. (New York Times)

How garage & basement apartments help people, neighborhoods and the environment: One of the best ways to accommodate growth (as we must) without either exacerbating sprawl or disturbing the character of existing communities is by using so-called “accessory units.” (NDRC Switchboard)

Pop-up placemaking and next gen urban neighborhoods: If there ever was a time to experiment with forward-thinking placemaking, the time is now. ‘Pop-up’ placemaking allows just that by enabling allow cities to try out innovative placemaking without much if any taxpayer commitment. (Cooltown Studios)

Hope you have a great long weekend!

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