Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists (May 21st -27th)

May 27th, 2011

This week’s round up of news and views for urbanists:

Articles for Urbanists: Great places: dense, wired, and sustainable

  • Great places: dense, wired, and sustainable: Part of what makes great places great is ecological sustainability. So what’s the best way to reduce our per-capita resource footprint? The answer is simple math: density. (Grist)

  • Opinion: Vancouver coasts on its beauty, but misses out on creating vibrant city life: Vancouver coasts on its natural assets, too rarely learning from other cities that do more with less. (Vancouver Sun)
  • The city gets a new lease of life: Even in this age of technology—where people can collaborate with people they barely know on the other side of the globe thanks to the internet—success depends on communities of individuals being in close physical proximity. (Future of Business)
  • What it takes to be a planner: So what does a planner do? Most of them are bureaucrats that shuffle paper, roll out red tape, make plans with all the best intentions that nobody will actually implement and lament the numerous things— especially the public—that are out of their control. But a few will actually improve humanity, better the human condition and make their part of the world a more spectacular place. (Strong Towns Blog)
  • Gentrification and Its Discontents: Manhattan never was what we think it was. Best to pick a different place to try to render fixed and solid that which inexorably melts into air. (The Atlantic)