Archinect - News

Book review: Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable Future

2015-04-22T18:40:00-04:00

I have to admit to a degree of wariness when I first opened Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World, a new book edited by Jared Green and published by Princeton Architectural Press. The introduction makes some bold claims for a rather slim book with little text. “We have the answers. We are both the cause of the problems and the solution to them,” Green writes with supreme optimism. The book is a collection of eighty projects that leading architects, urban planners, artists, critics and thinkers chose as a response to the question: “What gives you hope for the future?” The criteria for their responses stipulated that they must discuss a project they admire, not their own. And the results are as varied as one might imagine for a question that is both vague and expansive.

More than anything else, the responses highlighted the mutability of the term “sustainable” within contemporary architecture discourse. Some of the responses, such as that of Katrin Kling...

So gentrification is just a myth after all?

2015-01-19T14:22:00-05:00

It’s time to retire the term gentrification altogether. Fourteen years ago, Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard of the Brookings Institution wrote that gentrification “is a politically loaded concept that generally has not been useful in resolving growth and community change debates because its meaning is unclear.” That’s even truer today. Some U.S. cities do have serious affordability problems, but they’re not the problems critics of gentrification think they are.

What's your take on John Buntin's Slate piece?

Public Transit Helps New Yorkers Earn More Money

2015-01-05T14:23:00-05:00

[NYC] neighborhoods with the best access to transit, usually in Manhattan...also have the highest median household income, and the lowest unemployment rate... Neighborhoods with the worst access to transit (South Staten Island) had lower median incomes... and slightly lower unemployment rates...The neighborhoods with limited access to public transit, like the Flatlands in Brooklyn, fare the worst: their unemployment rate is nearly 12%, and their median household income is around $46,000.

That or the subway was designed around, and continues to serve, historically-affluent communities...

The study was conducted by NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management.