The wisdom of surrounding transit stations with "seas" of park-and-ride lots may be turning. In theory, park-and-ride seems like a great transportation compromise, converting full-trip drivers into part-trip riders. In practice, the opposite often occurs, with former non-drivers now commuting part of the way by car.
That unexpected practical shift can increase vehicle miles traveled in a metro area, subverting the sustainability goal of transit.
— citylab.com
Amelia released audio from an interview with architect, preservationist and filmmaker Malachi Connolly, director of "Built on Narrow Land". NewsOrhan Ayyüce takes a weekend drive through a vacant Vernon, in a short film for the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. citizen commented... View full entry
Cars offer more than just convenience: they can give lower income Americans an economic leg up. [...]
While tracking households that had participated in two federal housing voucher programs, [a study] found that car owners were twice as likely as transit users to find jobs and four times likelier to retain them. Car-owning households were also able to locate near better neighborhoods and schools. This reaffirmed previous work ... arguing that car ownership plants the seeds for upward mobility.
— thedailybeast.com
In 2002, CINTRI, a branch of Canadian firm Cintec Environment Inc., was granted an exclusive 50-year contract to collect commercial and residential waste in Phnom Penh and keep the city’s main streets clean. The exact details of the company’s agreement with city hall have never been made public, but since the deal was inked, Phnom Penh’s population has swelled from just over one million to two million people. The population boom and its attendant urban sprawl seem to have caught CINTRI off-guard — nextcity.org
The winners of the Rebuild By Design competition were finally revealed! The global competition sought out the best local and resilient design solutions that would help rebuild the Eastern Seaboard cities affected by Hurricane Sandy...Out of the 10 invited multidisciplinary teams, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) selected the six winners, who were announced today by Secretary Shaun Donovan. — bustler.net
BIG U by the BIG Team for New York, New YorkLiving with the Bay: A Comprehensive Regional Resiliency Plan for Nassau County’s South Shore by the Interboro Team for Long Island, New YorkNew Meadowlands: Productive City + Regional Park by MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN for The Meadowlands, New... View full entry
Baumgartner+Uriu looked to none other than Mother Nature for their Apertures installation, which was publicly displayed at the SCI-Arc Gallery in Los Angeles this past spring. If B+U's Apertures sound familiar, perhaps you may recall their "Animated Apertures" Housing Tower that was exhibited at... View full entry
In an effort to remediate a large patch of heavily contaminated soil in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, engineers managed to unleash a smell so pungent that, last week, owners of the site took a new tactic: a giant tent to contain it all. [...]
Though the 20,000-square-meter polyester tent contains an area roughly the size of three football fields and rises 36 meters near downtown, it only covers less than half of the contaminated area.
— motherboard.vice.com
Previously: Giant bubbles could be 'built over Beijing parks to save residents from smog danger' View full entry
As the search for more affordable real estate in New York City pushes deeper into neighborhoods that were once considered out of the way, bicycle lanes are taking on new importance. Since 2007, the city has carved out more than 350 miles of bike lanes in the five boroughs, according to the Department of Transportation. As a result, the distance from the nearest subway or bus stop has become less of a drawback for the two-wheeled set, particularly in transit-challenged areas of Brooklyn. — nytimes.com
The latest Student Works: highlighted work from students in UCLA’s 3M futureLAB studio along with collaborators from University of Huddersfield. Reacting to the lonely dystopic 3D printed future of residential architecture, PULPITO quipped "The project makes me feel... View full entry
The jury is in and the Los Angeles River's future seems to be bright. After more than six months of intense lobbying by the city, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) has announced that it will be recommending a more ambitious $1-billion plan to restore an 11-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River from downtown through Elysian Park. — kcet.org
Architects, designers and scientists have joined forces to explore the technologies needed to build a spacecraft that could be launched within the next 100 years and sustain human life for generations.
Early designs for the ship envisage a giant 15km-wide ball filled with soil that will support complex ecosystems of microbes, plants and animal life. Rather than building homes on top of the soil, humans will live within, carving out rooms in a network of connected burrows.
— theguardian.com
A major insurance company is suing Chicago-area municipal governments saying they knew of the risks posed by climate change and should have been better prepared. The class-action lawsuits raise the question of who is liable for the costs of global warming. [...]
“What the insurers are saying is: ‘We’re in the business of covering unforeseen risks... But we’re now at a point with the science where climate change is now a foreseeable risk.’”
— washingtonpost.com
The just-elected new Mayor of Paris, Madame Anne Hidalgo, has prepared a revolutionary sustainable mobility project whereby virtually all of the streets of the city will be subject to a maximum speed limit of 30 km/hr.
The only exceptions in the plan are a relatively small number of major axes into the city and along the two banks of the Seine, where the speed limit will be 50 km/hr, and the city’s hard pressed ring road (périphérique) [...].
— World Streets: The Politics of Transport in Cities
Spirit of Space are known for their emotive, precisely choreographed short films exploring buildings and urban spaces. Their most recent film reports on Studio Gang's renovation of the Shoreland Hotel, a historic Chicago high-rise on the border of Lake Michigan. SOS's film looks into the guts of... View full entry
As fossil fuels become more expensive and the number of urban dwellers continues to rise, urban farming will help feed the population without increasing the cost and pollution of food transport. [...]
The rise in rooftop farming isn't limited to commercial operations. "Rooftop farming and gardening has become extremely diverse, and in that sense a more 'normal' presence in cities"
— news.nationalgeographic.com
