Through the program, property owners will pay a small assessment that will go toward maintaining and improving parks, plazas, gardens, sidewalks and more. It’s modeled after the Community Benefit District (CBD) program, but geared toward greening a residential area, as opposed to promoting commercial shopping districts, like more conventional CBDs. [...]
“This provides a way for us to not only maintain them [the public spaces], but provide capital improvements over time.”
— NextCity
Targeted specifically in the Dogpatch and Northwest Potrero Hill neighborhoods of San Francisco, the impetus for the Green Benefit District plan began years ago, as development rates were quickly beginning to outpace public green spaces in the area. The GBD program would provide a continual source... View full entry
Germany might still be a car-obsessed country, but it's starting to build an Autobahn for bikes. — Fast Company
From the U.S. to Germany, urban planners and major corporations are starting to purposefully design for bicycles instead of individually operated cars. In Munich, a proposed network of two-lane bike paths would radiate out from the city center to the surrounding suburbs, creating 400 miles of... View full entry
With a $35,000 grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, [MITs Elizabeth Christoforetti] and her team are working on a project called Placelet, which will track how pedestrians move through a particular space. They’re developing a network of sensors that will track the scale and speed of pedestrians [and vehicles] over long periods of time. The sensors, [currently being tested in downtown Boston], will also track the 'sensory experience' by recording the noise level and air quality of that space. — CityLab
More on Archinect:The Life of a New Architect: Elizabeth Christoforetti (Featured interview)MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bikeMIT's Newest Invention Fits All the Furniture You Need in One Closet-Sized BoxMIT develops self-assembling modular robots View full entry
Regulations have progressively made homes more sustainable and energy-efficient, and voluntary codes take these standards further. Architects like to push them further still [...]
There are now housing associations and developers who can see the point of good design, and others who can’t quite, but still feel as if they should employ it. The public, too, perhaps encouraged by the TV programmes of Kevin McCloud, are more open to contemporary architecture.
— theguardian.com
According to The Guardian's Rowan Moore at least, who takes the long-view on how Britain's public housing policy and execution have changed in the last 50 years.Related on Archinect: 4 Public Housing Lessons the U.S. Could Learn From the Rest of the WorldLondon is eating itselfHousing mobility... View full entry
If it is possible, financially and technologically, to build a three-acre park in the river west of New York City, then why isn’t it possible to construct an artificial island at a higher elevation than downtown Manhattan that would serve as New York City’s sixth borough? Many of the city’s problems—real estate prices, developers purchasing blocks at a time, the astronomical cost of parking a car, or even a bicycle, even shoreline erosion—are problems of space. So why not just build more space? — theawl.com
Related: Visions of LoLo, a Neighborhood Rising From Landfill View full entry
The neighborhood — a central district that was dismantled by the Nazis, battered by Allied bombs and radically reconfigured by postwar architects — has foiled urban planners, exasperated patrons of the arts and demoralized generations of Berliners intent on seeing their city made once more into a cohesive whole. [...]
Many are hoping that all that strife is in the past now that a new museum of modern art will be built in the much-maligned arts quarter.
— nytimes.com
In recent Berlin news on Archinect: Berlin's world-class museums struggle to build up excitementBerlin lists communist-era towers of Alexanderplatz as historical monuments; Gehry high-rise still happeningHerzog & de Meuron to redevelop Berlin’s infamous Tacheles cultural center; locals fear... View full entry
We all have a pretty good idea which NYC neighborhoods command top dollar, but this incredible 3D map from NeighborhoodX really puts things into perspective by pinning the city’s 325 neighborhoods against one another in a visually jarring side-by-side comparison. Among the most expensive? In Brooklyn... — 6sqft
More on New York real estate:The rise of communal living in New YorkThis $250M mega penthouse might become New York's priciest homeNew York & London ranked highest in 2015 Global Cities IndexNYC's public-housing woes View full entry
Across the continent, Chinese companies are building highways, railways, sports stadiums, mass housing complexes, and sometimes entire cities.
But China isn’t just providing the manpower to fuel quickly urbanizing African cities. It is exporting its own version of urbanization, creating cities and economic zones that look remarkably similar to Chinese ones.
— qz.com
Related in the Archinect News:Urban China: Chinese Urbanism in AfricaA Look at Africa's Modernist ArchitectureAdmire the diversity of African vernacular architecture in this growing online database View full entry
After the dramatic decline in concentrated poverty between 1990 and 2000, there was a sense that cities were “back,” and that the era of urban decay—marked by riots, violent crime, and abandonment—was drawing to a close. Unfortunately, despite the relative lack of public notice or awareness, poverty has re-concentrated. — Paul Jargowsky for The Century Foundation
The Century Foundation publishes a Paul Jargowsky paper laying out the facts and statistics of decline and poverty's impact on American cities. Paul Jargowsky is a fellow at The Century Foundation where he writes about inequality, the geographic concentration of poverty, and residential... View full entry
If America decides to take on its growing slum problem, people will need to think hard about how to do so. Mobility programs are proven to work for the families who move, but what happens to the neighborhoods that people leave? Can affordable-housing projects in low-income areas also help poor families succeed, or are they doomed to fail their residents, no matter how nice they are, because of where they are located? — theatlantic.com
Related on Archinect:In Chicago, forming economically integrated suburbs is more complex than it looksAbandoned schools = new development opportunitiesNYC's public-housing woes View full entry
'There is no one size fits all approach — every region is completely different...' Hurricane Sandy underlined the urgency by ruthlessly exposing New York's structural weaknesses...California also suffered as historic droughts settled in, and the 2014 wave of winter storms terrorized the North, emphasizing that extreme conditions were here to stay and could strike anywhere. This bought the U.S. into line with the global situation. — CNN
More on Archinect:The Hurricane Katrina Cottages: where are they now?Coating the LA reservoir in "shade balls" will save 300M gallons of waterHow the Cascadia earthquake threatens America's coastal NorthwestThe Pragmatics of Adaptating to Sea Level Rise: The Next Wave @ UCLAU.S. Department of HUD... View full entry
‘"It’s hard to think about ways to drain the swamp when alligators are biting your ass.’” — Placemakers.com
Immediately after a natural disaster, most residents want to get things back to normal, even if that "normal" wasn't particularly ideal. The story of the Katrina Cottages, a series of 400 to 800 square foot residences that would provide temporary relief housing in Mississippi after Hurricane... View full entry
Zaha Hadid Architects has been announced as the winner of the Danjiang Bridge competition. Sited at the mouth of the Tamsui River, the bridge will provide a critical link between several highways on Taiwan's northern coast.The Danjiang Bridge is intended to bring economic growth to Taipei's Port... View full entry
"You have generations of people under the age of 35 … who are choosing to live car free and car-lite." – Westside Councilman Mike Bonin — L.A. Times
From the newly installed "protected" intersections in Austin, Texas and Davis, California to additional proposed bus lanes and bike paths in Los Angeles, car culture is becoming less of a given and more of an expensive, perhaps even less desirable, option. Cities across the U.S. are starting to... View full entry
At a macro level, Chicago is quite diverse. At a neighborhood level, it isn’t. — Five Thirty Eight Economics
How can a city be both diverse and segregated? In Chicago's case, the city is home to every major racial/ethnic group, but these groups rarely tend to live together in the same neighborhoods. In fact, on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level, Chicago has one of the higher residential segregation... View full entry
