Proposed environmentally friendly town of Sky would have 600 homes. Sky would be part of a growing, $12 billion a year sustainable-building industry. Some locals concerned about impact of a big new development. Developer says Sky won't be a commune, winces at the hippie connotation CNN View full entry
A whirlwind tour of Istanbul that even includes a ski lift and 16 other modes of public transportation.TDN View full entry
Escondido,CA and others did try earlier, but Farmers Branch, Texas became the first in nation to publicly vote and ban renting housing to illegal immigrants. View full entry
Saeb Erekat, a chief negotiator for the Palestinians in Jerusalem, said, "Peace, or Settlements, but you can't have both." To this we learn that today "The Israeli authorities are planning to build three new Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, an area regarded as occupied land under... View full entry
Susan G. Soloman, the author of American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, and Roger A. Hart, a psychologist from the Children's Environments Research Group at the Graduate Center of CUNY, discuss how playgrounds affect community and child development. And they tell us about their work... View full entry
China’s “Comfortable Housing Program” aims to modernize Tibetan society, whether they like it or not. “In the new settlements, cookie-cutter houses line the roads at regular intervals, striking in their uniformity. The settlements varied in size but were mostly towns... View full entry
China's largest city languished for 30 years as the Chinese economy was closed to outside influence, and the country went through the political turmoil of the cultural revolution. All this was dramatically changed when the country opened up its markets to the West in the 1980s, and Shanghai was... View full entry
The Deutsche Bank recently announced a $100,000 award to recognise innovation at the urban scale across the globe. Urban Age is a worldwide investigation into the future of cities whose principal aim is to shape the thinking and practice of urban leaders and sustainable urban development... View full entry
The Economist gives cities a thorough going-over in one of its most recent surveys. The usual suspects are to be found under sources: Robert Bruegmann, Mike Davis, Jane Jacobs. Glaeser, Gluckman, Katz, Kotkin, Mitchell, Mumford…and Johnny Town-mouse. Quite “Of the traditional reasons... View full entry
"That [Robert] Moses was highhanded, racist and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists. But his grand vision and iron will, they say, seeded New York with highways, parks, swimming pools and cultural halls, from the Belt Parkway to Lincoln Center, and... View full entry
Geoff has a cool post on Bldgblog that runs the gamut from old style campuses to post-modern streets, spurred by a ctritique of the Great Streets LA Event. Who are the streets for? That's the question... Lots and lots of comments respond... Read View full entry
TAKE a walk along the Seine in southeast Paris, about a mile east of Notre Dame Cathedral, and you’ll see a dense collection of boxy glass-and-steel office buildings, futuristic apartments, cleverly converted industrial structures, concrete mixers, forklifts and cranes. It’s what some... View full entry
More than a half century after Edythe "Toots" Hagglund and her husband, Eddie, decided to build a town on a treeless piece of prairie at the edge of a popular fishing lake, Toots is putting the heart of the town on the auction block. usatoday. Toots, 93, said, "I love to fish, but I don't have... View full entry
A fuel tanker explodes, heat melts the freeway, which collapses and governor plans to declare emergency in Bay Area. No one died. Worst traffic jams to come in San Francisco, Oakland and vicinity. AP/yahoo View full entry
Pro Moses and anti Jacobs? Not entirely, but there’s a familiar trajectory to this lapsed neocon's thinking. "The tension between a government promoting public purposes and the forces of the market has been present from the beginning of the American Republic. This is nowhere more evident... View full entry
