John LaPlante, a longtime city employee who served as the first commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation, died Saturday at 80 after testing positive for the novel coronavirus less than two weeks earlier.
The son of a Cook County judge and the head librarian for the Chicago Public Schools, Mr. LaPlante was a “municipally minded” Roseland native who cared deeply about his city and its government, according to his daughter Leslie.
— Chicago Sun-Times
LaPlante worked for the City of Chicago for over 30 years, starting as an intern in the 1960s for what was then the city’s department of public works. He served as chief traffic engineer in the 1980s and as the city’s Transportation Commissioner in 1992. John LaPlante. Image courtesy of... View full entry
Ridership declines across all of the MTA’s trains and buses is becoming “more severe” by the day, the agency’s latest statistics revealed, causing $87 million in weekly revenue losses and raising the specter of more debt and drastic cuts to much-needed long-term repairs. — Streetsblog NYC
Already dealing with financial pressure, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority is being hit especially hard by the coronavirus pandemic, as new ridership data in the latest Annual Disclosure Statement reveals. "Recent substantial declines in ridership and traffic in response to the... View full entry
The General Manager of the Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department (HCIDLA), Rushmore Cervantes, has announced plans to step down from his position at the end of the month. Cervantes has led the department for over a decade and has presided over a turbulent era in the city... View full entry
Architects are no longer builders but healers. They have to get off their computers and out of their cars to heal the social, physical and environmental aspects of our landscape. What architects build is not a finished product but a part of a city’s changing eco-system. — WOODBURY UNIVERSITY
James Rojas as an urbanist with close ties to his home, from its community values, feel, art to neighborhood stories and legends. All materializing in his inimitable urban visioning. His brand of Latino Urbanism via his beloved East LA neighborhood are series of performances, installations... View full entry
Boston continues to hold the dubious distinction of having the worst traffic in the United States, fending off the likes of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago to top traffic data analyst INRIX’s list of congested cities for the second year in a row. [...]
Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C., round out the worst five U.S. cities for congestion. Wichita, Kansas, tops the study for least congestion.
— Boston Herald
The latest annual Global Traffic Scorecard published by transportation analytics company INRIX calculated that the average Boston commuter lost 149 hours — that's more than six days — per year due to traffic congestion, amounting to $2,205 per driver in time lost. Boston ranked as the... View full entry
The Indonesian government is involving three international consulting firms in developing the masterplan of the country’s new capital city, which is to be located in East Kalimantan.
[...] American engineering company AECOM, consulting firm McKinsey & Company and Japanese architectural and engineering firm Nikken Sekkei would design the city, which is to feature the latest technology and be environmentally friendly at the same time.
— The Jakarta Post
In August 2019, Indonesian President Joko Widodo had announced the selection of a 450,000-acre site in East Kalimantan province on Borneo Island where the nation's new capital would be relocated to. Jakarta, the current capital on Java Island, is traffic-choked, increasingly prone to floods, and... View full entry
The architecture world has been abuzz lately over the recent public opening of Countryside, The Future, the new exhibition taking place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Let's take a look at some of the... View full entry
Michael Hertz, whose design firm produced one of the most consulted maps in human history, the curvy-lined chart that New York City subway riders peer at over one another’s shoulders to figure out which stop they want, died on Feb. 18 in East Meadow, N.Y. He was 87. — The New York Times
In an effort to boost ridership, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, North America's largest public transportation network, formed a committee under the leadership of John Tauranac in the mid-1970s to create a new, more appealing map for the New York City subway system and replace the... View full entry
Welcome to “Countryside, the Future”: This is what you might get if you asked a celebrated European philosopher-architect to reinvent the Iowa State Fair. No mess, no smells, just acres of color printouts, cryptic homilies about nature, and a couple of pesticide-spraying drones. Did you know that agriculture is increasingly computerized? — New York Magazine
New York Magazine's architecture critic, Justin Davidson, takes a no-holds-barred look at the Countryside, The Future exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The exhibition, developed by a research and exhibition team led by OMA/AMO and Rem... View full entry
On Wednesday, the city released its “Resilient Houston” strategy, a robust plan to invest in and strengthen the capabilities of neighborhoods, communities and the entire region to address, withstand and quickly recover from physical, social and economic shocks and stresses.
Mayor Sylvester Turner unveiled the strategy alongside Chief Resilience Officer Marissa Aho and signed an executive order requiring all city departments to make resilience part of all strategic planning.
— Kinder Institute For Urban Research
The new plan comes in relation to the six floods that have occurred in the region: the Memorial Day Flood in 2015, the 2016 Tax Day Flood and Hurricane Harvey in 2017. According to the Kinder Institute, the Resilient Houston plan focuses on 5 core visions: A Healthy Place to LiveAn... View full entry
Located in the city of Jiangyin, China, the new Brearley Architects + Urbanists (BAU)-designed greenway captures the local push toward more sustainable transport and builds on the formal qualities of the nearby Yangtze River. Through geographical mimicry, the formal manifestation of the... View full entry
Just look at the American Hotel (sold in 2001 and then again in 2013). It is still "preserved," but entirely gentrified. What happens when the suitcase full of money and sleek renderings by a famous architect show up, when demolition is someone's foregone conclusion? This is Los Angeles after all.
Starting with a scene of a fictional computer game called Demolition, Anthony Carfello's investigative article for "Georgia" goes behind the scenes of much touted and celebrated developments taking a place in downtown LA's artsy parts. It is like a guide book to gentrification, demolishment and... View full entry
Satellite images dating back to 1975 allow researchers to map how millions of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends have proliferated in street networks worldwide. [...]
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charts a worrying global shift towards more-sprawling and less-hooked-up street networks over time.
— CityLab
The study's authors, Christopher Barrington-Leigh at McGill University and Adam Millard-Ball at UC Santa Cruz, were able to identify the global trend toward urban street-network sprawl by analyzing high-resolution data from OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery of urbanization since 1975 and then... View full entry
The University of Oregon is currently seeking applicants for its latest cohort of Visiting Faculty Fellowships in Design for Spatial Justice. The initiative, according to a listing currently featured on the Archinect Jobs board, “will award up to six faculty fellowships in... View full entry
Beginning in early 2020, Berlin’s left-leaning government will freeze rents for five years. Landlords will be required to show new tenants the most recent rental contracts to prove they aren’t jacking up prices. They’ll also have to follow new rent-cap rules, which for many landlords could mean lowering rents by as much as 40%. Those who don’t comply will be hit with fines as high as €500,000 ($553,000) for each violation. — Bloomberg Businessweek
Writing in Bloomberg Businessweek, Caroline Winter and Andrew Blackman cover the fascinating political battle taking place in Berlin, Germany, where tenants' groups and landlords are navigating the impacts of recent rent-freeze regulations by the local government that aim to reign in unaffordable... View full entry