Calling Los Angeles streets a “front door to the world and the place where public life and private enterprise connect,” Mayor Eric Garcetti and the city Department of Transportation released a strategic plan Monday aimed at making them safer and more accessible by 2025.
The 61-page report, titled “Great Streets for Los Angeles,” looks toward ending all pedestrian-related deaths, improving safety around public schools and changing the timing of streetlights [...]
— Los Angeles Daily News
Included in the plan are initiatives to help the city become more bike-friendly, such as adding more bike corrals on the street and racks to city buses. This comes on the heels of new, state-wide legislation recently signed by Gov. Jerry Brown aimed to increase bike safety. Assembly Bill 1193 will... View full entry
The dominant architectural site in [Mecca] is not the Sacred Mosque, where the Kaaba, the symbolic focus of Muslims everywhere, is. It is the obnoxious Makkah Royal Clock Tower hotel, which, at 1,972 feet, is among the world’s tallest buildings. It is part of a mammoth development of skyscrapers that includes luxury shopping malls and hotels [...] The city is now surrounded by the brutalism of rectangular steel and concrete structures — an amalgam of Disneyland and Las Vegas. — NY Times
In a move that could dramatically change Los Angeles’ skyline, city leaders announced Monday that helicopter landing facilities will no longer be required atop new buildings.
The fire code requirement has been criticized for contributing to the “flat-topped” look of Los Angeles’ skyline, particularly in downtown.
Los Angeles was the only major U.S. city with such a rule, which has been in place since at least the 1970s.
— dailynews.com
The Spofford Juvenile Center was a particularly painful landmark in the Hunts Point community in the Bronx when it was built in 1957... [Majora Carter] envisions the Spofford site combining mixed-income housing, open space and economic development that would appeal to the neighborhood’s existing demographics. Carter is a supporter of affordable housing, but thinks that if it’s built in isolation, you still haven’t solved the problems of employment and a lack of amenities. — nextcity.org
CityLab's more than 400 attendees will bring together the people who are creating the cities of the future—dozens of mayors from around the world, practitioners, planners, architects, artists, economists, urban scholars, and other civic leaders—to discuss emerging trends and share best practices for common challenges. — AtlanticLIVE
Archinect will be covering the second annual "CityLab: Urban Solutions to Global Challenges" conference, a summit for top figures in city governments, design, architecture, journalism and technology to address pressing urban issues. Hosted by The Atlantic in partnership with The Aspen Institute... View full entry
"We have been spending eight months in the neighborhood, getting ideas from the residents, thinking about how do we repurpose these vacant lots...They can't all just be parks" — The Pitch
Natalie Gallagher profiles Kansas City Art Institute alum and community/social practice artist, Sean Starowitz. Some of Starowitz's projects include; Fresh Bread, Bread KC, Lots of Love and the Talk Shop. View full entry
Cartoonist and journalist Eleri Mai Harris tells the story of Canberra's creation by architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin (who also happened to be married to one another, and worked with Frank Lloyd Wright).Read the piece in full, gorgeous watercolor on Medium: The Utopian... View full entry
Bloomberg published their predictions for the top forty most densely populated cities by 2025, with current #1 Hong Kong keeping the top spot, at nearly twice the projected density of #2, Salvador, Brazil. Hong Kong's population growth is predicted to grow by 32.8%, while Salvador's is nearly... View full entry
Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University and an untiring defender of the suburbs, begins a recent column in the Washington Post with a valid question: “What is a city for?” He then proceeds to get that question completely wrong. But really, we should be thanking him. In his article, he neatly sums up many of the key myths emerging from the anti-urbanism set, making my job of debunking these myths a lot easier. — thisbigcity.net
The aforementioned WP column already managed to spark a lively discussion last month here on Archinect. View full entry
Before the end of this year, the Federal Highway Administration will release its own guidance on designing protected bike lanes.
The agency’s positions on bicycling infrastructure has matured in recent years. Until recently, U.S. DOT’s policy was simple adherence to outdated and stodgy manuals like AASHTO’s Green Book and FHWA’s own Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) — neither of which included protected bike lanes.
— usa.streetsblog.org
Saturday, September 20 NYC's historic 190 Bowery part of massive buy-up by developer RFR Holdings: RFR plans to spend upwards of $900M on property and land purchases by the end of 2014. One of its recent buys included the former "72-room bohemian dream house" at 190 Bowery. Friday, September... View full entry
The Information reports that Page started up a Google 2.0 project inside the company a year ago to look at the big challenges facing humanity and the ways Google can overcome them. Among the grand-scale plans discussed were Page's desire to build a more efficient airport as well as a model city. To progress these ideas to fruition, the Google chief has also apparently proposed a second research and development lab, called Google Y... — theverge.com
Today, on China’s southern coast, the integration of the Greater Pearl River Delta (PRD) is turning fiction into fact (sans the harsh lawman), with 11 cities linking to create an urban area of 21,100 square miles (55,000 sq km) and a population of up to 80 million.
The nine cities of the PRD, plus the special administrative zones of Hong Kong and Macau, are becoming increasingly linked by a series of bridges, tunnels, roads, and high-speed rail networks.
— urbanland.uli.org
Look for coverage of the confernce here on Archinect next week. For now, follow Archinect on Twitter, or via #anfarch#anfarch TweetsThe ANFA Conference will explore, from a scientific basis, the range of human experiences with elements of architecture, through collaboration between architects and... View full entry
The latest entry in the Showcase: series featured Barkow Leibinger's Stadthaus M1, located in the "sustainable model district" of Vauban in the already so-called "green city" of Freiburg. Plus, Nicholas Korody looked at Factory Berlin, a "start-up campus" hosted by Google, built... View full entry