"When Mohammed Atta flew a Boeing 767 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center he knew, perhaps more clearly than most of Manhattan’s inhabitants, the power of architecture to define a city. A student of town planning at Hamburg, Atta also had a degree in architecture from Cairo... View full entry
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg writes and Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal that calls for Gov. Paterson to "dismantle the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and hand over its development responsibilities to the city." WSJ | via Curbed | related? View full entry
Don't forget to feed the meter.. More after the jump. hello, I am writing to you as a volunteer helping to plan PARK[ing] Day LA 2008, which is citywide initiative happening on Friday, September 19th. If you haven't yet, I hope you will consider participating in Park[ing] Day LA, either by... View full entry
A vast region of the Amazon forest in Brazil was home to a complex of ancient towns in which about 50,000 people lived. The settlements, consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages organised around a central plaza, are now almost entirely overgrown by the forest. The findings were... View full entry
In contrast to Beijing's monumental building projects, future Olympic hosts like London shouldn't think that bigger is better. Guardian | prev. 1 | 2 | related Op-Ed View full entry
The fine folks at MONU have just released issue #9 (!) on the theme of Exotic Urbanism. (available here) View full entry
Two excellent recent posts by the folks at Airoots which look at the model of urban development which has shaped modern metropolitan Tokyo. They argue that the mixed-used, high density, low-rise, non-hierarchical model of urban/community planned epitomized by Post WW II Tokyo is in many cases... View full entry
As more and more people move from rural to urban aggregations, an increasing percentage of urban water is being used by the informal agricultural sector. A recent IWMI study tried to identify how much of the water being used is either treated or untreated wastewater. BBC News The report found... View full entry
In many American cities, public transportation infrastructure has been neglected for a long time in favor of other services, or where that is not incentive enough, for economic drivers like civic centers and ballparks. It seems things might be changing as many smaller cities in the US are... View full entry
Planners seeking to rebuild the World Trade Center have always envisioned that the 16-acre site would have a vibrant streetscape with distinctive buildings, shops and cultural institutions lining a newly restored street grid. From the destruction of Sept. 11, 2001, a new neighborhood teeming with... View full entry
Nine prominent Canadians critique the architecture of the cities they live in... National Post View full entry
When Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, announced that it would open one of its trademark big-box stores on the Brooklyn waterfront in Red Hook, many in the area feared that throngs of shoppers would transform and scar a quiet neighborhood possessed of a battered industrial charm...But since the... View full entry
Albert Speer's son helped design the architecture of the Beijing games. But the similarities with Berlin 1936 don't end there. Guardian | related View full entry
Former mayor of London Ken Livingstone has launched a stinging attack on his successor Boris Johnson, accusing him of cost cutting and “hypocrisy” following BD’s revelation that he has axed the 100 Public Spaces programme. BD | prev. View full entry
Plans to transform London’s urban realm through the mayor’s 100 Public Spaces programme have been abandoned and the 18-month-old organisation Design for London subsumed into a larger “land and infrastructure” directorate. BD View full entry