If we want everyone to participate in public life, we must design and build an inclusive public realm that is accessible to all. Public life can’t just be available to the abled, young, or healthy.

The sizeable global population of people with physical, auditory, or visual disabilities, autism or neurodevelopmental and/or intellectual disabilities, or neuro-cognitive disorders will face greater challenges if we don’t begin to more widely apply universal design principles — American Society of Landscape Architects

Andres Sevtsuk’s Harvard Graduate School of Design studio—examined how LA might maximize the opportunities at stake. The studio sought strategies to creatively optimize investment in public transit in an increasingly hot market for private-sector services. How can technology complement, rather than compete with, public transit? And, as LA reshapes itself, can it improve equity, sustainability, and quality of life as it aggressively redevelops its transit systems? — Harvard GSD

Touted as the city’s finest undeveloped piece of land, the 157-acre property redefined the luxury market when it listed for a record $1 billion last year. On Tuesday, it sold for a mere $100,000 at a foreclosure auction, a fraction of the $200-million loan outstanding on the property. — The Los Angeles Times

Tougher building rules for skyscrapers have been drawn up by the City of London because of concerns that a high-rise, urban microclimate will generate winds capable of knocking over cyclists and pedestrians.
Developers will have to provide more comprehensive safety assessments of how proposed buildings will affect people on street level, with more robust testing of roadways and pavements using detailed scale models in wind tunnels and computer simulations. — The Guardian

Workers are taking down Chernobyl's "sarcophagus," once meant to keep the reactor's radioactive materials locked inside, before it falls on its own accord.

The dismantling will begin after the New Shelter Containment (NSC) is in full working operation. Currently, the NSC controls part of the confinement. Earlier this year, the European Union handed off control of the NSC to Ukraine. — Popular Mechanics

Americans have, for generations, prepared themselves for society’s collapse. They built fallout shelters during the Cold War and basement supply caches ahead of Y2K. But in recent years, personalized disaster prep has grown into a multimillion-dollar business, fueled by a seemingly endless stream of new and revamped threats, from climate change to terrorism, cyberattacks and civil unrest. — The New York Times

This intertwined history of infrastructure and racial inequality extended into the 1950s and 1960s with the creation of the Interstate highway system.

As in most American cities in the decades after the Second World War, the new highways in Atlanta—local expressways at first, then Interstates—were steered along routes that bulldozed “blighted” neighborhoods that housed its poorest residents, almost always racial minorities. — The New York Times

We are concerned that at present our education does not give sufficient weight to the inherently ecological and political basis of architecture, nor to our responsibility to meet our uncertain future with socially and environmentally informed practice.

We appreciate and applaud the efforts of contemporary practitioners, but we ask you to join us in using the freedom and particular responsibility of academic institutions to push our discipline further in this direction. — Architecture Education Declares

Fifty years ago this summer, word reached New Orleans that John Volpe, secretary of the Department of Transportation under President Richard Nixon, had canceled the Riverfront Expressway—the high-speed, elevated interstate highway slated for the edge of the French Quarter. — Nola.com

In the 2014 deal, Forest City Ratner vowed to expedite affordable housing for the 17-building development, under threat of a lawsuit from neighborhood groups that alleged the firm had broken faith with a community benefits pact signed nearly a decade earlier. — The City

As the United States suffers through a summer of record-breaking heat, new research shows that temperatures on a scorching summer day can vary as much as 20 degrees across different parts of the same city, with poor or minority neighborhoods often bearing the brunt of that heat. — The New York Times