Marshall, Garrick and Piatkowski are talking about a different set of health concerns: not communicable diseases like cholera, but lifestyle diseases like diabetes. "The literature suggests," they write, "that the shift in industrialized nations toward a more sedentary lifestyle is linked to increasingly auto-dependent lifestyles, which in turn is linked to lower density developments and auto-friendly land uses." Maybe we're designing places, in other words, that make it harder to be active. — washingtonpost.com
As a report from the Obama administration warns that one in four bridges in the United States needs significant repair or cannot handle automobile traffic, engineers are employing wireless sensors and flying robots that could have the potential to help authorities monitor the condition of bridges in real time. — ScienceDaily
Brad Buchanan spends his summer weekends, and some predawn mornings, atop an ATV checking on his cattle along Kiowa Creek. [...]
But each weekday, Buchanan shifts gears... The weekend farmer who's also a longtime architect ... is five months into his job as Denver's head city planner.
That juxtaposition — an Eastern Plains rancher responsible for making key decisions about Denver's increasingly dense urban footprint — has some critics of the city's building bonanza grumbling.
— denverpost.com
In that ancient fable of localized identity, a city-dwelling mouse and his country-dwelling cousin try out life in each other's shoes. There are countless versions of this story, found in civilizations from all over the world. Invariably, when each mouse visits his cousin, he feels uncomfortably... View full entry
current conventional wisdom embraces density, sky-high scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments. It reflects a desire to create an ideal locale for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers. [...]
Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and “human scale” neighborhoods.
— washingtonpost.com
In cities around the country, the geographical hubs of gay culture — so-called “gayborhoods” — are changing. Amin Ghaziani, author of a new book, There Goes the Gayborhood?, says this subtle cultural shift holds enormous significance for the gay community in urban America and beyond. [...]
Yet while positive social and legal shifts have led to this change (from the Castro to Chelsea), we haven’t quite evolved past the point of needing them.
— nextcity.org
Samsung is making a big push into being the center of the smart home today with its acquisition of SmartThings, which allows people to sync up their connected gadgets onto a single smartphone app and hardware hub. — forbes.com
Looks like Samsung is trying to catch up with Apple's upcoming HomeKit. View full entry
The intensive militarization of America’s police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. “The blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement, police militarization” as “the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.” — THE INTERCEPT
And close to home, here at bigger Archinect circle, its impact on urban environments emphasized here. DEMILIT View full entry
It relates to scale, who's going to be there, what reflects the culture and interests of the community. People's first notion about a park is Central Park — big, grassy, lush. So adjusting expectations about that aesthetic, we have a hard row to hoe in L.A. This is the era for our city to think about parks and the river and the urban forest as all one thing. — latimes.com
I see nothing wrong with replacing the hegemony of cars with the hegemony I am proposing, of bikes. Those who need buses would be no worse off than they are now. But a problem would come if a city like Amsterdam had a bike modal share of 90 percent, as could achieved if end-of-trip strategies were built into all buildings to eliminate the problem of bike theft, and if shelter removed the inequity of cycling being the one mode remaining where people get wet. — cycle-space.com
Culture officials in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine have ordered museums to put their most valuable pieces into storage, and some institutions have closed to the public, as fighting continues between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces.
Ukraine’s culture ministry has also asked that the media refrain from “emphasising objects of cultural heritage” to avoid their being targeted [...].
— theartnewspaper.com
Artist and animator Sam Grinberg revisits the fight over the future of the American Folk Art Museum. — ny.curbed.com
Ridescout, the “Kayak of ground transportation” that aggregates over 300 rideshare services, announced today that it will integrate carpooling into its app. This move comes on the heels of recent announcements from Uber and Lyft, which on the same day earlier this month revealed they would gradually begin to allow their users to carpool. While ridesharing has up to this point been a mostly single-user service, Ridescout’s announcement reinforces a general trend toward multi-user integration. — urbanful.org
For the latest edition of Student Works: Justine Testado spoke with project architect, Duncan Baker-Brown, about The Waste House, designed/built by faculty and students from the Faculty of Arts and City College Brighton & Hove. Olaf Design Ninja_ did some quick math "The numbers tell... View full entry
Meandering down a section of Robson Street on the iconic 800 block in downtown Vancouver, passers-by can sit, relax, play, and socialize on the "Urban Reef" installation. Designed by Kaz Bremner and Jeremiah Deutscher with local furniture collective Higher Works, Urban Reef won the inaugural VIVA Vancouver: Robson Redux design-build competition out of 78 submissions worldwide. — bustler.net
The competition had entrants create a temporary urban installation to transform the block to a welcoming public plaza from Canada Day (July 1) until Labor Day (September 1).More details on Bustler.Check out a timelapse video and the making-of teaser below. View full entry
"Amale Andraos, principal of New York–based architecture firm WORKac, has been named dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), succeeding Mark Wigley. Currently on faculty at GSAPP, she has also taught at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the American University in Beirut." — Architect's Newspaper