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Maurice Cox grew up in Brooklyn, a borough whose name has since become a global shorthand for gentrification. An urban designer, architectural educator, and former mayor of the City of Charlottesville, VA, in 2015 Cox became head of the planning department of Detroit, where he hopes to prevent the forces that have reshaped his childhood home from taking over the Motor City. [...] Cox is using design to catalyze growth that’s incremental and closely in line with the city’s strong sense of self. — Urban Omnibus
Urban Omnibus presents an insightful conversation between Maurice Cox, Director of Planning and Development for the City of Detroit, and Marc Norman, founder of the consulting firm “Ideas and Action” and Associate Professor of Practice at UMich's Taubman School of Architecture and Urban... View full entry
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture & Urban Planning faculty have elected Lingqian Hu as the new Department of Urban Planning chair. Hu received her Bachelor of Planning degree from Nanjing University in China and a Master of Planning and doctorate in Policy... View full entry
I think we haven’t thought through the challenge of technology for city mobility. We are stuck with some 120-year-old ideas that the industry is desperately holding on to. I tell students: Whenever you hear the word “smart,” beware, because that is somebody who wants to sell as many millions as possible of some new gimmick. And he is not necessarily giving you a better quality of life. — CityLab
Annette Becker and Lessano Negussie, curators of the new exhibition RIDE A BIKE! Reclaim the City at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt, Germany, interviewed the 81-year-old 'people-friendly city' evangelist for the show's accompanying book. View full entry
Geography is getting stranger: the map is breaking up. Now we need to attend to the unnatural places, the escape zones and gap spaces, the places that are sites of surprise but also of bewilderment and unease. — Places Journal
Negotiating the hostile architectures of the modern city — from the anti-pedestrian cobbles of a median strip to the unloved landscape of a traffic island — geographer Alistair Bonnett reflects on the increasingly disciplinarian nature of public space, and by crossing roads and planting... View full entry
Streetmix is an online tool that lets you play with street design, allowing you to widen sidewalks, add public transportation, move around bike lanes, and more. Created by a small team of fellows at Code for America, a non-profit dedicated to finding ways to apply modern technology practices to... View full entry
In the maddening gap between how this place functions and how inventors and engineers here think it should, many have become enamored with the same idea: What if the people who build circuits and social networks could build cities, too? Wholly new places, designed from scratch and freed from broken policies. — The Upshot
In Emily Badger's latest piece for the Upshot, she investigates the Tech Industry's newest sector of disruption, the City. From Alphabet company's proposal for Sidewalk Labs in Toronto to a proposed smart city in Arizona, Silicon Valley is looking to build urban utopias of their own. While the... View full entry
The link between property and transport has been perhaps the most durable in human history.
Since the ancients, few things have delivered higher land values with more certainty than advances in transport, from roads to canals, railways to highways. [...]
But now, the dawn of the driverless car—promising a utopia of stress-free commutes, urban playgrounds and the end of parking hassles—threatens to complicate the calculus for anyone buying property.
— Bloomberg
Bloomberg Technology explains how the real estate industry is already preparing for all that sweet, sweet valuable space to open up for development once the widespread arrival of driverless vehicles makes parked cars — and the blocked square footage they occupy — a thing of the past. View full entry
Archinect's Architecture School Lecture Guide for Winter/Spring 2018 Archinect's Get Lectured is an ongoing series where we feature a school's lecture series—and their snazzy posters—for the current term. Check back regularly to keep track of any upcoming lectures you don't want to miss... View full entry
The Los Angeles region once again topped the list of areas with the worst traffic congestion for the sixth year in a row, according to a report by INRIX, a company that specializes in car services and transportation analytics.
Drivers in and around Los Angeles spent 102 hours battling traffic congestion during peak hours in 2017, INRIX's said. By contrast, New York City motorists spent 91 hours battling peak-hour congestion. New York was No. 3 on the INRIX list. No. 2 was Moscow.
— Los Angeles Times
Congrats L.A. — you lived up to your reputation as America's most congested city once again! Among the metro areas surveyed, "the U.S. accounted for 10 of the top 25 cities worldwide with the worst traffic congestion in the INRIX study," the LA Times reports. Help us Elon, or we'll start... View full entry
The council housing designed 50 years ago for a progressive London borough remains a potent symbol of the achievements of postwar social democracy. — Places Journal
Prompted by Mark Swenarton's recent book, Cook's Camden, Douglas Murphy looks at the radically experimental public housing estates built by the London borough from 1966 to 1975, and the reevaluation of these extraordinary projects currently underway in our own era of unaffordable cities and... View full entry
[...] Penn State landscape architecture professor Timothy Baird and architecture professor José Duarte taught a new studio that engaged students in the study of one Brazilian favela via virtual reality (VR) technology. The studio, which paired architecture students with landscape architecture students, posited VR as a proxy for expensive site visits. “Developing countries can’t always afford consultants because of the distance and difficulty to travel,” says Baird [...] — Landscape Architecture Magazine
"Duarte, who has studied informal settlements across the globe, believes in their power to model emergent patterns of more sustainable resource consumption in the developing world, and in the ability for contemporary technology to decode how they work," the Landscape Architecture Magazine writes... View full entry
Yet what has drawn the most concern and curiosity with regards to Quayside is a uniquely 21st-century feature: a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming “digital layer” that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life. According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on”—to an astonishing level of detail—as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all. — City Lab
While tech companies struggle to discover the new way to get a glimpse into our daily habits—attempting to discover how and where we spend our time and money—Alphabet might have just brought the ‘Truman Show’ approach to marketing. With Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, announcing... View full entry
The postwar passion for highway construction saw cities around the world carved up in the name of progress. But as communities fought back many schemes were abandoned – their half-built traces showing what might have been — The Guardian
The following examples show how gamespace can become the stage for a social, political and ethical critique: from a nondescript city under the effect of gentrification, to a barren luxury estate and a set of playful and absurd buildings for London. These examples suggest that, rather than allowing architects to indulge Piranesi’s power-hungry ideal, games could work as a means of showing how dysfunctional reality really is. — Failed Architecture
In her essay Gamespace Urbanism: City-Building Games and Radical Simulations for Failed Architecture, Federica Buzzi looks at a new crop of indie city-planning computer games that promise fresh potential for simulation and exploration of radical urban scenarios — and subsequent social... View full entry
Gentrification. It is a word that we hear with increasing frequency in contemporary discussions about American cities. But what does that word really mean? And, even more importantly, what does it mean in the context of the region that I live in and love – the Rust Belt? [...]
It is important to be clear about the meaning of this increasingly ambiguous term, because what needs to happen in the vast majority of urban neighborhoods in the legacy cities of the Rust Belt is far less ambiguous.
— City Observatory
"Many critics of Rust Belt gentrification are holding cities to an unreasonable standard, and placing them in an impossible situation. If much of the city remains poor and run-down, this is proof that the city does not care, and is not trying hard enough. If, on the other hand, parts of the city... View full entry