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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 Until recently, U.S. DOT’s policy was simple adherence to outdated and stodgy manuals like AASHTO’s Green Book and FHWA’s own Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) — neither of which included protected bike lanes.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
“The first thing is to find the identity of Seoul,” he says. “Seoul was created very differently from western cities, with special theories of feng shui and Confucianism, and we kept that for 600 years. We didn’t change anything – even under Japanese colonialism, that was kept. But since the 1960s, under American influence, it has changed very much.”
If Seung has his way, the days of skyscrapers springing up in central Seoul would come to an end.
— ft.com
Architecture theorist Jacob Dreyer explains how the Stalinist model of urbanism – a centrally planned component within a national economic unity – is thriving in modern China — theguardian.com
“The cities we’re working on were neglected by Saddam Hussein, so they have little basic infrastructure,” says Elliot Hartley, 36, a director of Garsdale Design. But why can’t Iraqis redesign their own cities? “There has been a massive brain drain of professionals from Iraq over the years, and a lack of investment in local government planning departments, which means that the skills aren’t there – yet,” [...].
More improbably yet, only one member of the family firm [...] has set foot in Iraq.
— theguardian.com
In the wake of economic reforms in the 1990s that helped set off the largest urban migration in history, China had the rare opportunity to embrace cutting-edge city-building approaches as it expanded its skyline. It could have avoided the mistakes that made Los Angeles into the land of gridlock, or bypassed the errors that turned the banlieues of Paris into what one American planner calls “festering urban sores”.
But China looked back instead of forward.
— theguardian.com
Meanwhile in Africa: Urban China: Chinese Urbanism in Africa 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
I asked myself the question: so what struck me about the process of thinking across boundaries and reimagining planning in the issues that we have been discussing in our celebration of DPU [The Bartlett Development Planning Unit]’s 60th anniversary in this conference. At the risk of simplifying a complex and dynamic set of discussions, I want to make six points. — thisbigcity.net
Outline plans for the project were approved by the North Devon Council this week. The village will officially be known by the surprisingly prosaic name Southern Extension, and will include shops, a primary school, a sports pitch and woodlands. [...]
The project will include 75 affordable homes, and will be built over the next 10 to 15 years. Renderings show an extremely typical suburban town filled with identical houses and strolling pedestrians.
— nextcity.org
Hirst is collaborating with the Architects Rundell Associates, who have yet to complete such a large scale project. Related news from the world's richest living artist:Artist Damien Hirst's eco-homes vision to regenerate town is unveiledDamien Hirst's London art space due to open next spring View full entry
The city needs places of solace, calm, order and beauty – even prettiness. But prettiness and concealment are anaesthetic. The urban mind needs its regular confrontations with tangle, too, a bracing shock that places the world in perspective and informs us, without either warmth or rancour, that our lives are enmeshed in a vital mechanism. The city is a machine for teaching people to be city-dwellers: one made up of crushing cogs and steel. — aeon.co
In June, the “Innovation in Mobility Public Policy Summit,” sponsored by the Association for Commuter Transportation, Transportation Sustainability Research Center, Mobility Lab, Transit Center, and Shared-Use Mobility Center, brought together a range of participants to discuss these themes in Washington, DC. — urbanomnibus.net
At the summit, elected officials, transportation entrepreneurs, academics, and developers engaged with a number of questions including, “What are new ways of solving urban mobility problems? How can we better design systems to address the needs of the public? Who should be engaged to make this... View full entry
If there is any one lesson that I have learned in my life as a city planner, it is that public spaces have power. It's not just the number of people using them, it's the even greater number of people who feel better about their city just knowing that they are there.
Public space can change how you live in a city, how you feel about a city, whether you choose one city over another, and public space is one of the most important reasons why you stay in a city.
— TED
Amanda Burden served as New York City's chief planner under Mayor Bloomberg, leading such revitalization projects as the High Line and Brooklyn's waterfront. You can watch the full TED talk below, or read the complete transcript here. View full entry
Last week I attended the seventh World Urban Forum in Medellín, Colombia, where more than 20,000 city leaders, urbanists, and planners from more than 160 countries met to discuss the future of cities across the globe. [...]
Unfortunately, a number of important countries, the U.S. and Canada among them, remain worryingly undecided about joining this widespread call for a city-specific SDG from countries as diverse as Germany, Colombia, and Ghana.
— theatlanticcities.com
Just two years ago [...] Australia’s previous government created the Major Cities Unit which outlined key long-term priorities for urban productivity and sustainability. Highly regarded by academia, as well as infrastructure, planning and property councils, the Unit showed promise for strategic city alignment, including investment into high-speed rail.
Today, all investment into the Unit has been withdrawn and momentum towards a national urban strategy has come to a halt.
— thisbigcity.net
Britain’s decades-long planning “chaos” has left London a city of great individual buildings, such as the Gherkin and the Shard, standing in a sea of “woeful” architecture, the Government’s design czar said today.
Marylebone-based architect Sir Terry Farrell called for a “revolution” in the planning system, to end the culture of Nimbyism and put the creation of well designed places to live, work and shop at the heart of policymaking.
— London Evening Standard
Farrell 's remarks certainly aren't limited to contemporary architecture in London: “If you dump yourself in any town centre and look at what the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st century has brought, it is woeful.” View full entry
A city that is connected -- in all senses of the word -- is a good city. The finalists of the Dallas Connected City Design Challenge offered numerous solutions in how Downtown Dallas can be linked to the Trinity River.
To guarantee a variety of ideas for Dallas' future development, the competition invited submissions in a Professional Stream and an Open Stream. Three Professional and 4 Open entries won.
— bustler.net
Professional Stream finalists (selected by jury):Stoss + SHoP, Boston, MA: "HyperDensity/HyperLandscape"Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, Barcelona, Spain: Dallas: "Downtown & Trinity"OMA*AMO, New York, NY: "2Rivers/2Datums"Open Stream finalists (selected by jury and public voting):Kohki... View full entry