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The Emerald Necklace Expanded Vision plan, a multi-partner visionary project spearheaded by Amigos de los Rios and the Conservation Fund, aims to connect the forests of the San Gabriel mountain range with the waters of the Pacific through a network of public park space, bike and walking trails, and restored waterways. It’s an ambitious plan that will require coordination of the 88 cities and and dozens of public agencies in the L.A. Basin to achieve. — nextcity.org
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
Sprinkling city parks with recycled water may create a breeding ground for hard-to-treat microbes [...] Even after the recycled water is treated in a sewage plant, it may carry microbes, drug-resistance genes and antibiotics that had washed down the drain. Sprayed into the environment, that water can spread microbes that could cause difficult-to-treat infections, the researchers say. — Science News
Last night on the bucolic hilltop campus of Occidental College, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke with the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, about the state of L.A. urbanism. This broad topical platform positioned Hawthorne's interview not as a political... View full entry
Some members of Chicago's design community have said privately that the Navy Pier project's parameters, which limited the scope of changes, stifled creative possibilities, even for highly regarded designers such as Corner.
"Anything that makes it more parklike is all to the good," said eclectic Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman. "It can only go up, architecturally."
— articles.chicagotribune.com
Community activism that simply nibbles at the edges is not enough. Small-scale rebellions can raise consciousness and help bring needed improvements to cities, but what we really need is a revolution. — Dissent
In the Winter 2013 issue of Dissent (the quarterly magazine of politics and ideas), Alex Ulam follows a thread From the Gold Coast of New York to the Venice Biennale. He argues Spontaneous Interventions "was not an outlier at the Biennale" but indicative of a general movement in... View full entry
...the city should reverse its approach, zoning neighborhoods like Midtown, Lower Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by thinking first about the shape of public space instead of private development. — New York Times
