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The toll of urbanization in China has been documented in a new paper published in the journal Science by a team of researchers from different institutions around the country. Using a method called spaceborne synthetic aperture radar interferometry (or InSAR), they were able to establish the rate... View full entry
Researchers from the MIT Senseable City Lab have produced a series of maps visualizing commuting habits across Chinese cities. Titled Potato Project, the study used mobile phone location data from 50 million individuals across 234 cities to understand commuting patterns between a person’s home... View full entry
As Spain, France, Greece, and Germany grapple with a spate of historic wildfires that have gripped the region in recent weeks, a group of researchers in the American West is now advocating for fairly extreme shifts in development trends there which would buck others currently favored by the... View full entry
Satellite images dating back to 1975 allow researchers to map how millions of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends have proliferated in street networks worldwide. [...]
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charts a worrying global shift towards more-sprawling and less-hooked-up street networks over time.
— CityLab
The study's authors, Christopher Barrington-Leigh at McGill University and Adam Millard-Ball at UC Santa Cruz, were able to identify the global trend toward urban street-network sprawl by analyzing high-resolution data from OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery of urbanization since 1975 and then... View full entry
About 450 houses have been sold so far at Riverstone and 73 at Tesoro Viejo, which already has a school (Hillside Elementary) plus a cafe and fire/sheriff’s substation in its fledgling “town center.” Together, these “master-planned communities” along with other proposed developments with names like Gunner Ranch West, North Shore at Millerton and TraVigne form what Madera County officials project will be a city of 120,000 people. — The Fresno Bee
California's urban housing crisis, fueled by lackluster housing production in the state's population centers, is fueling sprawl that is eating up wilderness and agricultural land around cities like Fresno. Madera County supervisor Brett Frazier told The Fresno Bee, “The assumption was this... View full entry
If Mr. Ratti’s projections are correct, and self-driving cars can radically reduce traffic without cannibalizing existing mass transit—the hypotheticals pile up—it is possible that self-driving cars will make many cities livable in a way they aren’t now. Imagine if every U.S. city had a hybrid public-private mass-transit system on par with those in New York City or Washington, D.C., comprised entirely of self-driving vehicles. — wsj.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Would self-driving cars be useful to people living outside urban cores?The "algorithmic dreams" of driverless cars, and how they might affect real-world urban designHow prepared are American cities for the new reality of self-driving cars? View full entry
China has detailed its urban planning vision, which has been designed to make its sprawling cities more inclusive, safer and better places to live.
[...] policymakers pledged to transform urban development patterns and improve city management.
The last time China held such a high-level meeting was in 1978, when only 18 percent of the population lived in cities. By the end of 2011, in excess of 50 percent of the population called the city their home.
— chinadaily.com.cn
Related news on Archinect:China considering drastic ban on coalDisastrous landslide burying dozens in Shenzhen likely caused by piled up soil from construction workBeijing's latest "airpocalypse" is bad enough for city to issue first ever red alertChina’s "most influential architect" is not... View full entry
Most Egyptians have always lived in the fertile stretch along the Nile, the nation’s breadbasket which accounts for less than 10 per cent of Egypt’s territory. But urban growth has become the chief threat to agricultural land as farmers haphazardly – and illegally – build new houses to make room for the next generation.
Construction surged even more amid a security vacuum that followed the 2011 popular uprising that ousted the country’s long-time autocrat, Hosni Mubarak.
— thenational.ae
Related:Photographer documents Egypt's monumental housing developments in the desertA New "Capital" for Cairo?A closer look at the Giza 2030 master plan: blessing or curse for Egypt? View full entry
A new analysis authored by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute concludes that sprawl costs the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion every year. [...]
The optimal density Litman uses in the report is only about 23 people per hectare. Add those 2.2 billion people to global cities at a density of about Atlanta, and we'd need the equivalent of all the land in India to accommodate them.
— washingtonpost.com
Previously: The true costs of sprawlHere's a direct link to Todd Litman's study Analysis of Public Policies that Unintentionally Encourage and Subsidize Sprawl. View full entry
How much more does it cost the public to build infrastructure and provide services for sprawling development compared to more compact neighborhoods? A lot more, according to this handy summary from the Canadian environmental think tank Sustainable Prosperity.
To create this graphic, the organization synthesized a study by the Halifax Regional Municipality [PDF] in Nova Scotia, and the research is worth a closer look.
— streetsblog.org
A new study by Thomas Laidley, a sociology doctoral student at NYU [...], uses satellite images to develop a new and improved “Sprawl Index,” which he links to a wide range of outcome measures.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that L.A. ranks as the least sprawling metro in the country, ahead of New York and San Francisco.
— citylab.com
Previously:Southern California not so sprawling after allThe U.S. Cities That Sprawled the Most (and Least) Between 2000 and 2010 View full entry
one-story peanut butter, noun: in reference to urban sprawl, how it spreads and oozes.The term comes courtesy of Archinector and Archinect Sessions co-host, Donna Sink, who recalls W. Kirby Lockard (1930-2007), Professor of Architecture at University of Arizona, using it to describe sprawl... View full entry
Urban densities are not trivial, they severely limit the transport mode choice and change only very slowly. Because of the large differences in densities between Atlanta and Barcelona about the same length of metro line is accessible to 60% of the population in Barcelona but only 4% in Atlanta. The low density of Atlanta render this city improper for rail transit. — usa.streetsblog.org
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
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
