Yule Heibel's Library tagged urbanism →  View Popular, Search in Google

Indeed: those attractive downtown neighborhoods aren't very affordable anymore.
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These neighborhoods are the economic drivers of their cities, often accounting for a disproportionate share of public revenue relative to their land mass. But today, only the wealthiest among us can afford to live in them. That will remain the case until we create many more Dupont Circles – enough to finally bring the supply of walkable urban neighborhoods in line with the demand of all the people who want to live in them.

These numbers all speak to a fundamental change in demand in our cities.

“It wasn’t that many years ago that walkable urban places had a price penalty associated with them, not a price premium,” Leinberger says. “That’s the structural shift. And when you have a structural shift, it’s important to change your public policy to take it into consideration.”

Those “walkable urban places” he’s talking about did not necessarily have people walking around in them 20 years ago (“Maybe they were running around because they were fearful of being mugged,” Leinberger says). These were the inner-city neighborhoods that middle-class city-dwellers abandoned decades ago. Over time, they deteriorated. They became the cheap places to live. And now that trend is reversing.
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atlantic_cities urbanism gentrification affordability

Yep.
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In recent months, Dr. Jackson has released another scholarly book, an edited collection on the topic, called Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Wealth, Well-Being, and Sustainability (Island Press), and he is also the host of a four-part miniseries called Designing Healthy Communities, which will air on public television starting this week. The series, which features a companion book, is clearly meant to sway public opinion.

"If we are going to change the way we build our communities, it has got to be done because of the demand of the citizenry—a demand that the average, very busy local political leader can understand," Dr. Jackson says. "We humans are so adaptable that we look at the world that we are in and we think, It has to be this way. But everything around us was an idea in someone's head before it was built. In large part, the idea behind the series is to alter what's in our head."
(...)
In the mainstream media, the work of Dr. Jackson and researchers with similar interests has been pithily condensed to a variation of this eye-grabbing headline: "Suburbia Makes You Fat." But his focus in Designing Healthy Communities is actually broader than that, with as much emphasis on our need for social connection and beauty as on our need for physical activity. (...)

The series also laments the loss of a social contract in America, looking at places like Detroit, Syracuse, and Oakland, Calif., where crushing poverty or pollution have hampered or even dissolved once-thriving communities. (...)

He also challenges the free-market, individualist ideology that has become popular in recent years. Communities and public health are things we build together, with the help of good planning and effective government, Dr. Jackson contends—even as companies that sell junk food, oil, cars, and sprawl pump money into politics and advertising to try to push society in the other direction.

"The fundamental paradigm that nobody else matters but me is making us fundamentally unhealthy and unhappy," he says. "This is a myth that has been foisted upon us by those that profit from this belief system."
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richard_jackson chronicle_of_higher_education sprawl cities urbanism socialtheory socialcritique

Just learned about this site the other day. Given women's historical role in civic leadership (at the municipal level, via committees and clubs), and how that role was been maligned as small and "boob-ish" when metropolitanism grew in strength and favor, initiatives like "Shetroit"'s are important in getting women back in the game. This is especially the case now that new urbanism (also male-dominated) is trumpeting certain traditional values, which women pioneered and should own.
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Shetroit’s mission is to help create an enriching space in which the women of Detroit can weave community. Shetroit’s vision is that by bringing women together to support each other in realizing their self-worth and recognizing their strengths, new heights of feminine leadership can emerge.

As Shetroit grows, the site intends to encourage “using the Internet to get off the Internet” by nurturing connections that help build and encourage all facets of our individual life journeys that focus on self-esteem and the power of learning to love ourselves.
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women urbanism urban_renewal detroit shetroit cities city_smarts

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While low dense brush seems to increase it, tall broad canopies seem to decrease it. That nuanced conclusion harmonizes with another study published earlier this year, in which U.S.D.A. Forest Service researcher Geoffrey Donovan (who has also linked urban tree coverage to home prices) reports the same mixed tree-crime associations in Portland, Oregon.
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urban_forest urbanism crime atlantic_cities

"Appleyard published his compelling research in 1981 in a book called Livable Streets. Sadly, he died the next year — struck by a speeding car in Athens, Greece — and perhaps that is why he is not better known, even among urbanists. But his findings, which have recently been replicated in the United Kingdom, should be part of any discussion about the erosion of social ties in modern society.

Appleyard did his research in San Francisco in 1969, looking at three categories of streets: light traffic (2,000 vehicles per day), medium traffic (8,000 vehicles), and heavy traffic (16,000). What he found was that residents of lightly trafficked streets had two more neighborhood friends and twice as many acquaintances as those on the heavily trafficked streets.

Residents who were interviewed by Appleyard also talked about what they saw as their home territory. On the heavily trafficked street, respondents indicated that their apartment, or perhaps their building, qualified as “home.” On the light-traffic streets, people often saw the whole block as home. They also included much more detail when asked to draw pictures of their streets."

atlantic_cities donald_appleyard traffic cars automobile socialtheory urbanism

Great interview. (I had no idea urbanists were supposed to 'hate' Joel Kotkin.)
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Meet Joel Kotkin, a guy who is reviled by smart growth advocates and new urbanists everywhere. Kotkin, an author and trend-watcher, is fond of dashing urban dreams with cold, hard numbers. Talk about the “triumph of the city,” and he’ll parade out a long line of Census figures that show that, sorry, the suburbs are still kicking demographic ass in this country.
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joel_kotkin grist urbanism cities interview

Lovely essay from 2006, Paul Goldberger on Jane Jacobs:
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Jacobs was never as eager as Mumford for acolytes, though she ended up with plenty of them, and she saw right through many of the things that were presented as consistent with her views. She didn’t even have much patience with the New Urbanists, whose philosophy of returning to pedestrian-oriented cities would seem to owe a lot to Jacobs. But she found the New Urbanists hopelessly suburban, and once said to me, with a rhyming cadence worthy of Muhammad Ali, “They only create what they say they hate.”

What Jane Jacobs really taught wasn’t that every place should look like Greenwich Village, but instead that we should look at places and figure out their essences, that we should try to understand what makes cities work organically and to think of them as natural systems that should be nurtured, not stymied. I think of her less as showing us a physical model for cities that we need to copy and more as providing a model for skepticism.
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paul_goldberger jjacobs urbanism american_scholar

Interesting piece by Karrie Jacobs on the word urban's changing meaning(s) ...in Austin, Texas.
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Up until recently, I hadn’t taken “lifestyle centers” seriously as places or as proto-cities. But on this trip to outermost Austin, my attitude changed. I’m not sure whether it was the perceptual magic worked by Dresher, Benedikt, and Rotondi, who literally turned my point of view around, or the shock of returning to the Aloft late on a sunny Saturday afternoon and encountering Dogtoberfest, a full-scale street fair for dogs with booths selling artisanal biscuits and doggie portraits, and a costume parade. I showed up just as hoards of people were leaving with their tutu-wearing pets. Suddenly, I understood what I was seeing. While The Domain and its ilk are not replacements for real cities, they are genuine urban places. They’re a conscious remix of the twentieth-century mall and the postwar subdivision, for a generation that wants absolutely nothing to do with either.
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metropolis_magazine karrie_jacobs urbanism austin_tx

Yes! Thank you Austin Williams. Chalk me up as another human tired of misanthropy.
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Q: In your book you argue that instead of worrying about the unsustainable growth of cities we should embrace urbanisation. Why?

A: People are not the problem, they are the solution, but sadly we seem to have conceded that humans are the cause of the planet's imminent demise. Sustainability has become a cloak for this misanthropic attitude. It suggests that we are a drain on resources, a harmful influence.
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Also:
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Raising yourself above the immediate relationship with nature is a noble—and reasonably universal—one.
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Yes.

austin_williams urbanism cities

Fantastic article by Kay Hymowitz on Brooklyn, NY: history, economics, gentrification, and the importance of land use zoning. Must-read.
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Walentas’s prescience—and patience—put him in an unusual position. Like many successful developers, he was able to make a lot of money: space in the buildings he bought for $6 per square foot now sometimes sells for $1,000 per square foot. But unlike other developers, Walentas owned so much of a neighborhood that he could play God. Also, since he was making so much money from the properties overall, he could give rent breaks to commercial tenants that he viewed as desirable—for instance, upscale retailers like West Elm, the modern-furniture outlet, and Jacques Torres, a high-end chocolatier—while refusing chains like Duane Reade, which, he felt, set the wrong, down-market tone.
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city_journal kay_hymowitz brooklyn nyc urbanism urban_renewal entrepeneurialism

Ed Glaeser and Michael Mehaffy debating over high-density living.
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“Building up is an option to avoid building out,” Glaeser says.
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Not everyone agrees. Architect and urban designer Michael Mehaffy says encouraging high-density living doesn't always improve a society's quality of life.
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edward_glaeser michael_mehaffy cities density urbanism

Nice shout-out to Victoria BC architect Franc D'Ambrosio's Atrium building:
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A transparent ground floor, housing cafes and restaurants, invites people to approach, look in and stay a while. Rain gardens edge the site, a first for a private development in Victoria, catching and cleaning polluted street run-off, and softening the cityscape. The building is organised around the seven-storey wood-clad interior atrium, which introduces daylight into the heart of the structure. The wood, visible from the street night and day through a full-height glass wall at the atrium's south end, distinguishes the building and invites the public to animate this urban room.
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victoria franc_dambrosio architecture atrium urbanism

Fascinating documentary video (just 6 1/2 minutes long) on the rise of cycling infrastructure in Holland.
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Besides of the historical resume of the process, it is really important to see that there are critical situations in which we have to change our ways of doing. The key for the Dutch bicycles were the amount of car deaths, the first oil crisis and a past history of bicycle use.
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history cycling infrastructure urbanism cities holland

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One Millionth Tower is the result of unique collaboration between apartment residents, architects, animators, filmmakers and web developers to re-envision what a declining highrise neighbourhood could be. Through a close collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation – Mozilla, developer of the open source Firefox browser and a pioneer in promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web, the HIGHRISE team has created a lush visual story unfolding in a 3D virtual environment. Visitors to the online documentary can explore how participatory urban design can transform spaces, places and minds.

One Millionth Tower re-imagines a universal thread of our global urban fabric — the dilapidated highrise neighbourhood. More than one billion of us live in vertical homes, most of which are falling into disrepair. Highrise residents, together with architects, re-envision their vertical neighbourhood, and animators and web programmers bring their sketches to life in this documentary for the contemporary web browser — one of the world’s first HTML5/webGL documentaries. And it’s got music by Jim Guthrie and Owen Pallett.
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highrise_movie high_rise movie video documentary architecture katerina_cizek urbanism

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an interactive documentary experiment
by Katerina Cizek, Mike Robbins + friends
music by Jim Guthrie, Owen Pallet

You see them all over the world. More than a billion of us live in highrises. But most of these low- and middle-income buildings are now aging and falling into disrepair.

Could life in the global highrise be different?

Take an interactive journey through a virtual landscape, where the power of imagination transforms spaces - and lives.
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high_rise highrise_movie urbanism wired_magazine nfb katerina_cizek video documentary architecture

This is very heartening:
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...Ziegler’s approach was about adding the positive to diminish the negative, not erasing the negative and expecting a positive to emerge.

In the end, the PHLF approach has been enormously successful. A variety of strategies, as opposed to a master plan, were established that could be applied according to different local conditions. Residents were involved in the process from the beginning. The worst vacant properties were purchased from absentee landlords and restored.
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urbanism urban_renewal heritage pittsburgh historic_preservation

Couldn't agree more:
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...the best way to save wilderness is through strong, compact, beautiful communities that are more, not less, urban and do not encroach on places of significant natural value.
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wilderness atlantic atlantic_cities kaid_benfield urbanism cities

Great article by Nicholas Kevlahan, comparing Vancouver and Hamilton (Ontario). In the conclusion:
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...the most important lessons from the Vancouver Model are generally applicable:
1. Residents have the power to decide what sort of city they want to live in. Vancouver residents deliberately rejected an urban freeway-based proposal, and eventually developed a dense, mixed-use pedestrian-based alternative. (...)
2. Effective city planning requires deciding on a strategic vision and sticking to it. Vancouver has followed the same basic urban planning strategy for 40 years now, regardless of changes in council and city administrators. This consistency allows the city to learn gradually how to do things right, and lowers the risk to developers. However, it needs all city staff (and council) to work together. (...)
3. Sustainability and livability are achieved in dense, mixed use, pedestrian-oriented development. Vancouver is consistently rated one of the most attractive and liveable cities in the world because it has focused on these qualities. Density makes cities more financially sustainable because it costs much less to provide services for a given number of people in a dense neighbourhood. (...)
4. Planners must be insulated from council and flexible in achieving strategic goals. Vancouver's planners operate largely free of direct council (and OMB!) interference, and have the power to mandate mixed use and particular built forms. Planning is prescriptive and interventionist. (...)
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nicholas_kevlahan vancouver hamilton_on urbanism cities urbanplanning urban_development

Part 4 of a 5-part series; excellent reading:
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What makes for an economically great place? I asked Bruce Katz, head of Brookings' excellent Metropolitan Policy Program, and he emphasized that smart growth alone is not enough. "What you want is great places that are built on great economic bases," he said. "The two really need to go together. What I argue for is economy-shaping, talent-preparing, and placemaking, all together."

So smart density cannot yield economic flourishing all on its own; cities need to focus on their tradeable sectors, research institutions, and worker training programs. Nonetheless, smart density lays the groundwork for agglomeration economies to emerge and can accelerate and strengthen them when they do. So how can places do density right, to encourage great (economic) places to take root and grow?
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cities urbanism density grist david_roberts

Totally agree/ am intrigued by the last sentence in this paragraph (starts with "In effect..."):
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We made the city work for people for whom it had not worked in a long time. People without capital for whom low barriers to entry and not certainty of outcome were the defining issues. Those who were operating digital cottage industries and Etsy stores, artists and fashion designers, bedroom record labels and Flickr photographers. In effect we made the physical space behave as their virtual spaces did -- easy to get into and out of, allowing of experimentation and failure and most importantly full of tools and structures and plugins designed to make it simple and cheap for them to do what they are passionate about.
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Listen to the video. Couldn't we do something like this in Victoria?

cities grist hacking urbanism renew_newcastle urban_renewal