Landscape+Urbanism

Category: dialogue

  • To New Horizons

    Oh the sick and twisted future… a film from General Motors in 1940 entitled ‘To New Horizons’ talking about the world twenty years later.  Yes indeed, “Man continually strives to replace the old, with the new!”  Spotted on one of my favorite new sites – Copenhagenize.  Check it out.

  • Shrinking Cities: The Forgetting Machine

    One of our supplementary readings for the Shrinking Cities group is the recent essay by Jerry Herron on The Design Observer entitled ‘The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit.‘  The author is from Wayne State and has been a resident of Detroit since the early eighties, so it avoids some of the outsider…

  • Shrinking Cities – Readings

    A class this term at Portland State involves a reading and conference on ‘Shrinking Cities’. Led by professor Ellen Bassett, a group of a dozen students from PhD and Masters in Urban Studies and Urban and Regional Planning reading and discussing four diverse texts, along with a range of other writings on the subject.   …

  • Science of Pedestrian Movements

     An interesting article from the Economist on ‘The Wisdom of Crowds‘ echoes much of the seminal research of William Whyte (City), Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension), and others that have closely studied the behavior of pedestrians and other users of public spaces. The interplay of cultural habits that tells us to step right or…

  • Anne Whiston Spirn Lecture in Portland

    An upcoming lecture by Anne Whiston Spirn entitled Restoring an Urban Watershed: Ecology, Equity, and Design will be happening on Monday, January 23rd, from Noon to 1pm at the Portland Building, 1120 SW Fifth Avenue – Second Floor, Room C.  The brownbag is free and open to all.  Here’s a synopsis. The West Philadelphia Landscape…

  • Soundtrack for Spaces – Next Generation

    I have discussed the concept  previous posts on the ‘Soundtrack for Spaces’, where I was making connections between physical locations in the landscape and the potential to imbue place with appropriate musical accompaniment.  These varied, but included looking at the Fleet Foxes as driving music in the Columbia River Gorge, the video customization for Arcade…

  • Siftings: 01.11.12

    ““All great art is born of the metropolis.” – Ezra Pound  :: image via NY Times A great little snapshot on urban serendipity from the NY Times that looks at the accidental ‘curation’ of spaces that the urban environment yields, such as the framed view from the subway to the Brooklyn Bridge.  Perhaps the uniformity…

  • Siftings 01.06.12

    Another round of Siftings from the past couple of days.  Starting off with a couple of Occupy-related posts, including a great article from Saskia Sassen and Hans Haacke from Artforum entitled ‘Imminent Domain‘.  The first sentence – “OCCUPYING IS NOT THE SAME as demonstrating…” points out a recent and annoying trend of calling any sort…

  • Community Growth: Crisis and Challenge

    Via Atlantic Cities, an interesting film from 1959 exploring the implications for sprawl… from the National Association of Home Builders and the Urban Land Institute.  I particularly like the diagrams of the monocentric city towards polycentric city form in post WWII United States.  The solutions include planned unit developments, cluster developments, townhouses, culs-de-sac, separation of…

  • Siftings 01.04.12

    A veritable log-jam of links worth checking out, so I thought I’d drop a few of them on folks – worth checking out for sure.  To start, John King of the Chronicle takes us on a tour of ‘parklets’ in San Francisco, or what is essentially Rebar’s Parking Day in a more permanent iteration… I’d…