Category: planning
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McDs as Density Indicator
It’s interesting to make connections between mapping and healthy communities. In this case it’s not just health in terms of people (such as this correlation between parks and obesity) – but factoring in local business, access to fresh/healthy food, and even the idea of non-drive through oriented business. The always fantastic Strange Maps offers a…
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Large Parks
In the spirit of one of the finest collections of writing on parks (and landscape urbanism) ‘Large Parks’ (edited by Czerniak & Hargreaves) a recent post on The Infrastructurist catalogs 10 of the world’s greatest large parks. “We thought it would be fun to take ten of the world’s largest, most famous, and most beautiful…
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Video: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
A great video series on YouTube – featuring ‘The Social Life of Small urban Spaces’ videos (a companion to the book, or is that vice-versa) by William ‘Holly’ Whyte . The content is kind of late Mad Men era (OK it’s the 1970s, but one expects Don Draper to mosey through the shot looking dapper,…
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3 Dutch Megacities Map
Another fantastic post from Strange Maps, this time featuring the excerpt from Rem Koolhaas’ fabulous door-stop like book ‘S/M/L/XL’. In this case, “…a rumination on “Manhattanism” – i.e. the tendency of city centre densities to be taken to new heights, sometimes literally, in the form of an urban grid filled with skyscrapers. These three maps…
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EcoCity Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany’s new planned EcoCity by TecArchitecture and Arup has received a lot of attention as of late… let’s take a look::: image via WAN Wind turbines… check. Green roofs and walls… check. Water and futuristic, semi-biomorphic building forms… check. Reuse of structures… check… Multiple green rating systems… check! Looks like an eco-city… Ok, I’m…
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Reading List: Learning from Las Vegas
:: Logorama by H5 – image via Designboom :: (color plate from the book) It is one of those books that everyone should read at some point, so I finally got around to sitting down and busting through the entirety of my copy of Learning from Las Vegas by Venturi, Scott-Brown and Izenour. Strangely enough,…
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New York Day/Night
Another interesting map, this time showing the difference in population from daytime to nightime – showing the major exodus that happens when the workday is finished. Via People and Place > The Pop-Up City > The Urbanophile “…an interesting graphic that gives insight in the huge differences between New York’s day and night population density…
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Detroit Vacancy
Another interesting visual on Detroit – this time from the The Detroit News – on the preponderance of vacancies in the CBD: “While there is no official ledger of empty buildings, The Detroit News identified 48 major structures with no outward signs of life in the Central Business District, which covers about 127 blocks. Others…
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Suburban Fantasies
These visualizations of suburban patterns by Ross Racine offer “…fictive urban patterns, mostly suburbias, surrounded by a desert or agricultural looking environment.” (via Landezine) :: image via LandezineThis is definitely a compelling idea to both elucidate and satirize the ubiquitous suburban patterns, and offers some commentary about the drivers of these forms. I thought at…
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Garden City Detroit
A great dialogue that happened a few weeks back over at Kaid Benfield’s blog at NRDC (read it, the links, and the comments… good stuff) – about the fate and potential for Detroit. Seems that without reading the report – there’s a lot of knee-jerk reaction to what has been percieved as ‘bulldozing and planting…