Category: planning
-
Picturing Smart Growth
A recent email from Kaid Benfield, fellow blogger and Director of Smart Growth for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) alerted me to an interesting visual tool they had recently unveiled, called Picturing Smart Growth” A short overview: “With generous assistance from our friends at Urban Advantage, NRDC has created a map of the United…
-
China’s Mixed Signals
The explosive growth of China has offered a dichotomy – on one hand the speed and voraciousness of development has created unprecedented impacts from natural resource consumption and pollution; on the other, the country has created a number of evocative potential eco-city planning examples that have excited and intrigued – giving hope that amidst the…
-
The Detroit Dilemma – Ruminations
I recently finished up the draft text that summarized the land use and open space portions of the Detroit Sustainable Design Assessment Team (AIA SDAT) that I participated in a few months back. It gave me a chance to revisit some of the thinking around my initial thoughts and reactions – with some distance and…
-
Academy of Urbanism
A quick post from Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today (look into the middle column ‘Medium Thoughts’ and scroll down to “The Deadening of Place…”) referencing the new manifesto of the Academy of Urbanism – which is more or less (according to TTT), is the UK equivalent to the Congress for New Urbanism. (insert groan here). This is…
-
The Paralytic City
As we spend another day cooped up inside, waiting out what has lovingly been dubbed ‘Arctic Blast’ – the most massive of winter storms – seriously. In a place of the country that has an occasional ice storm, but doesn’t typically have snow stick around for more than a day or two at most –…
-
Portland = Ecotopia?
In my third year of undergraduate studies, my Ecology instructor offhandedly mentioned the book Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, as something to read if you want to see a potential model of ecological urbanism. While I was toying with my youthful and newly formed consciousness about an ecological ethic, I was both rapt and appalled. Rapt,…
-
Holes | Sites
One of the main contextual starting points of site design is the topography of sites… flat, sloped, steep, gradual – all influence the eventual end. What do we do when there is a significant depression – either natural, or created via cultural activities. Whereas we consider the malleability of the site as a generic field…
-
Another Utopia: Victory City™
There are many diverse versions of utopia that have been proposed over the years… from Wright’s Broadacre City, Howards Garden Cities, Callenbach’s Ecotopia, Soleri’s Arcosanti and Corbu’s La Ville Radieuse (to name a few) – a long history of attempts to synthesize urban perfection have been attempted. Most of these ideas are either merely thought-exercises…
-
Thinking Out of the Box, Pt. 2
Following the big box threads of the previous post, some of the speculative work of Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis (LTL) offers another viewpoint towards the idea of a tranformed development archetype. :: image via LTL I think half of my interest in LTL is the concepts, the other half is the interesting graphic techniques – many…
-
Thinking Out of the Box, Pt. 1
The ubiquitous big box store is a staple of modern life, which, along with it’s associated expansive parking areas eat up a good portion of our cities. The collections of big box stores, known as power centers, exacerbate this phenonmenon by multiplying the footprint and impact of the store uses – creating significant gashes in…