Landscape+Urbanism

Category: resources

  • 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.   …

  • 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 01.06.12

    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…

  • What is the Nature of Your City?

    Across the world, cities are bringing back nature to help address urban challenges.  We are healthier when we are closer to nature.  We have a greater respect for the environment that sustains us.  We are more adaptable to change when we let nature do its work.    Join us for a free presentation by Dr. Timothy…

  • THINK.urban – Infographic: Portland, King of Bikeopolis

    Cross Posting from THINK.urban (12/20/11):  A simple variation on the biking infographic from yesterday, this animated version from GOOD shows how Portland leads in the bike wars, just barely, between US cities for percentage of commuters by bike.

  • THINK.urban Infographic: Bicycling, the Present and Future

    Cross Posted from THINK.urban:  A nice one from Sustainablog, with some juicy facts about biking today (and tomorrow). Graphic produced by WellHome.

  • THINK.urban: Introducing Megapolitanism

    A recent article from John King at the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned the concept of using the Megalopolitan scale for planning purposes. The article references the new book by Arthur C. Nelson and Robert E. Lang entitled ‘Megapolitan America: A New Vision for Understanding America’s Metropolitan Geography‘ (APA, 2011). As an example, King mentions the…