Category: transportation
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Historic Depave Portland
As previously mentioned, the main drag along the Willamette was formerly a multi-lane highway named Harbor Drive, which was removed in the mid-1970’s to make way for the current resident along the river, Tom McCall Waterfront Park. :: image via Portland Mercury :: image via Flickr – William200549 Text, from the article ‘The Dead Freeway…
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Ghost Highway: Mount Hood Freeway
It’s fascinating to dig into some of the historical legacies that have existed throughout planning over time. Some seem like missed opportunities – while others show that perhaps sometimes cooler heads will prevail, and we think of the awfulness of what might have been. Nowhere in Portland’s planning history is this more evident than the…
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Soundtrack for Spaces 2
This video reminded me of a post from this past summer regarding Soundtrack for Spaces, where I speculated on the connection of space and a particular experiential musical accompaniment (particularly that viewed while in motion). Check out this one, compiled from Google Street View imagery with a soundtrack by Phoenix. (via Urban Tick) Brilliant. Google…
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Portland Grid, revisited
The question of the efficacy of the grid system is continually interesting, and there have been some interesting conversations about this with a range of folks locally. Another resource to throw some information into this discussion is the recently released background documents in support of the Portland Plan. One worth checking out for any Portland-phile…
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Size Does Matter, or Not
An interesting article in Planetizen called “Beloved and Abandoned: A Platting Named Portland” investigates one of the unique, frustrating and beloved quirks of Portland. This is, our slicework of 200 foot square blocks… making for a lot of roads, and development of tiny blocks. It’s our burden to bear. The article is a fascinating ride…
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Big Box Surplus Space
One of the major ‘big ideas’ of our Integrating Habitats competition, or the idea of reinventing suburbia in general, is the reduced parking need over time – and what to do with the leftover paved areas. An article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows this idea isn’t merely peak oil induced futurism, but a more current…
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Park(ing) Day
One month to go… should be the best ever. We are joining the folks up in Seattle from People’s Parking Lot(s) as they take over a parking lot and transform it into Central Park(ing) with festivities, designs, small businesses, renewable energy, a design charrette and more. We shall see how many goodies we can pack…
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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…
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Hoax of the Week
:: image via curbed This one was pretty good and definitely had a bunch of folks going (via urbanism.org > via curbed)… The concept: “Bulldoze under Central Park and replace it with a modern, international airport. The idea is so simple, so beautifully elegant, so inevitable that it’s hard to believe we didn’t think of…
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Soundtrack for Spaces?
A brief lull in posting due to a visit from family, and a kick-ass barbecue last weekend – which culminated in the inaugural usage of the new backyard fire pit. As an aside… this past Friday, we took a short half-day trip to a popular hiking spot in the Columbia River Gorge, with the route…