Landscape+Urbanism

  • Waterscape Urbanism

    I was struck by a recent mis-use of the term landscape urbanism in this article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution on the need for climate change inspired floating homes.  Quoting  Thai landscape architect Danai Thaitakoo on the need for dealing with innundation. “Climate change will require a radical shift within design practice from the solid-state…

  • Guest Post: The Other Plane

    The Porter House project by SHoP Architects doesn’t quite sit right with the eye. Greg Pasquarelli, one of the founding principals of the New York firm, gave a great lecture at the University of Washington last year in which he elaborated on the achievement of finding an innovative solution to the challenge of expanding the…

  • Building a Bike Highway

    The video of the presentation for GOOD Ideas for Cities is up, along with a nice write-up from organizer Alissa Walker from GOOD – so enjoy. Also check out some more detail, and download a PDF of the presentation over at the THINK.urban site.

  • GOOD Times in Portland

    The recent event for GOOD Ideas for Cities happened last week in Portland, and generated some great dialogue.  I was also on one of the teams that presented.  A short recap. :: custom notebooks by Scout Books  “Each team was issued a challenge proposed by a local urban leader. At the event, the creative teams…

  • Shrinking Cities: Detroit’s Agony (1990)

    A clip that spawned a lot of conversation within our reading group, from 1990, Diane Sawyer reporting on ABCs Primetime Live, in a series called ‘Detroit’s Agony’ – which looks at Mayor Coleman Young’s legacy, and plays on Detroit as ‘the first urban domino to fall…’ [More after the video] The shock of ‘Devils Night’,…

  • Shrinking Cities: Sugrue Part I: Arsenal

    Arsenal Moving along with the Shrinking Cities readings, the first part of ‘Origins of the Urban Crisis’ by Segrue recounts the development of the City of Detroit around WWII as the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ which made it one of the highest paying blue-collar cities in the US.  In the words of Segrue, “Mid-twentieth-century Detroit embodied…

  • 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…

Get In Touch