Urban Design and Planning

Downtown housing affordability is an international problem.

Interesting article:  Alan Ehrenhalt argues in The New Republic that cities throughout North America are undergoing a "demographic inversion," in which the center city is once again becoming home to the well-off rather than the poor.

Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

By Morgan Greenseth

Mall culture in the United States -- at least as we know it -- is coming to an end. Last month, the fall of Steve & Barry's became the next addition to a series of recent retailer bankruptcies we've been witnessing across the nation. This trend is likely to continue, as the U.S. economic downturn causes people to reduce their trips to stores and to shop less, forcing more shops to close and leaving malls deserted.

According to an article that ran in The Economist at the end of 2007:

We've written a lot about China and the future of the planet. If you want to better understand the role China will play in the future, you might want to start with The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World, by Thomas J. Campanella, an associate professor of urban design and planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a visiting professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

We've written before about porous pavement, and the role it could play in helping to green our storm water infrastructure. Now Blaine tells us about a new one, Permapave:

Paul Krugman writes about why the answer to the problem of the car is not, or at least not entirely, under the hood, and makes this nice point:

Changing the geography of American metropolitan areas will be hard. For one thing, houses last a lot longer than cars. Long after today’s S.U.V.’s have become antique collectors’ items, millions of people will still be living in subdivisions built when gas was $1.50 or less a gallon.
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Urban Design and Planning at 8:38 AM)

After reading Justus Stewart’s recent article about a BIM collaboration I immediately thought of the Earthquake in China, the Cyclone in Myanmar, Hurricane Katrina and the SE Asian Tsunami, and last year’s mini-disaster in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, the collapse of the “MacArthur Maze” Interstate 580 connector ramp. All of these disasters could benefit from a process to redesign the destroyed urban environment and its infrastructural systems and to not just re-create what was there before.

What if we could accompany a collaborative design process with some sort of policy framework tying together disaster-response to designing for systemic change? What if we could plan to use the future's inevitable disasters as opportunities for change and innovation?

By Peter Newman and Isabella Jennings

Reviewed by: Davidya Kasperzyk AIA Architect and Bioregional Planner

Searching for a universal theory to save our precious orb is a compelling action pursued by many. In this noble effort Peter Newman and Isabella Jennings, based in Perth, Australia, have followed a trail from the American Northwest, through Europe and back to Perth. (They acknowledge upfront that they have not drawn many practices from the other continents and cultures of the world.)