Human Scale Cities

DOING IT DIFFERENTLY It’s all about creativity and innovative entrepreneurship, pop ups, collaboration and the sometimes seemingly crazy. Doing it Differently looks at a range of creative and innovative solutions to the challenges of urban living. Creativity in all its forms is essential to the healthy evolution of urban environments, particularly when undergoing such rapid change.  Kylie Legge is a founding Director of Place Partners, a multidisciplinary place making consultancy based in Sydney Australia.   

DOING IT DIFFERENTLY


It’s all about creativity and innovative entrepreneurship, pop ups, collaboration and the sometimes seemingly crazy. Doing it Differently looks at a range of creative and innovative solutions to the challenges of urban living. Creativity in all its forms is essential to the healthy evolution of urban environments, particularly when undergoing such rapid change. 


Kylie Legge is a founding Director of Place Partners, a multidisciplinary place making consultancy based in Sydney Australia.   


The Spontaneous City This book presents the concept of the Spontaneous City as an alternative direction of design thinking and urban planning opposed to traditional rigid city planning. The era of large-scale urban planning is over. ISSUU

The Spontaneous City

This book presents the concept of the Spontaneous City as an alternative direction of design thinking and urban planning opposed to traditional rigid city planning. The era of large-scale urban planning is over.

ISSUU

I don´t either! Very pertinent. If that photo has some value, is only because it shows a great example of insane planning citymaus: latimes: Since you guys seem to like Brian van der Brug’s gorgeous aerial photo of Dodger Stadium with downtown in the background, we’ve uploaded it here at 800 pixels wide. You’re welcome! I don’t see what’s so “gorgeous” about this. This thing is surrounded by cement. Only way to get to this stadium is by car. Talk about accessible. There should be a light rail line, bus line, and bike path to the entrance of the stadium.

I don´t either! Very pertinent. If that photo has some value, is only because it shows a great example of insane planning

citymaus:

latimes:

Since you guys seem to like Brian van der Brug’s gorgeous aerial photo of Dodger Stadium with downtown in the background, we’ve uploaded it here at 800 pixels wide. You’re welcome!

I don’t see what’s so “gorgeous” about this.

This thing is surrounded by cement. Only way to get to this stadium is by car. Talk about accessible. There should be a light rail line, bus line, and bike path to the entrance of the stadium.

Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond: Rethinking Cities for the Future

Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond: Rethinking Cities for the Future

History of urbanism in the 20th century in 10 videos

The “video” tag in my Delicious keeps growing and has reached 275 references. I opened this tag to prepare an experiment of facilitating a discussion session in the course Repensar las políticas urbanas 30 años después. That exercise took place late in 2010 and one year later, I posted A selection of 75 videos about cities and urban policies highlighting some of the videos that were considered for the final short-list of videos we finally used in the session. I will try to find the time soon to update this list but, in the meantime, here you can find 10 pieces that draw a selective and incomplete (but still relevant I guess) picture of some of the main ideas that influenced how cities were thought, designed and built in the 20th century. A mix of names, cities and rarities in some cases, and not an official chart of the most important ideas or topics of last century urbanism.

Read the full story and watch the videos on my blog

@manufernandez

For the people, by the people. A visual story of the DIY city For the People, By the People by Afaina de Jong is a visual story about how people influence change in the city. The collapse of faith in top-down planning has been followed by a renewed interest in the self-generating wisdom of bottom-up urban initiatives. What does it mean when people act as the urban change agents that direct the life and death of the world’s cities? Fusing her photography with a manifesto-like text, architect Afaina de Jong marks the people in the streets as the starting point of all urban trends and cultural innovation. And calls upon us all to become architects of our environment.

For the people, by the people. A visual story of the DIY city

For the People, By the People by Afaina de Jong is a visual story about how people influence change in the city. The collapse of faith in top-down planning has been followed by a renewed interest in the self-generating wisdom of bottom-up urban initiatives. What does it mean when people act as the urban change agents that direct the life and death of the world’s cities? Fusing her photography with a manifesto-like text, architect Afaina de Jong marks the people in the streets as the starting point of all urban trends and cultural innovation. And calls upon us all to become architects of our environment.

Paul Strand - Manhatta (1921)

Manhatta (1921) is a short documentary film which revels in the haze rising from city smoke stacks. With the city as subject, it consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose non-narrative structure, beginning with a ferry approaching Manhattan and ending with a sunset view from a sky scraper. The primary objective of the film is to explore the relationship between photography and film; camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions.

(Source: urbanophile.com)

massurban: “Why Don’t Real Estate Developers Just Ask Us What We Want? Emily Badger. March 8, 2012 It’s not all that difficult to identify what kinds of new development a neighborhood needs. There’s no pharmacy, no grocer, no gas station for miles? These are pretty obvious missing pieces in a community. It’s much trickier, though, to identify what the people who live therewant. A bagel shop? A vintage store? A vegan farm-to-table karaoke bar? Real estate developers typically handle this question by not asking it at all. If you’ve got a hole in your neighborhood, a street frontage of a certain size on the vacant ground floor of a certain kind of building, you’re probably getting a Starbucks. That’s the safe bet that can shoulder the highest rent, regardless of whether or not it’s also the business that locals really want. And so the vegan farm-to-table karaoke bar never comes to pass, and the people who’ve been coveting one must continue daydreaming. Technology, though, could potentially bridge this disconnect between what communities want and what developers are willing to give them, returning neighborhoods to something similar to that earlier time when building owners stood in front of empty storefronts and asked people, “what do you want to see here?” Hardly anyone literally does this anymore. But the Internet can. “Real estate development a long time ago was done by a family, or a person who generally had some sense of being in the community,” says Dan Miller, a developer with WestMill Capital in Washington, D.C. “They built something that they wanted, that they cared about, that they tended to own for a long time. It wasn’t always corporate development.” He and WestMill unveiled a web tool in December aimed at helping neighborhoods that want local businesses instead of national replicas to communicate that to the people who might make such places possible. The site, Popularise, is currently asking what potential customers want to see inside a property WestMill owns, a 4,250-square foot building on Washington’s eclectic H Street Northeast, that had previously been an underutilized convenience store.” Via: The Atlantic Image: Popularise.com

massurban:

“Why Don’t Real Estate Developers Just Ask Us What We Want?

Emily Badger. March 8, 2012

It’s not all that difficult to identify what kinds of new development a neighborhood needs. There’s no pharmacy, no grocer, no gas station for miles? These are pretty obvious missing pieces in a community. It’s much trickier, though, to identify what the people who live therewant. A bagel shop? A vintage store? A vegan farm-to-table karaoke bar?

Real estate developers typically handle this question by not asking it at all. If you’ve got a hole in your neighborhood, a street frontage of a certain size on the vacant ground floor of a certain kind of building, you’re probably getting a Starbucks. That’s the safe bet that can shoulder the highest rent, regardless of whether or not it’s also the business that locals really want.

And so the vegan farm-to-table karaoke bar never comes to pass, and the people who’ve been coveting one must continue daydreaming. Technology, though, could potentially bridge this disconnect between what communities want and what developers are willing to give them, returning neighborhoods to something similar to that earlier time when building owners stood in front of empty storefronts and asked people, “what do you want to see here?”

Hardly anyone literally does this anymore. But the Internet can.

“Real estate development a long time ago was done by a family, or a person who generally had some sense of being in the community,” says Dan Miller, a developer with WestMill Capital in Washington, D.C. “They built something that they wanted, that they cared about, that they tended to own for a long time. It wasn’t always corporate development.”

He and WestMill unveiled a web tool in December aimed at helping neighborhoods that want local businesses instead of national replicas to communicate that to the people who might make such places possible. The site, Popularise, is currently asking what potential customers want to see inside a property WestMill owns, a 4,250-square foot building on Washington’s eclectic H Street Northeast, that had previously been an underutilized convenience store.”

Via: The Atlantic

Image: Popularise.com

STANFORD INDUSTRIAL PARK (PALO ALTO, 1960). Imagen tomada de Palo Alto Historical Association More notes on my blog after reading Pastoral capitalism. A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes, byLouise A. Mozingo

STANFORD INDUSTRIAL PARK (PALO ALTO, 1960). Imagen tomada de Palo Alto Historical Association

More notes on my blog after reading Pastoral capitalism. A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes, byLouise A. Mozingo

Do you remember the remarkable presentation by Howard Kunstler about The tragedy of suburbia? You can find the video here, really worth spending some minutes. Now his ideas take the form of a new book, The KunstlerCast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler - The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl, a transcription of the conversartions between Kunstler and Duncan Crary

Do you remember the remarkable presentation by Howard Kunstler about The tragedy of suburbia? You can find the video here, really worth spending some minutes.

Now his ideas take the form of a new book, The KunstlerCast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler - The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl, a transcription of the conversartions between Kunstler and Duncan Crary

climateadaptation:

NASA vid shows incredible sprawl in Las Vegas. A must watch…

Via NASA Explorer

Top