Pedestrian Culture

A short article and slide show from the NY Times looks at vanishing Newsstands in NY and suggest that they signify the pedestrian vitality and cultural character of the city. “Each reflects the personality and business acumen of its owner as well as the needs and tastes of its neighborhood.”
This form of street vending is [...]

Part 2: Is New Urbanism a New Civitas

Cities all over are on the rebound. But this isn’t you parent’s urbanism; it’s a New Urbanism. These two words are often equated with mixed use, public transit, walkability, and my personal favorite ambiguous term, livability. New urbanism may encompass these some of these ideas, but it also represents a new ideology in planning that [...]

Is New Urbanism a New Civitas?

Civitas, a roman term, described the status of citizenship in the Roman empire as well as a type of semi-autonomous settlement made up of cives. Doug Kelbaugh, in comparing different paradigms of urbanism (New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism & Post Urbanism), focuses on this term in an article that relates the differnt types of urbanism to [...]

Indy’s Cultural Trail

Yesterday Indianapolis celebrated the completion of the first phase of the Cultural Trail. There is more to be done, but the completion of this stage is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, there is no other project like it, probably anywhere but certainly not in the region of similar sized cities. Secondly, in the [...]

Learning from Bogotá

I came across this excellent series of videos about Bogotá’s mayor, Peñalosa. The series talks at length about the public spaces of the city and how the mayor has created an extensive system of pedestrian, bicycle and bus transit. The scale and political will is unmatched. Check it out.
UPDATE: And an interview in the NYTimes [...]

NY Times Magazine Architectural Issue

This weekend the NY Times Magazine will issue its annual architecture issue. The one article that has been published online, The New, New City, as the title suggest, is more about cities than buildings. Still, its focus is architects and not planners. This is not unusual, but curious to me. I know Koolhaas and many [...]

Community Living Rooms

Community Living Rooms are something that I first came across this article in DESIGNER/builder Magazine, but this article in the NY Times caught my eye. I am glad to see that they have caught on, and in LA of all places. I think that it interesting how they were done in collaboration with the transit [...]

Taking Back the Streets

Here is a great article in the NY Times about some proposed methods for socializing streetscapes in New York. Many of them seem like the could be done on some level as a DIY approach, very similar to the Park(ing) Day events around the country

Closed Space

There are a number of vacant lots that have been fenced off to control undesirable activity, for which these spaces create opportunities. But the potential resource they hold for a neighborhood is broad. Thanks to a number of organizations and individual efforts a number of these lots have been appropriated and serve some social [...]