If Transit Investment Produces Jobs, Why Isn’t There More of It?

In a nation that is struggling to counter a frustratingly high unemployment rate, any intervention that would increase job numbers at no cost to the American taxpayer would be quickly welcomed by policymakers, right? Perhaps not. A new study by Todd... [read more]

Windy City

[Image: "Storm Clouds Over Central Park" by Joseph Bergantine].Do urban landscapes act as attractors for storms and hurricanes? "New research shows that rough areas of land, including city buildings and naturally jagged land cover like trees and... [read more]

Developers favoring walkable over car-oriented 3 to 1

We know the demand for walkable communities is there, but what about the supply? Looks like it’s finally catching up, at least as far as surveys go. A survey of 1000 builders and developers in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic area, conducted by The Strategic... [read more]

Public Transport Visualisations

More and more location data becomes available and makes it possible to visualise the beat of the city over longer periods and/or compressed as a speed up sequence. Eric Fischer has recently published online a few mappings of online available... [read more]

Building a City at Burning Man

The Burning Man Project begins today as nearly 50,000 people already have or soon will converge on the dry lakebed (known as the playa) of the Black Rock Desert. Burning Man takes its name from the eponymous, culminating act of burning a statue of a... [read more]

Can Eye Contact Enhance Road Safety and a Sense of Place?

Is it possible to build community through transportation? Bjarne Winterberg, an architect and urban planner from Copenhagen, has brought road design and the goal of creating places together in ways that may be unmatched by anyone practicing in this field today.   He will share his views at PPS’ upcoming Conference on... [read more]

Building a Density-Driven Grid

Many developing countries look to our utility grid with envy. Our access to technology and capital allow us to stretch services to just about anybody, but there is a point where a locality’s dwindling population density no longer warrants connection to the greater grid. With the amount of unavoidable renovation on the horizon and our... [read more]

Augmented City 3D

What if the city would be interactive in the sense of the emerging augmented reality technology? Not that the city is not interactive, but if one would be able to control many aspects of the environment constantly and from every location? Not that we are not in control of our lives, but just that there is more that we are aware of. This... [read more]

New City Landscape - Moscow

In out series of tweetography maps the latest addition is the Moscow New City Landscape. And it is now also available as an interactive, zoom and pan-able map using the GMap Image Cutter. Russia, but mainly Moscow are currently going through an internet boom and in this context twitter has become quite popular. The data we were able to... [read more]

So, Has Anyone Heard About This Empire State Building Thing?

It’s a strange thing to write: when will someone in New York City finally notice the Empire State Building? Obviously there are some of us (ahem) who find it easier to lavish attention on the city’s worst real estate projects, but the idea that the Empire State Building is somehow lacking for attention — the same Empire State Building... [read more]

Walking health benefits - illustrated

In case any public or private institution asks just what’s so great about walking and transit when it comes to your health, here’s a number of hard hitting facts visually communicated. These graphics can be found in the very readable 25-page Evaluating Public Transportation Health Benefits report published by the American Public... [read more]

Is Stockholm in Danger of Losing Its Waterfront?

It’s not easy to make a great urban waterfront and many cities have made numerous mistakes that they regret later. For example, adjacent land uses that are private versus public, the size and location of  roads limits pedestrian access to the water,  the design of the open spaces along the waterfront  provides few... [read more]

KaBOOM! What an impact!

Fifteen years ago, Darell Hammond, a 24-year-old college dropout who was raised in group home outside of Chicago, had an idea. He wanted to build playgrounds for kids who needed a place to play. He started with a playground in southeast Washington, D.C., raising money from the Home Depot Foundation and others to pay for the job, and assembling a group of volunteers to do the work. Then he built another. And another. [read more]

Foodprint Project

Sarah Rich and I co-founded the Foodprint Project as an exploration of the ways food and cities give shape to one another. As we told Urban Omnibus back in February, days before our first event, we wanted to see what you could learn if you used food as a lens to look at the city. [read more]

Geo-location, Social Media and the City

With hundreds of millions of active accounts across numerous platforms, it is fair to say that social media has already brought many changes to people’s lives, but can it change our interactions with the built environment? If the rapid adoption of geo-location technologies within social media continues, then it looks like it could. Geo-... [read more]

Clarksdale’s Blues Museum Lays the Foundation for the City’s Future

The Grassroutes Column is proceeding on a journey throughout the southern United States for a series about urban regeneration and transportation called “New Directions for the Old South”; So far, I’ve discussed Raleigh (Part 1 | Part 2), Knoxville, Nashville, and Interstate 69. The fate of Clarksdale, Mississippi is very much not settled... [read more]

'Maximizing urban cores' vitality and infrastructure must be the basis for any definition of sustainability'

  There’s a terrific article on cnn.com titled “Green Buildings Won’t Save the Planet,” written by architects Joshua Prince-Ramus, Randolph Croxton, and Tuomas Toivonen.  It states in broad, manifesto-like strokes the same concept I was trying to illustrate in my post last week on “net zero” Prairie Ridge Estates in Illinois... [read more]