housing

going green outside the home

When people think about green buildings, what comes to mind is solar panels, geothermal energy, improved insulation, and so forth. Although we often forget it, being green also includes what lies beyond the walls![read more]

women in society

The rise of women’s role in society will result in significant impacts on housing and communities across Canada. They will not only influence future housing demand, but also define the communities and housing in which they live.[read more]

urbanism

I would now like to make my case for a “lazy” urbanism. What does your city need for people who like or have to just “be” in a city and not build a city?[read more]

  New research from Southern California has found that residents of neighborhoods with a central core of shops and services – a pattern typically found in older, traditional communities – walk nearly three times more often than do residents of neighborhoods whose nearest shops and services lie along a major arterial roadway – a...[read more]

Suburbs will continue to exist. People will still want to live in them, and therefore we must re-design them.  In America, our thinking has become rather binary when it comes to urban development; you either live in a Manhattan high-rise or a suburban house in Phoenix. The suburbs will have to densify in some way in order to be...[read more]

Seems like my chapter "The Death of Sprawl" from The Post Carbon Reader is taking on a life of its own. Friday, Christopher Leinberger had an Op-ed in the New York Times, titled "Death of the Fringe Suburb," which built upon concepts I had published (and sent Leinberger last year) namely, that the US mortgage crisis and Recession were set off by upsidedown economics of sprawl speculation in US exurbs or "Boomburbs" and we can't ever do that again.[read more]

The Riddings is a long sloping crescent of nondescript semi-detached houses, branching off into cul-de-sacs and loops. The layout is typical of a sleepy English suburb. But this particular suburb in Huddersfield achieved notoriety in 1990 as the setting for a BBC documentary, The Estate.Local people still rankle at how they were...[read more]

Empowerhouse, Parsons the New School for Design and Stevens Institute of Technology.Almost exactly two years ago, I went to visit the Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. This year’s Solar Decathlon had the same goal — to design and build the best energy-efficient house powered by the sun. Like the houses in 2009, and the houses designed...[read more]

A study that looks at the true cost of homes found that transport plays a major role in affordability. Photo by Travlr. The District of Columbia Office of Planning, in cooperation with the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology, released a study that found transportation costs range from $8,500 to $25,000 per...[read more]

"[MoMA] recognizes – indeed it insists – that architecture even more than the other arts is bound up with ethics, social justice, technology, politics, and finance, along with the lofty desire to improve the human condition.”Arthur Drexler in his introduction to the exhibit "Another Chance for Housing," 1973“They [featured architects]...[read more]

Credit: Flickr user tylerdurden1Editor’s Note: This entry is the second in a series of interviews conducted by Cluster in collaboration with Living Labs Global (LLG) in occasion of the second edition of the Living Labs Global Award, an international technology award for digital services that add high value to users in cities around the...[read more]

It looks like one of the main take-aways from the CNU 18 conference is something being labeled agrarian urbanism. Fast Company is calling it the "new new urbanism" and Treehugger has described the notion as the next phase in the evolution of this 30-year old movement. Andres Duany, in particular, has been pushing pretty hard in this...[read more]