urban design

between a bus and a hard place

It is time for our cycling campaigns to go back to the drawing board together and start again with our cycling design guidelines, before every other road in our city is narrowed.[read more]

get the children outside!

If children are the future, we seem to be very short-sighted when it comes to urban design. Very little, if any at all, of the current discourse on the type of cities we should be building truly considers whether these cities will be child friendly.[read more]

the future of water

According to the heads of the major built-environment design organizations, it’s water. Water is going to become increasingly scarce. Worldwide, countries are struggling with diminishing ground water resources.[read more]

Show notes from this episode are available at Urbanism Speakeasy. [read more]

  If we built cities differently, would people travel differently? Marlon Boarnet, professor of planning, policy, and design and economics from the University of California, Irvine set out to the answer that very question. Through his research, Boarnet works to address the social issues that surround transportation and land use...[read more]

Photo credit: William Warby

Smart cities don’t happen by accident. To help planners and policy makers better understand and manage the dynamic behavior of cities, IBM Global Business Services is introducing new analytics software and services based on their “smarter cities” strategy. System Dynamics for Smarter Cities is an interactive model that allows leaders to observe how the core systems of a city -- such as the economy, housing, education, public safety, transportation, health care, government services and utilities -- work together and affect one another.[read more]

 Another post on the design of cities and health – how much is the city to blame and how much is the social climate? By Andrew Nusca  Quite a sensational headline, I know. But Grist’s Sarah Goodyear highlights a new article and   study that claim that poor urban development isn’t just an...[read more]

I am often asked about the role of foreign architects working in China-particularly why China even needs foreign architects when there are many qualified Chinese architects. The answer is simple, albeit not the most politically correct:[read more]

TransMilenio in Bogotá, Colombia was launched as a short-term goal that was part of a long-term vision for urban improvement. Photo by Gerardo Arévalo Tamayo. The inclusion of all stakeholders in urban planning was a recurring theme yesterday at the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development event, “Sustainable Transport and...[read more]

Spearheaded by the current energy, financial, and climate crises the sustainability agenda has called upon planners, architects, and urban designers to rethink profoundly the ways in which we build our cities. This, however, is not the first time when modern society is faced with such an imperative. Roughly one hundred years ago, in the...[read more]