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Why Trees Make For Safer Streets

January 19, 2012 by Bob Leonard
with 922 views
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Urban Forestry is a growing trend in cities looking to actively clean their air and water while making streets aesthetically pleasing for pedestrians, bike riders, and drivers as well. While I could list any number of benefits trees in urban areas have been shown to produce, there was one advantage that I didn’t expect to see: safer,... [read more]

Greening Streets: The First Step Towards Fixing Suburbs

December 21, 2011 by Kaid Benfield
with 486 views
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  We’ve made such a mess of the suburbs we constructed in the last fifty or so years that one wonders whether they can ever be made into something more sustainable.  Strip malls, traffic jams, cookie-cutter subdivisions, diminished nature, almost no sense of outdoor community.  We all know the drill: there are nice places... [read more]

Jordi Borja on Democracy and the City

December 8, 2011 by polis blog
with 101 views
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"If the city is both the producer of citizenship and the generator of innovation, it is therefore the soil in which democracy lives, progresses and responds to new challenges. Without the city, the place that maximizes exchanges between people, democracy loses its strength to create potential futures and promote current actions. The city... [read more]

Skating Kenya’s Streets and Ushering in Social Change

November 2, 2011 by This Big City
with 93 views
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A thunderstorm draws in over Nairobi City. Down in Uhuru Park, raindrops begin to dampen the dusty ground. The couples and swathes of youths that, moments ago, had adorned the wide expanses of sunlit grass, now swiftly head for cover under an unassuming grandstand as the city skyline begins to disappear behind sheets of heavy rain.... [read more]

Capturing Sao Paulo's Sidewalks

October 26, 2011 by polis blog
with 211 views
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Just as a flaneur in Hong Kong would be remiss in his or her explorations without looking up into the density of urban life that occurs in skyscrapers and apartment towers, looking at the ground offers a glimpse of art, utility and public works in a city — from manhole covers and street gravel, to sidewalk collisions of color, texture... [read more]

Empty Spaces and Meeting Places: Dealing With Division

October 26, 2011 by julian dobson
with 177 views
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How will community be built in the 21st century? If you want to know the lie of the land, sometimes you must literally see how the land lies and what human beings have done to it.Ancient settlements were connected by trade routes and divided by fault lines: valleys, rivers and hills were means meeting or contested territory. This week I... [read more]

Making the Case for Sustainable Streets

September 21, 2011 by The Dirt ASLA
with 164 views
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Riding high on the announcement of New York City’s bike-share program just a day earlier, NYC Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan gave the keynote lecture at the two-day conference A Roadmap to Sustainable Infrastructure & Green Cities at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Striding through her talk as... [read more]

Why Rioters Destroy Their Own Neighborhoods

August 23, 2011 by Tony Chavira
with 627 views
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Since random men (criminal or not) are often shot by honest police officers just doing their jobs, the riots cannot simply be about pure, simple hooliganism. There is a reason, and it is disparity. [read more]

Assuring Sustainable Third Places in the City

July 24, 2011 by Chuck Wolfe
with 835 views
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Image courtesy of the author

Last week, while the Seattle City Council gave final approval to more street food vendors in public places, Borders Group Inc. began its liquidation of most remaining Borders bookstores, including locations in destination American downtowns. This is related news, because both items are about how public and private uses and spaces mix... [read more]

Complete Streets or Complete Networks?

June 5, 2011 by Ben Schulman
with 225 views
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This is a guest post by Ruth Walker.The “complete streets” idea - the concept that streets need to be designed for all users, including pedestrians and cyclists as well as SUVS and fire trucks - has caught on well in recent years. Maybe it’s caught on too well, in fact.   That was one of the messages in the NU 202 session on “... [read more]

Why 'Streets' aren't the same as 'Roads'

May 16, 2011 by David Levinson
with 209 views
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Chuck Marohn endorses streets over roads ... Co-opting Complete Streets : "Now notice that I called this route a 'road' and not a 'street'. Understanding the difference between a road and a street is critical to understanding the problem we have with engineers misusing the Complete Streets approach. From our Placemaking Principles... [read more]

Transformative Transportation Policy in Abu Dhabi

August 18, 2009 by Project for Public Spaces
with 172 views
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Abu Dhabi, a rapidly-growing city The third in a series of reflections from the travels of a 34-year veteran Traffic Engineer from the New Jersey Department of Transportation.  Gary Toth, who had previously never been abroad, spent a week in the United Arab Emirates capital city of Abu Dhabi. He found the city to be rapidly... [read more]