There’s a fiction that cars are needed in cities and we should provide parts of our limited land in urban centres so one person can leave their car. This fiction perpetuated by car brains hurts our cities and is really not good, to solve this problem the city of Rotterdam
Continue readingTag: urban planning
Things Are Good: How to Build People Focussed Communities
The Sustainable City Show · Ep 3: Creating Car-Free Communities | In Conversation With Eckart Wurzner & Chris Shears A sustainable world is a walkable city. Over at the Sustainable City Show they talked to two people engaged in making cities walkable, car-free, and down right pleasant to live in.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Hamburg Builds for a Future of Higher Seas
Hamburg’s transition from being seen as only an industrial port to a thriving cultural hub is well underway and part of that transition is to ensure the city can survive climate change. Since the city is located not far from the coast rising water and more sever storms will impact
Continue readingThings Are Good: SF’s Busiest Street Removed Cars and Traffic Improved
Market Street in San Fransico connects many communities within the city, yet using it to navigate from place to another was a slog. Until they got rid of cars last year. The removal of cars on the popular main street made getting around the city faster, easier, and healthier. Anyone
Continue readingThings Are Good: Building Superblocks Can Save Cities
Barcelona’s urban layout of “superblocks” has proven to be a great way to make cities liveable, efficient, and environmentally friendly. We’ve looked at the brilliant design in Barcelona before, and now the question is how to take this urban design to other cities. Can car-focussed cities like Atlanta, Toronto, and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Milan’s Massive Mobility Mission
The Cambio project in Milan aims to get more people on two wheels while also improving the cityscape. Milan once had a reputation as an industrial city clogged with traffic, but now with cleaner air and easy streets the city’s attracting more people. To improve life within the city they
Continue readingThings Are Good: Spreading the Movement Against Sprawl
Where you live matters. Who chooses in what type of building you can choose to live in matters too. Undoubtedly most people want to live in walkable communities, yet in many areas it’s actual illegal to build places that don’t rely on cars. Low density sprawl is bad for everything
Continue readingThings Are Good: Why 30 km/h is Best for Every City
People move through cities in whatever mode of transportation gets them from point A to point B efficiently. Car focussed developments restrained people’s freedoms by focussing only one form of transport, today cities need to incorporate as many forms of movement as possible. To help with this transition speed limits
Continue readingThings Are Good: We can Save 200,000 Lives a Year Replacing Car Commutes with Bicycles
A simple modification to our cities can save a lot of lives: add more and better bicycling infrastructure. Researchers looked into quantifying how many lives we can save by replacing car journeys with bicycle use and the results aren’t surprising, but will hopefully influence people. The harms vehicular traffic does
Continue readingThings Are Good: Paris, the City of Bike Lights
When I visited Paris long ago it was a traffic clogged mess, with lovely architecture. Parisians have had enough of bad traffic and decided to solve their mobility challenges by adding more ways to get around the city. Thy’ve already returned urban space to pedestrians and started to build more
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cities of the Future Act as Sponges
When it rains cities should hold all the water. In the 20th century that idea would have been laughed out of the room; today, we know better. Urban water management is vital to a healthy city, ecosystem, and flood mediation. The old idea of building giant channels of concrete to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Make Believe Ideas and the City
The mayor of Toronto, like other 20th century mayors, believes in mystical solutions to urban problems. In the 21st century smart mayors are shedding the myths and make-believe thinking around urban design. In forward looking places we see neighbourhoods made livable and large swaths of land made into the human
Continue readingThings Are Good: To Revive Main Streets Let’s Make them People Focussed Instead of Business Focussed
Since the proliferation of big box stores and malls small cities have been struggling to keep their downtowns engaging and profitable for businesses. What if we rethought our downtowns to be about people and making a community instead of profit centres? That’s the very question a small city in the
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Real Smart City Lacks Smart Technology
A few years ago Silicon Valley mega corps thought all cities should be made “smart” by tracking all citizen data. There was a concentrated effort by Google to violate privacy rights in Toronto and bullying the city into a finance deal which only benefit the advertising giant. Torontonians protested and
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Cities Deal with More Intense Heat Waves
Global warming is bringing more intense heat waves to our urban environments which means cities will need to adapt to the new temperatures. Indeed, regular readers will recognize a lot of ways cities can mitigate extreme heat from painting roads white to regulating green roofs. Over at Arch Daily they
Continue readingThings Are Good: It’s Time to Destroy Highways to Build Cities
People make cities an interesting place to be. It’s the people that produce culture and economic prosperity, yet many cities have highways going right through them. These highways make the city worse in every regard. Now, cities in America will be getting funding to repair the cities from the damage
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Suburbs Are Bad, Here’s How to Make Them Good
We need to change the way we build and live if we’re going to avert catastrophic climate change, and it’s time we think about the biggest carbon offender: the suburbs. Suburban living is car-centric, energy intensive due to the design of the houses, more expensive to maintain due to low
Continue readingThings Are Good: Ending the Gender Gap in Transportation
There is a gender gap in our cities and it’s all thanks to car-centric design. Everybody knows that cars destroy urban centers and cause a lot of harm to public health. but you may not have thought of the impact cars have on gender. As cities look to modernize themselves
Continue readingThings Are Good: Urban Ecology Cools Building, Cities, and Helps Biodiversity
Modern cities are full of biodiversity, you just need to know where to look .Urban ecology is a relatively new field of study that examines how isolated urban green infrastructure relates to one another to form an ecological understanding of our cities. This infrastructure includes green roofs, parks, water catchments,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Removing Highways Improves Cities
Urban highways occupy a lot of space that can otherwise be used for parks, housing, offices, or anything else that produces economic benefits. The post war highway building boom in North America destroyed communities (in the USA highways were built to purposefully isolate black communities), fuelled car-dependent suburban developments, and
Continue reading