In the cold of winter you might not be thinking of the nice hot summer days as a negative thing. In the winter when temperatures get really low people suffer from hypothermia or worse, whereas in heat they can suffer from heat stroke or worse. When it comes to the
Continue readingTag: urban
Things Are Good: Hop Aboard the Free Transit Movement
Our contemporary financial approach to moving people around a city subsidizes individual automobile use, which leads to more car use and worse mobility for everyone. An easy solution to this problem that’s gaining popularity is to change what mode of transportation get subsidies. The most direct way to stop subsidizing
Continue readingThings Are Good: Time to Rethink the Skyscraper
The climate crisis has us questioning where people live, work, and how they get between the two. We’ve known for decades that low density sub-urban living is horrible for the environment (and people’s mental health) because it detaches people from each other due to car-based transportation. Many have argued that
Continue readingThings Are Good: Kids Love Living in Cities
Urban places are already good places since they are more environmentally friendly than sub-urban places and have fantastic access to culture. Research in Toronto has revealed that children love cities too. In North America there’s a myth that suburban developments are better for children (despite the reliance on automobiles to
Continue readingThings Are Good: 13 Year Long Study Confirms Bike Lanes Make Streets Safer for Everyone
Bike lanes not only protect cyclists from negligent drivers, they protect drivers and pedestrians too. A longitudinal study reveals that it’s not the cyclists which make the streets safer, rather it’s the infrastructure that separates cyclists from giant metal slabs that matter. Bike lane only made of paint did nothing
Continue readingPostArctica: Street Writing Snippet #1
Angelique imagines herself howling. It seems like something she would like to do. Some people imitate what they believe are Iroquois war cries. She is not sure how you could confirm that that that is what they sounded like, unless you could ask an Iroquois to demonstrate one, and that
Continue readingThings 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: 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: The Transformation of Paris from Traffic Jams to Quick Movement
Paris once had a reputation for horrible traffic, long queues of cars and taxing journeys via cars. When you have a problem stemming from one element sometimes it’s best to just get rid of it. That’s exactly what Paris is doing. By getting rid of the car traffic jams are
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: 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: 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 readingThings Are Good: Bustling Bike Boom Brought on by Pandemic Continues
Riding bikes has gotten more popular over the course of the pandemic due to the fact it’s a safe outdoor activity. Popularity of commuting by bicycle has also increased thanks to initiatives done throughout many cities to increase infrastructure supporting bicycling. All of this has led to demand for bicycles
Continue readingThings Are Good: Urban Farming Helps Cities Tackle the Climate Crisis
Growing your own food is fun and possible, even in a tiny space, so everyone should give it a try. Cities are finding ways to encourage more people to grow food locally for a variety of reasons, and they all revolve around dealing with climate change. Cities become more resilient
Continue readingThings Are Good: We’ve Improved Urban Life During the Pandemic, Let’s Keep it up!
During the the last century urban planners in North America built cities for cars instead of people. The 21st century is literally paying the costs of their misjudgement. Efforts to make streets for people we gaining popularity over the last couple of decades and the pandemic pushed that further. We’ve
Continue readingThings Are Good: 5 Ways We Can Improve Cities During the Pandemic
IKEA’s research and design lab in Copenhagen released a book this month on ways we can improve our cities. They start by recognizing we’re presently facing two global crisis: a pandemic and catastrophic climate change. Their proposals to address these two issues within cities is titled The Ideal City and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cable Cars Growing in Popularity
The future of urban transit can be found in the mountains. As we noted back in 2012, gondolas (AKA cable cars) are a very real and practical option to solve urban mobility. The benefits of using cable cars are many and when they are integrated into local fare systems they
Continue readingThings Are Good: Fleeing the City During This Pandemic? Do so Sustainably
Inequality has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and we ought to be conscious about this. Wealthy individuals can work from home and afford to move, while others need to be physically at work and can’t move. As a result the prices of houses outside of cities have risen has
Continue readingThings Are Good: Truly Smart Cities are Actually “Dumb”
Earlier this year Sidewalk Labs (Google) opted out of building a “smart” neighbourhood in Toronto due to local pressure (protests work!). What the “smart” neighbourhood wanted to do was monitor and control the activities of occupants and visitors, which would have likely violated many laws. The business plan was even
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