Let’s face it: driving sucks. Car traffic is bad for everyone and a lot of American cities have caught on to this. As a result, more light rail is being built throughout the USA, recently Pheonix residents voted to back more light rail with a tax hike. What’s pushing this?
Continue readingTag: urban
Things Are Good: Why Urban Areas Are More Efficient Than Suburban Areas
It’s been known for years that urban centres have a lower carbon footprint than the lands of urban sprawl. This is a for a variety of reasons and it’s rather complex, sure most of it comes down to density, but the exact know how is still being figure out. Over
Continue readingThings Are Good: Watch Streets Evolve From Car-Focused to People-Focused
Streets were for people, then cars took over and ruined cities. For the last hundred years cities transformed themselves from walkable places to sprawling buildings which were designed for heavy car use. Now, cities have seen how that’s a mistake. A design firm, Urb-i, has used Google street view to
Continue readingPostArctica: About That Beach In Verdun
While not an entirely new idea, the concept of a beach in Verdun in it’s current form was given impetus by Projet Montreal in 2009. I didn’t like the idea then and am still not too crazy about it. But the city of Montreal is handing out “375” goodies (
Continue readingPostArctica: About That Beach In Verdun
While not an entirely new idea, the concept of a beach in Verdun in it’s current form was given impetus by Projet Montreal in 2009. I didn’t like the idea then and am still not too crazy about it. But the city of Montreal is handing out “375” goodies (
Continue readingThings Are Good: Artists Bring Peace to the Streets
Street art about peace is getting special attention in London these next few weeks. Artists from all over the world are going to explore the idea of ‘peace in our streets’ and what it means to them. It looks like it’ll be a great exhibit. If you’re in London you
Continue readingThings Are Good: Living Architecture Tour of Toronto
If you’re in Toronto or visiting you can now go on a special tour of the city that will reveal all the cool living architecture! It’s a free tour that you can download and go on anytime you’d like. Toronto abounds with green roofs and walls, but most people aren’t
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Futuristic Conclusion to HIGHRISE
HIGHRISE is back with another look into how we humans live in our built environments. We’ve looked at HIGHRISE before (Out My Window and One Millionth Tower) and this last iteration is just as captivating. We are becoming a vertical—and digital—species. Billions of us live in highrises, and three billion
Continue readingThings Are Good: Seoul Starts Vertical Farming
Vertical farming is a possible food production solution as suburban sprawl consumes arable land. The new style of farming essentially is a farm in a skyscraper; they have yet to demonstrate commercial value but it’s inevitable that these farms will be normal fixtures in urban centres; Korea wants to be
Continue readingThings Are Good: Urban Living Cheaper, More Sustainable Than Suburban
Years of car-focused suburban designs have unleashed problems in the 21st century that we will have to deal with and accommodate. The years of the suburbs are coming to an end and it can’t be soon enough. With every passing years more and more municipalities discover that urban design is
Continue readingPostArctica: Verdun Waterfront Today
Didn’t have my camera when when we got hit with sunshine combined with blinding wet snow but got a few of the aftermath.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Seville is Spain’s Cycling Gem
It’s well known that the future of urban design and transportation will support the mass use of bicycles. Still, some cities are slow to catch on to this. In Spain where cycling is not nearly as popular in colder northern parts of Europe the city of Seville is leading the
Continue readingThings Are Good: The 20 Safest Cities in the World
The Economist safe cities list (pdf link) has been released and the results are pretty neat! There are some cities that you’d expect to be there and some surprise too! The analysts looked at digital, health, and personal security of every city on the list plus the condition of the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Copenhagen Designed a Neighbourhood to Cope With Climate Change
Climate change is happening faster than projected and this means that cities need to react sooner than anticipated. We’ve seen efforts in New York that will create barriers against rising sea levels and other cities have done similar infrastructure improvements. Copenhagen has taken the next logical step: converting an existing
Continue readingThings Are Good: Slow Increasing Carbon Waste by Growing Cities
People living in cities have a lower carbon footprint than those in the suburbs and rural areas. Some people find this rather counter intuitive for reasons I don’t fully understand. There are researchers looking into the future of our global carbon footprint and they have concluded that if we increase
Continue readingThings Are Good: Growing the Green Roof Industry in North America
Green roofs are great! They help alleviate a lot of issues that arise in urban living while making cities more beautiful. There is growing interest in making sure that urban green roofs take off and it looks like it is working. While other countries like Germany have been using green
Continue readingThings Are Good: New York City’s Simple, and Green, Flood Prevention
New York, like other large cities, has a lot of impermeable services which means that when it rains there is little to contain the water. By using green infrastructure of soil, broken stone, shrubs, trees, etc. the bioswales can capture a lot of water. This green infrastructure is good for
Continue readingPostArctica: Turcot at La Biennale de Montreal
OK, I have sure been out of the loop here. Stumbled on this article about an artist who is featured at the Montreal Biennale whose work is focused on ideas about Turcot. That’s pretty cool in itself until I listened to the audio where it seems there are concerns about
Continue readingThings Are Good: Condesned Forests for an Urban Canopy
Shubhendu Sharma has found a way to get a small area of land to become a thick forest nearly impossible to walk trough. The idea is to take useless spaces in cities (like car parking) and turn them into miniature forests. These mini-forests can cool the local temperature, clean the
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Rise of Urban Agriculture
Industrial agriculture is not kind to the environment and has been attributed to deforestation of the rainforest to the massive bee die-off. Yet, we find ourselves attached to this 20th century model of centralized production. Lucky for civilization, this is changing! Small scale urban agriculture is getting large enough as
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