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Pedalling myths: the anti-bike lobby is flat out of plausible arguments | Oliver Burkeman | Comment is free
Menace to society: a woman cycling in New York. Photograph: Thomas Grass/Getty Images If you hold the view that bikes, and bike lanes, are among the greatest evils threatening society today, you might at first have been pleased to see this week's Toronto Sun column by Mike Strobel, which has circulated widely online. Initially, it appears to stand in the fine tradition of anti-bike screeds such as those by the New York Post's Steve Cuozzo or Andrea Peyser , or the New Yorker's John Cassidy .
This year, the Knight News Challenge has been soliciting project proposals that would open up and leverage government data anywhere at the national, state and local levels (in the U.S. and abroad). As of last week, 886 projects are vying for a share of the $5 million in funding, all in response to this question : "How can we make the places we live more awesome through data and technology?" Amid all of the submissions are some familiar innovations we've already encountered at Atlantic Cities , formerly as nascent ideas now competing for a chance to scale up: our favorite guerrilla wayfinding campaign from Raleigh, North Carolina; Code for America's playful StreetMix web app ; the San Francisco-based Urban Prototyping Festival ; and a community-driven transportation planning project based on the kind of data analytics we wrote about here . But that's barely scratching the surface of all the proposals that Knight has corralled.
12 Fresh Ideas for Transforming the Places We Live With Open Data - Emily Badger
1 | This "Airbnb For Storefronts" Is Creating New Opportunities In A New York Neighborhood
Despite its rapid gentrification over the past decade, New York City’s Lower East Side is still surprisingly full of vacant storefronts, as many as 200. According to Eric Ho , an architect and founder of neighborhood revitalization group miLES (Made in the Lower East Side), that’s because many landlords are content to sit on empty properties until the perfect, high-paying, long-term tenant comes along to sign a lease. The result is a constellation of unoccupied spaces that add little value to neighborhood residents, business-owners, and visitors. MiLES’s mission is to activate those storefronts, by matching up vacant units with temporary tenants, including entrepreneurs who might want a space to run a pop-up shop or education and community focused organizations looking for affordable meeting space.This post is also available in: Chinese (Traditional) , Italian By Kyla Mandel at Green Futures The humble coconut can offer a quick-fix for the thirsty, but could it also provide a reliable source of clean water? Research Triangle International [RTI] believes it could.
Could Coconuts Purify Urban Water Supplies?
Manifesto | The Spontaneous City International
Manifesto The Spontaneous City is dealt by its inhabitants in a never ending process of transformation and adaptation to accommodate the contemporary culture that demands change in time, collective and individual concern, broad understanding of sustainability, and surprise! Individuals and groups, including both residents and business people, re-use or re-organize spaces in apartments block, workplaces, parks and street. The potential of city dwellers has too long been ignored. Co-design, Co-production, Co-property and Co-responsibility are no longer just fashionable terms, but accepted design forms in terms of sustainable urban development, which have to be implemented and applied more and more in a larger scope in collaboration with the big companies and local authority.Is this Placemaking? Some would say yes… / Photo: Brendan Crain “People develop, not places.”
Project for Public Spaces | Challenges and Warts: How Physical Places Define Local Economies
‘Do not base policies about cycling on the views of existing committed cyclists’
Some of you will no doubt remember the advice – quoted in the headline of this post – of the 2011 Understanding Walking and Cycling Report [pdf]. do not base policies about cycling on the views and experiences of existing committed cyclists. These are a minority who have, against all the odds, successfully negotiated a hostile urban environment to incorporate cycling into their everyday routines. It is necessary to talk – as we have done – to non-cyclists, potential cyclists, former cyclists, and recreational cyclists to determine what would encourage them to make more use of this transport mode.
The Flaneur Society was created in response to Walter Benjamin's book Berlin Childhood Around 1900 . In it he explores the concept of the Flaneur, one who wanders without destination. Intrigued by this concept, the society was created to spread the concept of the Flaneur beyond academic studies and into the general consciousness of how we think of urban spaces. The Guidebook to Getting Lost is a small pocket sized book which defines the concept of the Flaneur.
Welcome to the Flaneur Society
1 Review Local Projects A local developer or business starts a drawing board by posting a real project that they are building in your city. They frame the question and ask for your input. Next step → 2 Submit your ideas You help them with their project by submitting ideas that answer their question.
How it Works | Popularise
It would not be unfair to characterize the growth we are experiencing as “astronomical,” even in light of the current, apparent, slow down. Some believe we are experiencing a seismic shift; the very fabric of the city is being redefined with every newly approved application, and it’s tempting to question whether the “centre will hold.” I was at a conference recently in the American Midwest where Toronto was identified as “the fastest growing city in the world,” and the comment rang in my ears. What does this mean? At the very least, it means we are experiencing change at a rate that most of us - and our policy frameworks – did not fathom.
The Public Realm Creates the City | Own Your City
Project for Public Spaces | What is Placemaking?
“’Placemaking’ is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. It has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.”This Big City - ideas for sustainable cities
It’s a Love/Hate Thing: The Protest to Preserve the Berlin Wall “Don’t tear down this wall!” This phrase may sound shocking to Berliners who lived for decades in a divided city, but it is the rallying cry of the current protest in Berlin to preserve the East Side Gallery, a 1.3 kilometer section of the Berlin Wall in the Friedrichshain neighborhood. Continue Reading → Crowd House Mortgages: How Our Financial World Might be Different in 2030 The Crowd House Mortgage idea couldn’t be more removed from the model of today.Kelly Clifton has heard this stereotype a number of times: "Cyclists are just a bunch of kids who don’t have any money," says the professor of civil and environmental engineering at Portland State University. "They ride their bikes to a coffee shop, they sit there for four hours with their Macintoshes, they’re not really spending any money." If you’re a shopkeeper with such suspicions, you’re probably not on board with any plan that would cut down on parking right outside your door. Cyclists are the ones with time to kill; drivers are the ones with money. This perception is problematic in a place like Portland, where the bike-friendly city government is now looking to extend the reach of bike infrastructure – and the appeal of bikes themselves – to newer riders and neighborhoods farther afield from the urban core. "As we move out beyond those areas into more auto-oriented areas," Clifton says, "we start to see businesses say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.
Cyclists and Pedestrians Can End Up Spending More Each Month Than Drivers - Commute
Brahm Ahmadi spends a lot of time thinking about something most people take for granted: grocery stores. But it hasn’t always been this way. As one of the founders of the nonprofit People’s Grocery in West Oakland — the Bay Area’s most notorious food desert — he and his colleagues started out with more affordable, less ambitious projects, like a mobile food delivery service and a local community-supported agriculture (CSA) box. But it quickly became clear — as several grocery chains tried to enter the neighborhood and failed, and residents were left relying on corner stores or taking long trips by public transportation to other neighborhoods — that the area needed a reliable, independent grocery store. “Residents said, ‘What you’ve brought to the neighborhood is great, but it’s far from a complete solution,’” Ahmadi recalls.
A grocery store for the people planned for West Oakland food desert
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