Commentary: When Tokyo Was a Slum. This essay touches on many of the themes that we will be exploring in the Informal City Dialogues: The way cities develop incrementally and at the hands of ordinary citizens, the role of government in planning and infrastructure, and how neighborhoods integrate with the larger urban system. Through examples like this one, we hope to gain a greater understanding of how to build more inclusive, resilient cities for all. First-time visitors to Tokyo may arrive with one of two fantasies dancing in their heads.
One is the hyper-modern city of sleek 100-story high-rises and gleaming starchitecture. The other is the darker version: The city that inspired Blade Runner and Akira, a super-dense, technology-saturated metropolis in which Manga faces on towering billboards grin down on shootouts and chase scenes. And why shouldn’t they? This is incremental Tokyo, the foundation upon which the world’s most modern city is built. A City of Villages? Rebuilding, One House at a Time Prosperity, Inch by Inch. Our future in cities | TED Playlists. The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10 Diagrams - Design. Le Corbusier’s plan may not have had such power if he hadn’t put it on paper. The French modernist architect wanted to reform the polluted industrial city by building “towers in a park” where workers might live high above the streets, surrounded by green space and far from their factories.
His idea was radical for the 1930s, and it was his diagrams of it that really captured the imagination. "It swept everyone along," says Benjamin Grant, the public realm and urban design program manager for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. "They were such compelling drawings of such a compelling idea. " Le Corbusier’s iconic plan for his "Ville Radieuse" was an obvious choice when Grant and SPUR began to curate a new exhibition, "Grand Reductions: Ten diagrams that changed urban planning. " The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. 1. Courtesy of the Town and Country Planning Association 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Secretario de Planeación habla sobre barrios en Bogotá - Noticias de Bogotá - Colombia.
Una polémica norma que autoriza la mezcla de usos urbanísticos en toda la ciudad y que, según el secretario de Planeación, Gerardo Ardila, implica que no haya zonas exclusivas residenciales ni de ningún otro tipo fue incluida en el proyecto de reforma del Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (POT) que presentará esta semana el alcalde Gustavo Petro. Además de invertir las prioridades en el POT, para que se consolide primero la ciudad construida, especialmente el centro, y que la expansión en los bordes de la ciudad se haga "solo si es necesario" -en palabras de Ardila-, la Administración le apostará al "polifuncionalismo", es decir, la mezcla de usos del suelo, que hoy está prohibida en algunos sectores.
Una ciudad con monofuncionalismo no funciona. No podemos tener más Santa Anas", dijo el funcionario al referirse a la baja densidad del barrio Santa Ana, en el norte, donde predominan las casas, y que además es de uso exclusivo residencial. Gerardo Ardila, secretario de Planeación Obvio.
Shared Space. The concept of building shared space within the public realm is a radical one here in the United States, where automobiles are not only given priority, but completely dominate most public spaces. With the financial insolvency inherent in our current approach becoming more and more apparent each day, there is a need to study alternatives. The shared space model -- while a dramatic departure from the status quo -- can help us build Strong Towns while making our urban neighborhoods safer in the process. Strong Towns is proud to support a new transportation-focused blog here in Minnesota called Streets.MN. The site is a collaboration among a number of local transportation enthusiasts. This year at Strong Towns we have focused on a comparison between the financial productivity of the traditional neighborhood pattern and the post-WW II development pattern of the Suburban Experiment. The traditional development pattern is more financially productive and more resilient.
La velocidad de la ciudad del futuro >> I Love Bicis. En el imaginario colectivo, influenciado por las películas de Hollywood, las ciudades del futuro vuelan con tranvías y coches flotantes moviéndose a una velocidad supersónica. Los tubos de Futurama pueden ser válidos en teoría pero ¿es esa velocidad el futuro de las ciudades? El ajetreo se ha usado, durante años, como epítome de la experiencia urbana: el metro resoplando mientras entra en la estación, un gentío apresurado cruzando un paso de cebra en Manhattan o alguien parando un taxi con premura; parece que un minuto en el centro de Nueva York, Londres, Madrid o Tokio no pasa como un minuto en el resto del mundo. A pesar de que nuestras avenidas se obstruyen con el tráfico, cuando alguien piensa en una gran ciudad se la imagina más urbana cuanto más rápido se mueve. Sin embargo, si en el trasiego diario por la jungla de asfalto miras alrededor descubres que muchas propuestas diseñadas para acelerar la ciudad, realmente la ralentizan.
Ahora se llevan las ciudades lentas, slow cities. Video - Breaking News Videos from CNN.com. Ciudades superdotadas · ELPAÍS.com. Dicen que la mejor manera de limpiar una casa es no ensuciarla y que la energía más barata es la que no se gasta. ¿Y si el objetivo es mantener limpia una ciudad o rebajar la factura de la luz en una autopista?
Las recetas caseras no pierden sentido. Pero a veces necesitan también otro empujoncito: tecnologías, estrategias y proyectos que pueden hacer que los municipios sean más sostenibles y eficientes. El objetivo es lograr smart cities, ciudades inteligentes que hagan un esfuerzo consciente por usar la tecnología para mejorar la calidad de vida y gastar la menor cantidad de recursos posibles.
Y no solo se trata de dinero. El medio ambiente, el tiempo de los ciudadanos y su salud también cuentan. Málaga es la ciudad más inteligente de España, según la consultora IDC En el año 2050, el 75% de la población mundial vivirá en ciudades. Obviamente, si las empresas están interesadas en el concepto es porque se traduce en negocio.
Pero la tecnología cuesta dinero. El futuro es la inteligencia · ELPAÍS.com. Mejorar las infraestructuras de agua, ahorrar energía, reducir drásticamente el tráfico, adelgazar el alumbrado público o vestir de verde los espacios son algunos de los gestos de decenas de Ayuntamientos y municipios de todo el mundo que empiezan a tomar conciencia del reto que representa el éxodo planetario a la ciudad para mejorar la calidad de vida de sus ciudadanos y, de paso, crear una nueva cultura económica que apueste por el más es menos. De no abrazar esta cura de modernización y adelgazamiento, los expertos en gestión urbana auguran el colapso de las ciudades, donde ya se concentra más de la mitad de la población mundial, y donde el 75% de las almas de todo el planeta se aglutinará en los próximos 20 años.
Toledo ilumina todos sus grandes monumentos con luces led, lo que supone un ahorro del 80% respecto a las lámparas tradicionales En este giro de las ciudades hacia una nueva imagen de marca que las asocie con mayor eficiencia, cada cual debe buscar su seña de identidad. Universal Principles for Creating a Sustainable City. For Professor Wulf Daseking, the City of Freiburg's Head of Urban Planning, longevity and continuity aren't just buzzwords on a whiteboard but themes to live and plan by. After 26 years at the helm of Germany's Environmental Capital, Daseking embodies the notion of sustainability in a city that has seen only four planning directors since World War II. Daseking and his team have also found creative ways to accommodate population growth within its coveted city limits by using available land to build bustling eco-villages: Rieselfeld, a former brownfield area, and Vauban, once a French military base, are ecologically integrated and socially diverse developments that make car-free and high density living easy, fun, and a matter of civic pride for its residents.
On a recent visit to Freiburg, writer and Ecocity Builders contributor Sven Eberlein talked to Professor Daseking about his experiences, visions and the lessons to be learned from the Freiburg experiment by American cities. Global Reports on Human Settlements | 2011. Contested Streets. This is your brain in the city « Per Square Mile. For a kid who spent much of his childhood outdoors—alternately splitting time between the wooded park down the street, my friends’ backyards, and a patch of countryside my parent’s tended—I have been spending a lot of time in rather large cities as an adult. Ever since I left college, I’ve lived in cities that count their residents in hundreds of thousands and metro areas that count in the millions. It’s gotten me to wondering, what effect are these throngs of people having on my brain?
An answer to that question scrolled across my Twitter feed last week in the form of a paper published in Nature. “City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans.” Boom. The paper is the first of its kind, merely lifting the corner of a page in what is likely to be a huge tome of neuroscientific discoveries on how urban life affects the development of our brains and how we react to the populous world around us. The questions the study leaves unanswered are myriad. Village Towns. The Continued Relevance of Reclaiming the Urban Memory. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9) preface Recently, many have inquired about the inspiration for my exploratory and photo-intensive myurbanist and Huffington Post entries from Tanzania, as well as visual documentation of city corners and Portland ambience.
Other urban observers, such as Kaid Benfield in Grist, have kindly included my image-oriented suggestions for reinterpreting cities such as San Francisco through my concept of the “urban diary”. Upon reflection, I realized one major reason for these questions and observations: an unexpected, motivational discovery in a Seattle used bookstore one year ago. Here, revised below, for new readers and old, is the stirring work of Burton Holmes, a continued and motivating force in my own work, and by inference, a catalyst for us all the old is new again Melbourne, Flinders Street Station, 1917 ©2006 BHHC -Burton Holmes, Seoul, Korea, 1899.
Future Cities. Back to the Future | James Howard Kunstler. A road map for tomorrow's cities by James Howard Kunstler I LOVE THOSE CITIES-of-the-future illustrations from the old pop-culture bin. In “yesterday’s tomorrow,” they always get things so wonderfully wrong. One of my favorites, from the August 1925 issue of Popular Science Monthly, depicts a heroic cross section of New York’s Park Avenue looking to the south from around 47th Street in the far-off sci-fi future of 1950. “Airport landing fields” are denoted on the roof of a building that has replaced the familiar Grand Central Station tower at the end of the vista. The illustration is a beautifully rendered black-and-white lithograph, and the layout of this future New York is impeccably rational down to the pneumatic “freight tubes” in the lowest subbasement of the buildings.
Another favorite of mine in this genre, done in the mid-1950s to portray the far-off year 2000, depicts a city of towers cut through with swooping super-duper highways. Bye Bye Beaver Shuttering the Metroplexes. Which-part-detroit-if-any-really-needs-right-sizing from... At the bottom of this post are two short videos about Detroit, both featuring architect and planner Mark Nickita, principal of the city's Archive Design Studio and a lifelong Detroit resident.
In a very refreshing change from the mind-numbing negativity one usually hears about the city, Nickita is upbeat and hopeful. His point of view, emphasizing revitalization, is much closer to my own than much of what I read, which effectively takes the approach that the city has somehow been abandoned beyond redemption, leaving the only question how to manage its more-or-less permanent shrinkage. But it’s not that simple. There has indeed been a decline in part of the region. In 1970, 1,670,144 people lived within the city limits of Detroit. By 2010, that number had declined to 713,777, an astounding apparent loss of some 57 percent of the 1970 population. But the extent to which Detroit is such a tragically “shrinking city” depends on your definition of “city.” Look at the maps below.
Trancón en Bogotá durará más de dos años. Se requiere una política pública centrada en el peatón para solucionar los problemas de movilidad. Por ahora, pico y placa de tres días a la semana podría ayudar. Por: José Stalin ROJAS Director - Observatorio de Logística, Movilidad y Territorio (OLMT) Universidad Nacional de Colombia Bogotá, 17-02-2011. La continuidad del pico y placa en Bogotá obliga a reflexionar sobre la existencia o ausencia de una adecuada política de movilidad y si los trancones que padecen los habitantes de la ciudad se pueden mitigar.
Aquí, lo primero que se debe advertir es que las causas del trancón son históricas y estructurales, es decir, se originaron hace varios años y han persistido en el tiempo. La infraestructura, la cantidad de automóviles, la cultura ciudadana y la ausencia de una política pública centrada en el peatón, son algunas de las principales razones por las cuales las dificultades en la movilidad no desaparecerán en el mediano plazo, es decir que el trancón seguirá por más de dos años. Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia. - By Annie Lowrey. This week, researchers at Umea University in Sweden released a startling finding: Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce. The Swedes could not say why. Perhaps long-distance commuters tend to be poorer or less educated, both conditions that make divorce more common. Perhaps long transit times exacerbate corrosive marital inequalities, with one partner overburdened by child care and the other overburdened by work.
But perhaps the Swedes are just telling us something we all already know, which is that commuting is bad for you. Awful, in fact. Annie Lowrey, formerly Slate’s Moneybox columnist, is economic policy reporter for the New York Times. Commuting is a migraine-inducing life-suck—a mundane task about as pleasurable as assembling flat-pack furniture or getting your license renewed, and you have to do it every day. That unpleasantness seems to have a spillover effect: making us less happy in general. Do not take it lightly.
A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation. Wiki cities. Sprawl. Smarth Growth.