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Planning & Urbanization

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What’s your city’s personality? No two cities are exactly the same, but some enjoy distinct looks that makes them unmistakable.

What’s your city’s personality?

Think of Parisian balconies with cast-iron banisters, chimneyed townhouses lining the streets of London, or the water towers and fire escapes of New York. Small quirks like these can add up to make a city instantly familiar to anyone in the world. With this in mind, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a software program to determine exactly which features give certain cities their unique architectural character. Using everyone’s favorite vicarious vacation dream machine, Google Street View, the researchers developed an algorithm that detects elements, such as a window, column or balcony, that are both distinct and occur with regularity inside a city.

As explained in an accompanying video, this disqualifies singular landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, whose iron angles are distinct but don’t occur anywhere else in Paris. Postcards from the Future - An FP Slide Show. Welcome to the era of the megacity. More than half the global population now lives in urban areas, and there's no going back to the farm. With China leading the way, today's global cities are surging ahead in population and economic heft, powering the world economy -- and posing some very difficult problems for governments.

But it's not all about the Beijings, the New Yorks, and Tokyos. Want To Make A Creative City? Build Out, Not Up. Copyright © 2012 NPR.

Want To Make A Creative City? Build Out, Not Up

For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required. Green plants reduce city street pollution up to eight times more than previously believed. Trees, bushes and other greenery growing in the concrete-and-glass canyons of cities can reduce levels of two of the most worrisome air pollutants by eight times more than previously believed, a new study has found.

Green plants reduce city street pollution up to eight times more than previously believed

A report on the research appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology. Thomas Pugh and colleagues explain that concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and microscopic particulate matter (PM) -- both of which can be harmful to human health -- exceed safe levels on the streets of many cities. Past research suggested that trees and other green plants can improve urban air quality by removing those pollutants from the air. However, the improvement seemed to be small, a reduction of less than 5 percent. Christine Rosen: The Machine And The Ghost. Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things By Peter-Paul Verbeek (University of Chicago Press, 183 pp., $25) JUST WEST OF SEOUL, on a man-made island in the Yellow Sea, a city is rising.

Christine Rosen: The Machine And The Ghost

Slated for completion by 2015, Songdo has been meticulously planned by engineers and architects and lavishly financed by money from the American real estate company Gale International and the investment bank Morgan Stanley. According to the head of Cisco Systems, which has partnered with Gale International to supply the telecommunications infrastructure, Songdo will “run on information.”

"Dramatic" New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces. Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.

"Dramatic" New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces

Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya. Unlike the relatively centralized Aztec and Inca empires, the Maya civilization—which spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region (Maya map)—was a loose aggregation of city-states. (Read about the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)

PHOTOS: Plant Tomatoes. Harvest Lower Crime Rates. I suppose the easy thing to do would be to rail against food deserts, the dearth of fresh produce and other healthy foods for those living in impoverished neighborhoods. Or to enter the debate over whether there are, in fact, food deserts. (A couple of recent studies have suggested that proximity to decent grocery stores isn't the key problem of inner-city nutrition.) In Rooftop Farming, New York City Emerges as a Leader. Today, she could have had both.

In Rooftop Farming, New York City Emerges as a Leader

New York City (the stores!) Is suddenly a farming kind of town (the chores!). Almost a decade after the last family farm within the city’s boundaries closed, basil and bok choy are growing in Brooklyn, and tomatoes, leeks and cucumbers in Queens. Commercial agriculture is bound for the South Bronx, where the city recently solicited proposals for what would be the largest rooftop farm in the United States, and possibly the world. Onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/acrp/acrp_syn_025.pdf. Secondary Airports, Losing Traffic, Have Space to Rent. McAllen Walmart Turned Into Public Library. Will Wal-Mart eat L.A.? - Consumerism. How many Wal-Marts could fit in Los Angeles County?

Will Wal-Mart eat L.A.? - Consumerism

How the Growth Machine Ate Florida. John DeGrove was the father of land use planning in Florida and the principal architect of the state land use agency, the Florida Department of Community Affairs.

How the Growth Machine Ate Florida

The agency was established in 1985 to oversee compliance with the Growth Management Act. Most Floridians are unlikely to know either what the Department of Community Affairs did or what its disappearance means. Fewer still understand the challenges to design and implement a regulatory framework for rationale growth and development in one of the nation’s fastest growing states, or, how DCA and DeGrove’s mission was a target of anti-government, pro-property rights zealots from the first. Why this matters is simple. Ayutthaya 3.0: Bold take on flood-defense would restore "Venice of the East" to former glory. Shma's bold "water city" concept is a reimagining of the medieval Thai city of Ayutthaya, that rethinks flood defenses for the 21st century by drawing inspiration from the past.

Ayutthaya 3.0: Bold take on flood-defense would restore "Venice of the East" to former glory

It's a concept, yes, but one worthy of a second look, given that this is a uniquely Thai response to the catastrophic flooding that hit the country last year. Gizmag takes a moment to set Shma's scheme in its proper context: that of the very recent past, as well as that of Ayutthaya's heyday as one of Asia's, if not the world's, foremost cities. View all. 10 Most Fascinating Tunnels.

This unusual tunnel can be seen in California's Sequoia National Park.

10 Most Fascinating Tunnels

The drive is cut through the tree trunk of a Sequoia which fell in 1937. Instead of removing it from the road, the park administration decided to cut a tunnel in it. It's 5.18 m. (17 ft.) wide and 2.44 m. (8 ft.) high. Prairie Lights is Texas's premier holiday drive-through park, featuring more than 4 million lights along the shores of beautiful Lynn Creek Park on Joe Pool Lake in Grand Prairie. Visitors are amazed by the world's longest light tunnel and the Holiday Village out-of-car experiences.

Stop thinking big - Dream City. Last week, a press release from Chicago’s Office of the Mayor proclaimed something that would have sounded like a Yes Men prank just a few years ago: Rahm Emanuel, it said, has a plan to get rid of the city’s “excess asphalt.” It wasn’t a proposal for a big new park or recreational facility, but a plan to take little bits of public space here and there — streets, parking spots, alleyways — and turn them into places for people. It was the latest example of a municipal government taking an active role in tactical urbanism, that low-cost, low-commitment, incremental approach to city building — the “let’s not build a stadium” strategy. The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

The Center’s exhibit space and offices in Los Angeles offers exhibits, lectures, and other resources for the public. A small bookstore stocks CLUI publications, and titles of special interest from other publishers. Currently on view: SOLAR BOOM: SUN-POWERED ELECTRICAL PLANTS IN THE USAWhile visiting the CLUI in Los Angeles, check out: POINTS OF INTEREST IN CULVER CITY Open 12 to 5 PM Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and by appointment.Closed Christmas Day, and New Years Day. A City Confronts Its Image - Slide Show. LA’s original subway. Update 3/15: According to Metro 417 the tunnels are now condemned and no longer available for touring of any kind—please do not contact them. By now almost everyone knows (I hope!) That LA has a subway system. But did you know that this is not the first subway that LA has ever had?

America's great divergence - American History. Dallas Urban Lab. WALKABLE Dallas-Fort Worth. Urban entertainment districts: Blocks where no one has fun. If you took all the clichés about horrible urban design and shoved them into 75 acres, you’d probably end up with something pretty close to Dallas’ Victory Park. What Remains of Treece - Slide Show.

Forgotten in the Past: Nikulino Mine. The Ghost Station Volokolamskaya. Ghost Town Of The Moscow Region. Rust Belt chic: Declining Midwest cities make a comeback - Dream City. Detroitism. Locations of Bike-Share Stations Unveiled by City. Science fiction no more: The perfect city is under construction - Dream City. Formula One car racing is the most viewed sport in the world. On any given race day, half a billion people — one-fourteenth of the globe — are watching it on TV. But it’s what they’re not seeing that wins races today: More than 300 sensors are implanted throughout each vehicle to monitor everything from air displacement to tire temperature to the driver’s heart rate. These data are continuously transmitted back to a control room, where engineers run millions of calculations in real time and tweak their driver’s strategy accordingly.

Through this process, every last ounce of efficiency and performance is wrung out of each car. And so it will be with cities like PlanIT Valley, currently being built from scratch in northern Portugal. “We saw an opportunity … to go create something that was starting with a blank sheet,” said PlanIT Valley creator Steve Lewis, “thinking from a systems-wide process in the same way we would think about computing technologies.” But wait, there’s more! Will that Starbucks last? - Dream City. Everyone knows that cities like New York, Boston and Chicago have flipped the script over the past couple of decades, turning richer and whiter as their surrounding suburbs grow more diverse.

Explore the Walkability of 2,500 Cities in the United States on Walk Score. Why Don't Conservative Cities Walk? Wikimedia Commons Photo. Star Garden. Rapid Construction Techniques Transform Infrastructure Repair. IKEA breaks ground on its Utopian village within London. The U.S. Government’s Top-Secret Town. Welcome to Ikea-land: Furniture giant begins urban planning project. Bold Solutions Make Real Cities More Efficient [Interactive] Life In an Abandoned Packard Plant - Arts & Lifestyle. A Single Day On the Moscow Subway, in 2 Minutes - Arts & Lifestyle.

Subway Platforms From Around the World - Design. Wild Design of the Day: A Skyscraper Prison to Rehabilitate Jersey City's Convicts - Design. The impending urban water crisis - Dream City. Hollywood’s Small-Town Charm Meets Mini-City Planning - Slide Show. Renovated Tour Bois-le-Prêtre Brightens Paris Skyline. When a Parking Lot Is So Much More. At Prospect Park, Change Is Behind Schedule.

Visiting the High Line: An Amazing New Park Opens in Manhattan. Watch Sprawl From Las Vegas Consume The Desert. Secret City: The Illegal Architecture of Tawian. Urban Exploration & Abandoned Places, Urban Art & Urban Legend. 18.6 Million Empty Houses in America. On the edge of reality. Arcosanti : Home. Walmart threatens the town R.E.M. made famous - Dream City.

Student scheme to protect Future-Manhattan from rising sea levels. Urban Planning for the Future circa. 1925. Dead weight losses: Why not build? The World's Biggest Buildings. BNKR Arquitectura.