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. Today, you’re more likely to hear Farsi and Thai spoken in the sprawling cul-de-sacs outside of Atlanta than you are in many parts of the Starbucks-soaked city center itself. Exactly how this happened, however, doesn’t get as much ink. We just assume that a lot of the kids who watched “Friends” in the ’90s decided they’d like to engage in witty repartee at Central Perk. But that’s just a small slice of what caused the massive shift that Alan Ehrenhalt details in his new book, released this week, “The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.” The revitalization of cities seemed to come out of nowhere, but you write that it was actually the result of deliberate efforts and policies. The suburbs themselves break down into different factions, too. I think it’s a little too simple.
Why Don't Conservative Cities Walk? Wikimedia Commons Photo Reading Tom Vanderbilt’s series on the crisis in American walking, I noticed something about the cities with the highest “walk scores.” They’re all liberal. New York, San Francisco, and Boston, the top three major cities on Walkscore.com, are three of the most liberal cities in the country. In fact, the top 19 are all in states that voted for Obama in 2008. You might think it’s a simple matter of size: Big cities lean liberal and also tend to be more walkable. Substituting density for size gets us closer: Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are notorious for sprawl, while New York, San Francisco, and Boston are tightly packed, partly because they are older cities whose downtown cores developed in the pre-car era. That still leaves the question of why urban density should go hand-in-hand with liberal politics, however. My guess is that it’s mostly 4), with some of the other three thrown in, depending on the situation.
Star Garden [Image: Building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization]. An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. "If all goes well," the magazine explains, in a few year's time the pit will "rage with humanity's first self-sustaining fusion reaction, an artificial sun ten times hotter than the one that gives our planet life." Reaching that point, however, requires an ambitious reformatting of the entire site, seemingly the very limit of landscape architecture: a kind of concrete garden that produces stars. As the project now stands, construction involves inserting a supergrid of rebar into the quarried pit, securing the limestone walls with concrete foundation work, then pouring seismically-stabilized plinths that will support the so-called International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (or ITER) upon completion. More images are available at the ITER website.
Rapid Construction Techniques Transform Infrastructure Repair By Lori Moore , Gretchen Ertl and David Scull A Bridge in a Day: The Massachusetts Department of Transportation is learning the advantages of a technique known as “accelerated bridge construction” to move a span into place in a day. Instead, they did it over a weekend. By using “accelerated bridge construction” techniques, a collection of technologies and methods that can shave months if not years off the process of building and replacing critical infrastructure, Massachusetts is at the forefront of a national effort that is aimed at putting drivers first. “This will be the new normal,” said Victor M. Quick replacement of bridges, however, is anything but intuitive, he said. As the sun climbed into the sky on Sunday, the new River Street Bridge, 400 tons of steel and concrete, rode on a set of trailers and high supports that adjust to keep the span as level as a tray of drinks balanced on a waiter’s hand. “It’s awesome!” Prefabrication techniques allow Ms.
IKEA breaks ground on its Utopian village within London When you enter one of IKEA's giant home furnishing stores, it often feels like taking a trip to a distant, uber-modern town where everyone is just a little more hip than where you just came from, and space is used oh-so-efficiently. Now, the iconic Swedish company wants to actually build just such a town in the real world – in London, to be exact. View all LandProp Holding, IKEA's real estate development arm, has snapped up 26 acres (10.5 hectares) in a historic and somewhat blighted section of London to create an idyllic urban hamlet dubbed "Strand East." If you're familiar with London-town, you'll find it between Stratford High Street, the Three Mills Wall River and the River Lea waterways. It's not the first housing project IKEA has undertaken, but this time the company says the goal is to create a development that fits in with the rest of London "...where mews-style townhouses sit comfortably alongside creative commercial space. Source: Strand East via Globe and Mail.
The U.S. Government’s Top-Secret Town In 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government acquired 70,000 acres of land in Eastern Tennessee and established a secret town called Oak Ridge. The name chosen to keep outside speculation to a minimum, because Oak Ridge served a vital role for the development of the atomic bomb. The massive complex of massive factories, administrative buildings and every other place a normal town needs to function, was developed for the sole purpose of separating uranium for the Manhattan Project. The completely planned community was designed by the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and had a population of more than 70,000 people. The U.S. The Manhattan Project has long fascinated me and much has been written and said about the top-secret program. The X-10 site above, now the location of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was established as a pilot plant for production of plutonium using the Graphite Reactor. More info about the photography from the U.S. Comments: 39
Detroitism What does “ruin porn” tell us about the motor city, ourselves, other American cities? Photograph by Yves Marchan and Romain Meffre courtesy Steidl. Red Dawn 2, the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. “Do you have any books with pictures of abandoned buildings?” Detroiters often react testily to this kind of attention (as I do), even when it is done skillfully and with good intentions, as much of it is. The city has been a bellwether of each major urban crisis since World War II. For media workers from more prosperous cities, Detroit’s spaces of ruination appear to tell a history, or at least evoke a vague sense of historical pathos, absent in those other, wealthier cities. Photograph by Andrew Moore courtesy DAP.
Rust Belt chic: Declining Midwest cities make a comeback - Dream City More than any other city in America, Cleveland is a joke, a whipping boy of Johnny Carson monologues and Hollywood’s official set for films about comic mediocrity. But here’s what else is funny: According to a recent analysis, the population of downtown Cleveland is surging, doubling in the past 20 years. What’s more, the majority of the growth occurred in the 22-to-34-year-old demo, those coveted “knowledge economy” workers for whom every city is competing. Pittsburgh, too, has unexpectedly reversed its out-migration of young people. The number of 18-to-24-year-olds was declining there until 2000, but has since climbed by 16 percent. St. It’s a surprising demographic shift that has some in the Rust Belt wondering if these cities should trumpet their gritty, hardscrabble personas, rather than try to pretend that they’re just like Chicago or Brooklyn, N.Y., but cheaper. But Rust Belt chic is at least partly a romantic fantasy, and that makes it a risky way to try to revitalize.
The Ghost Station Volokolamskaya This abandoned station is often called “a ghost station”. During construction of the section Oktyabrsk field – Planernaya, under the airfield of Tushino they built a standard three-span station. But when the section started its work in 1975, Volokalamskaya was not listed with other stations. Her opening was delayed till better times, when the airfield will be built up with new houses. But due to some problems (abundance of ground waters and swampiness) they were never built.
Forgotten in the Past: Nikulino Mine The Nikulino mine is the largest one in the coal field of the Moscow Region. The coal mined there had a high ash content equal to 30-40%. The underground relief in the mine was 50-70 workers. 30-40 workers mined coal and others only provided mining. The direct places of mining were 150 m deep underground. However, all that remained in the past… As far back as 21st century the mine was drowned and shut down … Today it can be observed only from above – the concrete structures of the ventilation system and the fang. This window was used to provide electricity “Front access door” to the fang “The back door” to the fang, 10 meters to water Here were hanging bunches of cables An office complex to the right and a coal mining complex to the left The doors to the main building Everything that had even a minor value was already pilfered long ago … Attributes of a polling station from the 90s. Control room
Welcome to Ikea-land: Furniture giant begins urban planning project There are feelings you get when you enter an Ikea store. The vertiginous experience of getting lost in their craftily designed labyrinth. The surprise of wandering into something you hadn’t intended to buy. The discomfiting almost-warmth of a fake apartment. Would you like to feel that way all the time? “We are in keeping with the Ikea philosophy: We don’t want to produce for the rich or the super-rich; we want to produce for the families, for the people,” says Harald Müller, the head of LandProp, the property-development branch of Inter IKEA, the company that invests the profits from the furnishing giant. “Our approach must be to get the right housing and office prices while delivering very good quality at the same time, he added. I recently made the long drive into the vanguard of Ikea’s city-building ambition, in a triangle of post-industrial wasteland surrounded by goods-shipping canals and highway ramps in the far reaches of East London, not far from the 2012 Olympics grounds.
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. A pre-planned billion-dollar collection of imposing hyper-modern monumental structures, high-end chain stores, enormous video screens, expensive restaurants, a sports arena and tons of parking, completely isolated from the rest of the city by a pair of freeways, Victory Park is like the schizophrenic dream of some power-hungry capitalist technocrat. Or in this case, his son’s. What could be wrong with a district where nightclubs and galleries are encouraged to thrive? Victory Park is an extreme example, hyper-planned right down to the performances to be held at its American Airlines Center. “A district inherently becomes a single-use idea,” says Kennedy. That’s a defeatist choice to have to make, but the monocultures created by urban districting make it almost inevitable.