Smart Growth Principles "Smart growth" is a collection of land use and development principles that aim to enhance our quality of life, preserve the natural environment, and save money over time. Smart growth principles ensure that growth is fiscally, environmentally and socially responsible and recognizes the connections between development and quality of life. Smart growth enhances and completes communities by placing priority on infill, redevelopment, and densification strategies. The smart growth principles are: Mix land uses. Our Position on Greenfield Development Greenfields are previously undeveloped land including restored land, agricultural areas, forests, parks, and natural areas. A greenfield development would not be consistent with smart growth if it provides smart growth elements, such as transit and mixed uses, but is discontiguous from existing development and servicing (even if it is located within an urban containment boundary). Alternatives to Greenfields
Quotes Alan Moore: interview on mtv.com I have a theory, which has not let me down so far, that there is an inverse relationship between imagination and money. Because the more money and technology that is available to [create] a work, the less imagination there will be in it. Tadhg Kelly: Stories, Structure, Abstraction and Games And that's why Chess and Go remain as enduringly popular as they are, and why soccer is the most popular game on earth. Robustness and elegance are the key driving forces here, and they are in direct opposition to the brittleness and complexity, the defining traits of story. Bill Tozier: Diverse themes observed at GECCO 2006 What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart people, arrange to do short one-off research projects and simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property quickly and easily, and move on to another conversation. Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo: lua-l Richard Hamming: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (1980) C.A.R.
Toronto Urban Sprawl Compared to Other Cities One of my favourite things to do when I'm on one of my urban research binges (as I imagine all of us on this site tend to be plagued with from time to time) is to look at cities on Google Earth to see what they look like from space, how the city developed, where new development seems to be taking place, etc. I don't know why this fascinates me so much, but it does.It's interesting to look at cities from above, because only then can you truly understand how some cities can boast having 5000 people/km yet not have many highrises, while other cities have world famous skylines, but have an urban density of less than 1000 people/km. What I haven't done before though is compare cities head-to-head before by taking screen captures at the same scale and viewing them next to each other. From these pictures it becomes much more apparent how each city values urban density.
Three Little Circles Once upon a time, there were three little circles. This tutorial shows you how to manipulate them using selections. #Selecting Elements The d3.selectAll method takes a selector string, such as "circle", and returns a selection representing all elements that match the selector: var circle = d3.selectAll("circle"); With a selection, we can make various changes to selected elements. circle.style("fill", "steelblue"); circle.attr("r", 30); The above code sets styles and attributes for all selected elements to the same values. We can also set values on a per-element basis by using anonymous functions. circle.attr("cx", function() { return Math.random() * 720; }); If you run this code repeatedly, the circles will dance: #Binding Data More commonly, we use data to drive the appearance of our circles. circle.data([32, 57, 112]); Data is specified as an array of values; this mirrors the concept of a selection, which is an array of elements. circle.attr("r", function(d) { return Math.sqrt(d); });
American cities are haunted by too many parking spaces (Photo: Thinkstock | Photodisc) American car culture may be declining, but much of our urban infrastructure remains steadfastly centered around the automobile. Planning choices made in the heyday of car ownership may prove incompatible with a rising generation of consumers who seem remarkably disinterested in driving. “In the ’50s and ’60s, cities did things like subsidize garage parking, and they condemned buildings so the lots could be used for parking,” says Norman Garrick, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Connecticut. Many, he adds, still require a minimal number of parking spots to be added for each new development. But it turns out that all the parking doesn’t pay off. Related gallery: 10 U.S. cities with the worst traffic jams A pair of forthcoming studies by Garrick and several of his UConn colleagues examine the economic and sociological impacts of parking trends in six U.S. cities from 1960 to 2000.
The Technium How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? The question that I'm asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we going to stop sharing, and how far are we going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there's no end to how much we can track each other—how far we're going to self-track, how much we're going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there's going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine. How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don't see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I'm trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched.
Mayor Walsh Report Calls For More Affordable Housing - Real estate news Missing: Developers who want to build middle-class housing in Boston. Last spotted speeding west on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Please contact Mayor Marty Walsh at 617-635-4500 with any information on whereabouts. The middle of the Hub’s housing market has gone missing. “Boston 2030” calls for enticing developers with tax incentives and favorable deals on land, among other carrots, in the hopes of spurring the construction of thousands of moderately priced condos and apartments over the next decade and half. Mid-priced homes are needed to head off an exodus of middle-class homeowners and buyers to the suburbs. The recommendations are part of the new mayor’s first official housing plan, which calls for 53,000 new apartments and condos by the end of the next decade, a broad mix of middle-market homes, subsidized units for lower-income families, and renovated public housing units. The report calls for the creation of 20,000 middle class homes over the next 16 years.
It's time to transition to mobile - Design+Code I recently had the honor to do my very first talk at Mobile Designers Who Code. With little preparation and no script, I discussed about the tools that we use today to make our work more efficient and future-proof. Also, I talked about what designers can do to start owning the UI in Xcode. For the longest time, I couldn't help but notice the slow pace for building an iOS or Android app. 3 months in average if you're optimistic. iOS engineers still own the whole spectrum of designing in Xcode. That includes the UI, animations and of course engineering. During my stay in Hong Kong, I've had the privilege to work closely with an iOS engineer to solve that problem. It's time for designers to implement their own iOS designs and speed up development tenfold. Note: some parts are slow and out of sync. WWDC Videos For the past couple of weeks, I've been watching one WWDC video a day. Prototyping: Fake It Till You Make It This is the perfect video for beginners. What's New Videos Swift Playgrounds
The Physics of Gridlock - The Atlantic What causes traffic jams? The depressing answer may be nothing at all. BERTRAND Russell once observed that animal behaviorists studying the problem-solving abilities of chimpanzees consistently seemed to detect in their experimental subjects the "national characteristics" of the scientists themselves. A divergence in the findings of the practical-minded Americans and the theoretically inclined Germans was particularly apparent. Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness. In science, Germans tend to come up with things like the uncertainty principle. The latest field to host this conflict of national styles is one that seems at first glance to offer little prospect of a sporting contest. Such mathematical discoveries do seem to be borne out in the real world.
What's Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse Stuart Dee/Getty I grew up in Los Angeles, the city by the freeway by the sea. And if there’s one thing I’ve known ever since I could sit up in my car seat, it’s that you should expect to run into traffic at any point of the day. Yes, commute hours are the worst, but I’ve run into dead-stop bumper-to-bumper cars on the 405 at 2 a.m. As a kid, I used to ask my parents why they couldn’t just build more lanes on the freeway. What's Up With That Each week, we'll explain the science behind a strange phenomenon that you may be wondering about, or may be hearing about for the first time right here. The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. But before we get to the solutions, we have to take a closer look at the problem. “We found that there’s this perfect one-to-one relationship,” said Turner. Now, correlation doesn’t mean causation. A freeway interchange in Los Angeles.