February 6, 2021

Inspiring Urban History Work

It’s been quite some time since I came across the Greene Street project online. NYU’s Development Research Institute did a study to understand the historic development of a block in Manhattan. This particular block had witnessed wealthy residents, sex workers, artists, and many more over the past 400 years. Here is a short video summarizing the study and a link to more information.

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February 11, 2020

Walkable City by Jeff Speck and the Bay Area

Last year I read the book Walkable City by Jeff Speck and I finally found some time to write about it. Walkable City is a great book for those who are frustrated by the lack of walk-friendly cities in the states.

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This website is just amazing!

Noparkinghere.com was created by Josh Vredevoogd to help communicate how LA’s parking policy impacts the climate, housing, and transportation challenges facing the area.

Great article on co-living from The Guardian Cities.

I have heard ‘Co-living’ as a popular solution to many issues such as urbanization, loneliness, and housing crisis. This article draws a good picture of the status and future of co-living. I particulary found Matthew Stewart’s opinions valuable. Check it out!

To Matthew Stewart, a researcher and designer at the University of Westminster, co-living led by developers cannot be a radical alternative because it lacks the social intent of collective living. He points to bolder suggestions proposed by modernists almost a century ago to address the interwar housing shortage, such as the work of Karel Teige, a Czech theorist whose 1932 book The Minimum Dwelling proposed restructuring living space around community and collective domestic labour.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash unsplash-logoToa Heftiba

From The Washington Post

In their sometimes rundown, often eclectic ways, urban districts offer a kind of visual stimulus – in the form of attractive single people, outrageous outfits, ethnic diversity and eclectic architecture – that has attracted artists and writers for hundreds of years. “City air,” goes an old German saying, “makes one free.

New York Times

To avoid congestion, the plan requires efficient mass transit. Mr. Calthorpe has proposed an alternative — autonomous rapid transit, or ART — using fleets of self-driving vans in reserved lanes on main arteries like El Camino Real. Those lanes would allow the vehicles to travel faster and require a lower level of autonomous technology. And the vans could travel separately or be connected together.

Read in National Geographic