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Curated by:
Lisa Drogin | a University of Michigan Urban and Regional Planning Graduate Student studying Physical Planning, Urban Design, and Neighborhood Development. //
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via GOOD | How to Bridge Neighborhood Gaps? Turn Overpasses into Main Streets
” The answer to one of today’s most difficult urban planning problems may lie in the Middle Ages. In cities and towns across America, freeways cut through communities, creating urban dead zones that sever neighborhoods from each other. To heal that damage, the city of Columbus, Ohio built a type of urbanized bridge that was common in Europe between the 12th and 17th centuries.
In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, imaginative, multifunctional bridges known as “habitable bridges” were quite common. Some hosted markets. Others contained mills that harnessed the power of the river. Many housed defensive towers or featured chapels. Beyond the novelty of having buildings on a bridge, they were highly functional, as they became natural venues for commercial trade… By the 18th and 19th centuries, the construction of habitable bridges was phased out in Europe as the disciplines of architecture and engineering became divorced…

That brings us back to Columbus. In the late 1960s, a major highway (now Interstate 670) was built through town, carving a 200-foot-wide gash in the city that separated downtown Columbus from the nearby Short North neighborhood. A plan for capping the highway was developed in 1996, and finally completed in 2004. Technically, the project consists of three connected bridges: Car traffic passes on the middle span, flanked on either side by platforms that support storefronts and sidewalks. The three bridges fit together into one urbanized overpass that’s home to a handful of restaurants and shops, all of which turn their backs on the highway. “I think the success of it is that most people don’t even know they’re on a bridge,” says architect David Meleca, who designed the retail portion of the project…
Meleca acknowledges that a bridge like his might not work for every highway crossing, but on High Street, renting the space hasn’t been a problem so far. “It’s added a really strong connection with the downtown,” says Meleca. “Before the bridge was done, you would’ve never walked across that freeway. It was a typical utilitarian, scary freeway crossing.” Extending the urban streetscape across the highway shields pedestrians from the roar of the road below and lifts a psychological barrier between neighborhoods, healing a generation-old wound created by the Interstate Highway System.”

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via GOOD | All of the Lights: San Francisco Illuminates Night Biking with Free Lights
“Biking at night can be a harrowing adventure. All the potholes, pedestrians, and broken glass that line city streets become that much harder to see in the dark … But if you’re biking without a light in San Francisco this month and a cop pulls you over, it’s possible that he’s trying to issue you a light, not a ticket. Thanks to Light Up the Night, a collaboration between the city’s transit authority and the nonprofit San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, 2,000 bike lights purchased by the city will find a home with unsuspecting bikers traveling without lights this season …”

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via GOOD | Regional Planning Is the New City Planning
“The ripple effects of a new downtown skyscraper or suburban development are now felt far beyond any one neighborhood or even one city, extending to surrounding counties and metro areas. An ideological shift is underway as we understand the interconnectedness of the communities in which we live. Collectively, we’re rethinking our society’s developmental future.
Cue regional planning. It’s not a new concept, but it’s quickly gaining in popularity as cities learn the importance of working together to build sustainable foundations for growth.
For example, San Diego recently adopted the first Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) as part of its larger Regional Transportation Plan. While the plan accounts for a long-range vision for the logistic development of the area’s transport and travel infrastructure, the SCS component adds a necessary emphasis on the environmental impact of each decision.
Any good relationship, however, requires negotiation. Multiple cities may comprise a region, and even though their fates are intertwined, it’s only natural that each would want to advocate for privileges and protections for its own citizens. Regional planning is a way to productively engage in that negotiation, addressing issues that transcend city limits and involve shared resources—whether natural, built, or human.”

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via New York Times | I.H.T. Special Report on Smart Cities: Hip Cities That Think About How They Work
“The story of young people, full of ambition, energy, skill and talent, moving to enticing cities that call to them like a siren’s song is as old as modern civilization. And in a world where national borders are easier to traverse, where more countries are joining the prosperous global middle class and where the cost of a one-way plane ticket is more affordable, young professionals probably have more cities to choose from than ever before.

Our pick of cities that are, in a phrase, both great and good…”

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via GOOD | New ‘Slow Zones’ Make NYC Streets Safer and Greener
“This week, New York City opened its first neighborhood slow zone, a six-block-square area of the Bronx where the speed limit is now 20 mph, compared to 30 in the rest of the city….The neighborhood is mostly residential, with a high concentration of schools and a history of injuries and fatalities. The city’s transportation commission, Janette Sadik-Khan, spoke at the opening ceremony for slow zone about how it will make the streets safer. But it will also make them greener: slower speed limits make roads more accessible to anyone not in a car….
The real triumph of slow zones is that they acknowledge that streets don’t need to be reserved for cars. The more they’re used for other forms for transportation, the more people will feel safe trading in one form of wheels for another….Green transportation advocates support measures like traffic calming and slow zones because they open up the streets and indirectly promote the use of alternative forms of transportation.”

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A cyclable city like Amsterdam not only makes it quicker and easier to access urban facilities, it facilitates friendship and networking, developing a sense of community in the process.

— Joe Peach asks: can Amsterdam’s bicycle network develop sustainable communities? Read the full article on This Big City.

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studio630:

In The Future, We Will All Live in Ecodistricts
“Llewellyn Wells, founder of Living City Block, argued that our continued efforts to go after the low-hanging building efficiency fruit often reduces the bigger gains from deeper innovation because once an investment is made in efficiency, it reduces the viability of a subsequent, larger-scale initiative. He also had one of my favorite quotes from the summit: “Don’t waste your time with incrementalists, they are the enemy of the future.” As one participant noted, a “sustainability Arab Spring” needs to happen city by city, district by district.
Keynote speaker Jeb Brugmann, the founder of ICLEI (one of the most influential municipal networks in the world) and the cofounder of The Next Practice, an urban sustainability consulting firm (full disclosure: I am in the middle of collaboration with Brugmann), explained how ecodistricts should be customized to their local condition and ideally become net producers.
For example, an ecodistrict in a local food-centric community could become a net producer of local food through a range of solutions such as rooftop and community gardens and vertical farms. Others could be net energy producers, leveraging smart buildings and smart grids as well as distributed renewables to generate enough energy to meet all the needs of the ecodistrict—while also selling energy back to the grid. By combining rich local networks with international networks of cities, ecodistricts can provide access to the world’s resources.Ecodistricts are not only here to stay, but are likely to become the biggest form of city building. Over time, leading cities will be composed of a patchwork of ecodistricts, all interconnected to each other as well as to ecodistricts and cities in other parts of the world. It’s entirely possible to imagine a future where every resident of a city lives an ecodistrict.”

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Planetizen's Top 100 Public Spaces

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theoriginalchingy:

An urban legacy in need of renewal by Anthony Flint - “Fifty years ago this month, Random House published “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.’’ The author was Jane Jacobs, a housewife from Scranton who had no formal training in urban planning, but had managed to get a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and was encouraged to write a book that would change the world. And that it did. The book took on city governments, planners, the business establishment, modernist architecture, and the policy of urban renewal, charging that all were misguided, ravaging our cities with ill-conceived plans that sucked the life out of communities, while depriving residents of any say in their future…”
via The Boston Globe.

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Don’t focus on single buildings so much as fabric. If fabric is lost, we have a few heroic buildings in large parking lots.

— Steve Mouzon (via impracticalinconceivableabsurd)

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latimes:

Greening vacant city lots could improve residents’ health: The greening of thousands of vacant lots in Philadelphia was associated with reduced crime in some areas and improved health of the residents.
Photo credit: Tom Mihalek / Associated Press

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What if we could easily share ideas for what we want in our neighborhoods? This is the question that drove Candy Chang and her colleagues to make Neighborland, an online tool for people to shape the development of their neighborhoods. It takes her I Wish This Was public art project a few steps further to help people voice what they want in their neighborhoods and take next steps to make things happen. It connects residents who want things with likeminded people, initiatives, and resources. It’s a valuable poll for civic leaders and developers to assess what residents want in different areas, vacant real estate, and existing public spaces. And it promotes entrepreneurship by revealing neighborhood demands and proving there is a viable customer base for new businesses to open.
via jdbroderick:

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urbangreens:

Anastasia Sonkina submitted:

Mobile Living Partitions to Divide San Francisco’s Largest Patio Space:
San Francisco based company Habitat Horticulture installed 3 living wall partitions for The Metreon City View patio space owned by Westfield’s shopping malls looking over Yerba Buena Gardens. Comprised of succulents and sedums, the 3 freestanding mobile living wall partitions are used to break a 300 ft patio space that is used for cooperate events. They can be manipulated around to create a lush and intimate “living room” or aligned horizontally to close off the unused or private space.
The living wall partitions create functional gardens in a tight urban space, providing greenery for city dwellers and for the downtown area of San Francisco.

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via GOOD | How Biking Can Save Cities Billions of Dollars in Health Expenses
“Last week, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives published findings from a study by scientists at the University of Wisconsin on the economic and health benefits of switching from a car to a bike for trips shorter than five miles long in 11 metropolitan areas around the upper Midwest.
Combining data on air pollution, medical costs, mortality rates, car accidents, and physical fitness, the researchers found that if inhabitants of the sample region switched to bikes for half of their short trips, they’d create a net societal health benefit of $3.5 billion per year from the increase in air quality and $3.8 billion in savings from smaller health care costs associated with better fitness and fewer mortalities from a decreased rate of car accidents…”

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via GOOD | New York Turns the Spotlight on North Brooklyn’s Creative Communities
“Love them or hate them, it’s undeniable that the North Brooklyn neighborhoods Williamsburg and Greenpoint have served as a laboratory of creativity for longer than a decade. Urban activists in the trendy enclaves have created models for more collaborative, locally focused economies, mapping out a blueprint for a sustainable approach to urban life. Amplify Brooklyn, an exhibit and event series officially opening tonight, will explore the work and ideas generated in those neighborhoods. Workshops will showcase organizations like Green Map System, which uses mapping to promote sustainable community development, and ioby, a social media and fundraising site for activists that’s debuting a new toolkit for neighborhood problems…
The exhibit is part of a two-year initiative called Amplifying Creative Communities, which investigated Manhattan’ Lower East Side last year before shifting the focus across the East River for this year’s Amplify Brooklyn. Graduate students and faculty affiliated with Parsons’ Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab interviewed leaders from 30 different community organizations about socially innovative solutions to urban problems, from community gardening to alternative transportation….”

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