Toward an Architecture of Place: Moving Beyond Iconic to Extraordinary | Sustainable Cities Collective Sure, ok, there’s starchitecture that *is* obnoxious. But you know what’s wrong with entirely “community-driven” design? It can suffer from Tall Poppy Syndrome (TPS) and end up celebrating the merely subpar. TPS is when you cut everything down to the same […]
Bike Lanes: The New Job Creators? « Project for Public Spaces – Placemaking for Communities Can bike lanes create new jobs? QUOTE The answer seems to be yes — at least in the case of Long Beach, California. More than 20 new bicycle-related or bicycle-inspired businesses have opened at last count. I toured some of […]
Flavorwire » What Comes After the Hipster? We Ask the Experts I agree with Bruce Michael Conforth here: QUOTE The sociologist Robert Jay Lifton has written about the “Protean Man” who is more comfortable with images than with words and with fragmentation than with wholes. This, of course, is nothing more than the fruition of […]
The City, Covered With Logos – Arts & Lifestyle – The Atlantic Cities Corporate brand imagery as kudzu. Great points. QUOTE The logo-ing of our cities and neighborhoods is this process in reverse. Instead of borrowing the ambiance and associations of a place, the product infests it with its own characterless generica, diminishing and voiding […]
Can Urban Highways Be Fixed? – Commute – The Atlantic Cities Dwight D Eisenhower’s interstate freeway plan did not intend for freeways to run through cities. Too bad that memo was ignored… QUOTE But Eisenhower never intended that the Interstates be built through densely populated cities. A memorandum of a 1960 meeting in the Oval […]
“Over It” – The rant of an angry, Agnostic, British, Indo-Pakistani woman of Muslim heritage. | . Brilliant “rant” (not really a rant, more like good old common sense)! QUOTE I am over members of my community putting pre-pubescent girls in a hijab when they are not even old enough to understand or give consent […]
Why Alleys Deserve More Attention – Design – The Atlantic Cities Alleys as tight urbanism – great way to characterize them. QUOTE In America, by the way, it’s rare that you find a shop in an alley, but this is common in Melbourne, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka. Even major department stores have cut storefront windows into […]
What’s Behind the Urban Chicken Backlash – Arts & Lifestyle – The Atlantic Cities If I kept chickens, I wouldn’t want to slaughter them myself (much less slaughter mammals), nor would I like to have neighbors who do so. At the same time, I see some value in children “witnessing grisly scenes,” because everyone should […]
The American Scholar: Uncommon Sense – Paul Goldberger Lovely essay from 2006, Paul Goldberger on Jane Jacobs: QUOTE Jacobs was never as eager as Mumford for acolytes, though she ended up with plenty of them, and she saw right through many of the things that were presented as consistent with her views. She didn’t even […]