Chances are, this is how you will be spending the rest of your day. Google Earth Engine is an incredible satellite tour through the recent history of our planet, showing year-by-year images from 1984-2012. Watch as cities expand, glaciers retreat, and seas vanish in a matter of decades.
Source: io9.
Paraphrasing Yogi Berra – It’s so crowded, no one lives there anymore.
If people hate dense urban areas so much, why isn’t Manhattan one of the cheapest places in America to buy a house? Why isn’t San Francisco cheap? If people are voting with their feet for sprawl, why is land in Georgetown so much more expensive than land in Georgia?
Source: Slate.
PS. Oops, someone in the comments on Slate beat me to my punchline. Oh well, it’s that obvious.
Hilarious headline
From above, the designs for the Facebook West campus appear to be a raised platform of earth, due to an extensive rooftop garden. The designs for Facebook West as of September reveal a series of verdant walkways for inspirational jaunts, large boxy windows for gazing into the real world, and slouching white stucco buildings obscured by dangling flora. Judging from the height of the trees in the rooftop garden rendering, one might expect roots to dangle into the offices below.
Source: TPM News.
Effects of sequestration on housing:
As word of sequestration-induced furloughs courses through federal agencies, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is taking an unusual approach to the seven unpaid days it is requiring most full-time employees to take.
It’s planning to shut down the agency on those days.
Source: WaPo.
Nor is the Vatican where you think it is. Vatican City’s borders are remarkably fuzzy for a country this tiny. When we say tiny, we mean tiniest: The Papal State is accoladed as the world’s smallest sovereign state, and it is – if you discount those lacklands, the Knights of Malta. Vatican City, completely enclaved within Rome, comprises no more than 108 acres, which is 1/6th of a square mile, or 0.44 of a square km. The second-smallest state, Monaco, is almost five times bigger – huge by comparison
Source: Strange Maps | Big Think.
Housing is finally coming back. But the construction jobs isn’t. Why is that happening, and when might it change? A deeper dig into the data by economists at Goldman Sachs gives some answers. And it boils down to two words: Labor hoarding.
Source: Washington Post Wonkblog.
If you’re an avid RSS feed reader, you may have encountered the brouhaha of Google shutting down Reader, one of the web’s prominent feed reader. As users scramble to find an alternative and I’m one of them, I have decided to preempt Google by moving away from its services that it may consider shutting down in the future. One of which is Feedburner and may impact you if you read this blog via a feed reader.
Please re-subscribe to this blog, if you’re still interested in reading, by using this feed – http://urbanplanningblog.com/feed/. If your feed reader is subscribed to this feed then you don’t have to do anything but if you’re subscribed to the Feedburner feed which is something like this – http://feeds.feedburner.com/UrbanPlanningBlog, then you’ll have to switch to the earlier one.
Now, do not be surprised if you’re redirected to the Feedburner URL. It is because, like an ass, I used a plugin to redirect my primary feed to the Feedburner one. I will shut down the redirection in couple of days. If you somehow don’t see any posts appear in your feed reader for say, couple of weeks or a month, you may want to visit my website to see if in fact I have made new posts and if I have, then please consider changing the RSS feed to what it always should have been – http://urbanplanningblog.com/feed/.
I promise, this will never change unless I shut down my blog. Thanks for still reading me.
Measuring climate change at the urban scale and innovating design-based management strategies for cities
Source: Twitter.
One of the more focused initiatives from my alma mater.
Since then, it was everywhere. Now, I can understand how generalized holes — containers, street light bases, flower pots — become makeshift trashcans. Even if they’re obviously in no way trashcans, and likely will never be emptied or cleaned by any human being on earth, and in most cases there’s a real trashcan mere feet away, they at least share a vague similarity to the raw concept of a trashcan.
Source: cabel.me.
A local grocery store, HEB, had to put up a sign – THIS IS NOT TRASH – on a drum for food donation drive.
If you look at Houston, there are lots of employment centers: there’s downtown, there’s the Galleria area. Dallas is the same way. In Austin, by contrast, we have a core area around downtown—UT, the Capitol—where 18 percent of the jobs are located. That’s the fourth-highest percentage in the country, behind New York, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans.
Source: Texas Monthly.