Urban Planning Blog

An interactive film by Chris Milk featuring "We Used To Wait" by Arcade Fire

Enter in the address of the street you grew up on and watch the magic unfold. Excellently done and Arcade Fire's We Used to Wait fits perfectly. They are fast becoming my favorite band. Plus, they've an urban planning theme in their songs so what's not to love.

[Link to The Wilderness Downtown]

Mathew Moore, the last of four generations to farm his family's land outside of Phoenix, AZ presents an excellent visualization through time starting from the 1910s about how sprawl is gradually knocking on his doorsteps.

[Link to Tracking the Incoming Sprawl]

The Indian government aims to spend $500 billion on infrastructure by 2012 and twice that amount in the following five years.

The problem is a dearth of engineers — or at least the civil engineers with the skill and expertise to make sure those ambitious projects are done on time and up to specifications.

And I used to think my dad was foolish to recommend that like him, I too should consider becoming a structural engineer.

[Link to India in Dire Need of Civil Engineers]

Hamburg's new quarter is one of the largest urban development projects underway in the world today. But will it be successful? City planners are hoping that their application of an academic field known as environmental psychology will do the trick.

Same trick new magician?

[Link to Making HafenCity Feel Neighborly]

Cairo has become so crowded, congested and polluted that the Egyptian government has undertaken a construction project that might have given the Pharaohs pause: building two megacities outside Cairo from scratch. By 2020, planners expect the new satellite cities to house at least a quarter of Cairo’s 20 million residents and many of the government agencies that now have headquarters in the city.

As the author notes, only a country with limitless supply of open albeit desert land and an authoritarian government can come up with such a solution. Something similar was planned and executed on the mainland to ease Mumbai's (India) problem. Last I heard, the nodes of Navi Mumbai (New Bombay) had a population of nearly 3 million and rising.

[Link to Building Megacities to Solve Problems of a Megacity]

Five places saying "yes, in my backyard" to the nasty stuff that no one else wants.

You've heard of the NIMBYs (Not In My BackYard) but YIMBYs are emerging. These, however, are countries and similar geographic regions as opposed to communities or individuals. Only time will tell if such short-term profit in lieu of long-term consequences helps.

[Link to The YIMBYS]

Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs isn’t as much about suburbanism versus urbanism, or cars versus bicycles, as it is a question of “What now?” The album’s vision of suburbia may not exactly be an ideal place to live – not in the 1980’s and certainly not upon returning to it today.  But the narrator of the album does return, nostalgic for his wasted hours of youth and fearful of what may remain for his children.  If suburbia is no longer necessarily the dream, what is to be made of those communities we built in the 70s?

Arcade Fire'a latest album, The Suburbs is one of the finest examples of city planning commentary in pop culture today.

[Link to Arcade Fire on Suburban Sprawl]

The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.

Get your 3D glasses out for this one.

[Source: Augmented City 3D]

You know you need a serious transportation overhaul when your traffic jam is 60 miles long and has lasted 9 days.

And nope, we aren't there yet.

[Link to The Longest Traffic Jam in History]

Here's your chance to find out what our panel of over 20,000 ordinary people in 20 different countries really think about the world's cities: their people, their environment, their facilities and infrastructure, their culture and nightlife, their tourist attractions and their potential for immigrants.

This is the brief online version of the Anhold-GfK Roper City Brands Index.

[Link to City Branding]

Piece by piece, brick by brick, this LEGO Certified Professional (one of 11 worldwide) creates large-scale artistic models of some of the world's most famous structures including the Empire State Building, St. Louis' Gateway Arch, and Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece Fallingwater. The simplicity and nostalgic quality of LEGO affords viewers a new, detailed look at familiar buildings. Visitors can lean in close to see the complexity of a building's intricate design and engineering or take a step back to appreciate its stunning sculptural form in full.

…and you thought you had created a masterpiece with your 1000-piece Lego set.

[Link to LEGO® Architecture]

At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web—a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra.

Interesting. Now doesn't this put a unique twist on the current 'Ground Zero Mosque' controversy?

PS. The title of the article is stupid and clearly *NOT* the reason Bin Laden attacked the U.S.

[Link to The World Trade Center - based on Islamic Architecture?]

Just 9 percent of the people surveyed by Trulia said their ideal home size was over 3,200 square feet. Meanwhile, more than one-third said their ideal size was under 2,000 feet.

All it took was the housing bubble to pop for people to realize that they can indeed live in a lot less space.

[Link to Death of the 'McMansion'?]

For the U.S. to have world-class high-speed trains, the government will have to subsidize them. The investment would be small compared to the billions lavished on highways and airports.

Bruce Selcraig argues for subsidies to the high-speed rail transportation in the United States and points to the immense largesse enjoyed by its road and air counterparts.

[Link to Arguing for High-Speed Rail Subsidies]

The study includes analysis of the socioeconomic impacts of the World Cup and how to make the World Cup “greener,” and it aims to identify ways in which Brazil can ensure that “the event lasts not only a few days, but many years, leaving a positive legacy for society as a whole.”

Although Beijing may have done a better job for the 2008 Olympics, Athens still suffers from sports facilities in ruins from hosting the 2004 edition. Although the football (soccer) World Cup is not as diverse and facilities-intensive as the Olympics, I'm glad Brazil is considering sustainability as its top priority.

[Link to Brazil’s Green World Cup?]