Couple of colleagues in a Sustainable Urbanism class had proposed floating homes as a potential solution for homes in New Orleans. This floating villa designed by Swedish architect, Staffan Strindberg, currently situated in the town of Kalmar on the east coast of Sweden may be a tad fancy for residents of New Orleans especially for [...]
My name is Pratik Mhatre. I have a PhD in Urban and Regional Science program from Texas A&M University, College Station. I also have a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Georgia Tech, Atlanta and an undergraduate degree in Architecture from PiCA, University of Mumbai, India. I am deeply interested in the relationship of public [...]
New Urbanism incorporates neighborhood walkability as one of the pivotal factors in improving quality of life as well as working toward conservancy. Considering that obesity is one of the rising health problems in the United States, walkability measures are also used to promote healthy living. Walkability measures in a neighborhood usually include calculating distances to [...]
I am a self-professed critic of sprawl development which unfortunately isn’t saying much because any urban planner especially in this new age of planning is exactly that. Yet we see sprawling sub-divisions crop up everywhere around us and chances are that we will end up living in one of these cookie-cutter homes that we so [...]
At any given time, there are many quality lectures going around on university campuses across the nation. But grad school life is such that you scarcely get time to get done with your classes, assignments, and research and generally miss out on being exposed to great work right on your campus. I try to get [...]
WorldChanging rightly points out that, we need to be building better cities, but since we can’t build what we can’t imagine, the first thing we need to be doing is imagining and portraying better cities. Often artistic ability or capacity limited thinkers from expressing their ideas for a better city. City planners like Ebenezer and [...]
Jane Jacobs died early this morning at age 89. She was the author of the influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities written in 1961 [via]. She was primarily responsible for calling for a revision in planning methods that had encouraged sprawl and environment-unfriendly behavior. She took on Robert Moses, ‘master builder’ [...]
I recently read Fast Food Nation for a class on Sustainable Urbanism. Expectedly, the book was loaded with facts against mega corporations aiming for a quick buck while paying little attention to the overall impacts of their business. The author, Eric Schlosser came away as a convinced (and converted, I think) activist against the evils [...]
New Urbanism for New Orleans?
“A New Urbanist responds to Architects’ cliches” – Polyzoides Architects