Urban Planning Blog

Thoughts on Urban Planning and Design

Category: Planning Trends

New Silk Roads

New Silk Roads (NSR) is a multi-faceted urban research project that explores the nascent urban conditions emerging in rapidly expanding and transforming Asian cities and regions. Through a nomadic practice, Kyong Park has conducted a series of sequenced expeditions through transitional regions and cities between Istanbul and Tokyo, documenting his encounters of the people and [...]

Revitalizing Parking Garages

The harsh, almost geological angularity of the parking garage shears through Lapidus’s easy informality, yet with its open structure and its canted and V-shaped columns there is a faint echo of playful MiMo. The developer, Robert Wennett, has used Miami Beach’s parking shortage to smuggle in a layer of retail for which he otherwise would [...]

Look, Ma No Cars

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. An innovative experiment [...]

Lighting and City Character

[An] holistic approach to illuminating cities has come to be known as a lighting master plan. While few cities outside Europe have a plan currently in place, the steps involved in creating one help officials evaluate how the layers of lighting – street-level, marquees and directional signage, and monuments or cultural landmarks – should work [...]

The city is not a problem. It is a solution.

An interesting talk by Jaime Lerner who reinvented urban space in his native city, Curitiba, Brazil leading to a new worldview for urban planners to see what’s possible in the metropolitan landscape.

Vertical Urbanscape

Presenting five designs for sustainable and urban farm towers that might revolutionize agriculture.

19.20.21

19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st century. Read more on the mega trend of our century. The world is urbanizing rapidly whether you like it or not.

Compact Homes

Compact housing taken to the limits. More here. This is recycling at its best; using old containers to build housing.

Are you Hispanic enough?

Barak Obama has been asked the other version of the question far too many times. To understand why racial differentiation in social research might get difficult as years go by, read the following anecdote by Robert Putnam that he mentions in his latest study, E Pluribus Unum Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century (2007):

The Mismatch Dilemma of Training Planners

Robyn at Cities of Theory asks a pertinent and oft-raised question – “are we training people for a profession crying out for candidates but with candidates not fitting the requirements and unable to get a job?”

America's Next Hot Neighborhoods

Ten areas that offer both affordable housing and rapidly rising home values in some of the country’s largest cities. Also, check out the list of biggest Metro areas with the lowest rent. All four Texas metros make the cut.

Gated Communities – now available in India

The ‘white flight’ to the suburbs was followed by other citizens who well, were not so white. When the Fair Housing Act criminalizing racial discrimination in housing came into effect followed by the gradual decline of exclusionary zoning practices like redlining, etc, communities hunkered down further by creating the ‘gated community’. Justified in the name [...]

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The Dilemma of Gentrification

Living in cities is once again a viable option as trends of suburbanization are seen to be reversing at least in some urban areas. The inner city was long neglected and seen as a haven from poverty and crime. This was much in part to the dilapidated structures and abandoned property that resulted due to [...]

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