The redesign will be in line with many new urbanism projects. There will be shops, cafes and offices connected by walkways. Storefronts will be on the first floor and residential units will occupy the top floors. There will also be a mix of cottages, multi family homes, and condos in the neighborhood as to add variety. Parking will still be present but will be hidden behind the retrofitted mall, away from the storefronts.

[Source: Mall in Utah Being Transformed into a Mixed-Use Walkable Neighborhood]

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 landscape through photography, video, and audio/video interviews of local and international experts. The project is an examination of territorial conditions that constructs the interconnected system of the contemporary Asian landscape. Approaching urban cities as an ecology of built systems, structures and institutions, NSR presents alternate understandings of urban research and theory through artistic practice.

[via email] Urban theorist and architect Kyong Park is speaking at a special event on March 2nd at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in downtown Los Angeles. Be there or be elsewhere.

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 have struggled to get permission. Boutiques and bookshops at ground level establish a pattern of (upmarket) retail for (the now mid-market) Lincoln, while four condos on a new street at the side help with profits, leaving Wennett’s own penthouse and a restaurant to occupy the top floor. There is even a shop halfway up the ramps, isolated and intriguing.”

[Source: FT.com / Arts / Design & Architecture] After malls and big lot retail stores, parking garages are the new target for smart revitalization.

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 is current in progress in Vauban, Germany where residents of an upscale community, no less, are learning to live without cars in a suburb.

[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 together and be energy efficient.

An interesting look at how lighting is stepping out from the shadows of historic preservation and being used by urban planners to help improve a city’s character and livability.

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.

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

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

Several of my grandchildren were raised in Costa Rica, the children of an American mother (my daughter) and a Costa Rican father. A few years ago they moved to Pittsburgh and at the end of the first week of school, my granddaughter Miriam came home and asked my daughter: ‘People keep calling me “Hispanic.” What do they mean? I tell them “No, I’m Costa Rican.”’ My daughter, a social historian by profession, but also a mom, knew she had to answer the question seriously, and she replied: ‘“Hispanic” is how North Americans refer to people whose parents came from Latin America.’ ‘Oh,’ asked Miriam, ‘is Daddy Hispanic?’ ‘Yes,’ replied my daughter. After a pause, Miriam asked: ‘Are you Hispanic?’ and my daughter replied ‘No.’ After a much longer pause came Miriam’s inevitable question: ‘Am I Hispanic?’ ‘That’s a difficult question, isn’t it?’ replied my daughter.