Urban Planning Blog

Anyone remotely interested in modern architecture must have heard of Le Corbusier’s chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1954) in Ronchamp (France). It is one of Le Corbusier’s iconic buildings and is currently in the eye of a storm (in a teacup?) with regards to replacement of its visitor’s center to be designed by Renzo [...]

Much is being said about the grand libertarian experiment in rebuilding New Orleans. We saw how reforming the education system was considered a case against public education and overall government intervention. Nicole Gelinas at the City Journal looks at the urban renewal efforts in New Orleans that are taking a similar libertarian slant and at [...]

Quick calculations showed that, given construction costs in the 1990s, profits made from the market-rate sale of 560 apartments would finance 1,000 free homes for slum-dwellers. So, to give away 160,000 homes, developers would have to sell almost 90,000 full-price homes. In total, they would have to build 250,000 each year. In an insightful article, [...]

[via the ever-so-excellent Jessica Hagy's Indexed.]

Almost two years after Hurricane Katrina exposed the brittleness of New Orleans, New York Times reports that even after spending more than a billion dollars the city is still at risk. I had written earlier on how New Orleans might be the city that never should have been and if taken at face value, I [...]

This involves painting streets with a high-visiblity mural that creates a public square for residents to gather and one which gently encourages drivers to slow down when approaching these spaces.

Building demolitions in urban areas as part of redevelopment have always been messy affairs although well planned (and executed) implosions can be quite dramatic. However, just as that credit card company[I forget which] commercial shows that buildings aren’t built top down, buildings similarly cannot be demolished bottom up. Or can they? This amazing feat of [...]

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 [...]

Disasters have caused tremendous loss of life and property around the world especially in the United States. This trend has seemingly increased in the 1990s. The conflict between natural disaster occurrences and choices of places where people want to live has often proven to be the cause of these losses. The government, at the federal [...]

I had the opportunity to take a quick visitor tour through the School of Nursing at the UT Health Science Center, thanks to my fiancee who studies in the adjacent building. This building is counted as one of the top green projects for 2006. I could tell you more but I’ll point you in her [...]

A gallery of derelict London cinemas accompanied with a brief background of each [via]. Technorati Tags: revitalization, cinema, theaters, redevelopment, abandoned, derelict

The stark reminder of Hurrican Katrina – the battered dome roof of the Superdome (largest free-standing dome upstaging the Pantheon) was finally fixed today: The job required 120 roofers working round the clock since March 1 to finish. When it was done, workers had replaced 10,463 pieces of galvanized metal decking and sprayed 500,000 gallons [...]

People ask me why is sprawl harmful to the environment. Among other reasons, my first response is that why build on greenfields when you have so many abandoned sites waiting to be developed back to their glory days. As technology developed and industrialization changed dramatically, erstwhile bustling industrial sites fell into decay. Many of those [...]

We finally heard back from the EPA’s P3 [People, Prosperity, and Planet] Request for Proposals and sadly, they rejected our grant application. The reason – too ambitious and infeasible for the allocated grant money. Well, they are right. We had submitted a proposal suggesting developing a sustainable model to rebuild Southern Louisiana by seeking to [...]

New Orleans brings to mind several images dominated of course by the debauchery-riddled and flamboyant Mardi Gras. But death, destruction, despair, and desolate landscapes are far from your mind. The city stands on a rich cultural heritage and although (ecologically) as I argue, the city should not exist; it not only does but also prospers [...]