Urban Planning Blog

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 those whose houses got washed away. But definitely a technology worth exploring, right?

Just because you can doesn’t always mean you should. “This gleaming hunk of urban development is about to rise on an artificial, perfectly square island off the coast of Dubai” [source]. Dubai has been going crazy creating all these islands off their coast probably because coastal properties enjoy greater demand and thus elicit higher prices. But in the long run, these islands are proving to be an environmental disaster as they end up destroying the marine life and coral reefs in the vicinity which are an integral part of the ecosystem. This 6.5 square kilometer mini-city is being designed by noted architect, Rem Koolhaas. Why would you care for the environment when your paycheck from this job alone can let you retire in riches?

GROW, a project that develops innovative solutions on green technologies draws inspiration from ivy growing on the side of a building - resulting in a hybrid energy delivery device of leafy, fluttering solar shingles that provide power via both sun and wind. I would love a day when roof shingles that use solar power are just as cheap as regular shingles.

Unfortunately not all world cities are as exotic as you thought. Forbes compiles the list of the world’s dirtiest cities.

The office space of David Yocum and Brian Bell’s architecture firm. They have ‘decorated’ the space by using blight. Does it work?

After taking a stab at designing the ‘ultimate’ home, Scott Adams (of the Dilbert fame) takes on the challenge of an ultimate city plan. I hope someone has told him that it has been tried before only to fail miserably.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in.

Are today’s suburbs going to be tomorrow’s slums as consumer preferences move back toward city center living?

With the launch of Tata’s new car, the Nano which is priced at Rs. 1 lakh ($2500), roads in Mumbai are prone to congestion in the future. But does the city have enough parking space and what is the government doing to address these concerns? These questions are examined in this Hindustan Times article for which I was interviewed as well and have been quoted as well.

Is this penthouse located at One Hyde Park, London priced at 100 million pounds, the most expensive apartment in the world?

For those not living in the shadow of the Empire State Building and wondering what color is it displaying today, this site may be useful to satisfy that curious cat in you.

Prices will probably drop some more but personally I don’t expect to ever again see index values around 110.  Do you?  If we don’t see the massive drop back to “normal” levels then the run up in prices should be described as a shift to a new equilibrium - much as happened during World War II.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution uses the oft-quoted Robert Shiller’s chart on home values and concludes that fundamentally there was no housing bubble.

Update: As expected, Paul Krugman has a response.

The above image is the winning entry in the Space Settlement Calendar Art Contest. More here.

The current issue of Science has a special focus on cities and urbanization especially in the developing world. Covering a vast range of topics like transportation, housing, pollution, and future trends, this promises to a must-read for all urban planners and urban policy researchers.

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, Dilip D’Souza, writing for the Outlook section in the Washington Post explains the futility of the current slum redevelopment schemes in Mumbai.

I will always welcome the transfer of public property into private hands, and even the most left-liberal activist will agree that it is more preferable to hand over property rights to the “little guy” transparently than to big evil builders after intense backroom dealings.

Gaurav Sabnis, an Indian blogger takes the argument further and advocates transferring property rights to slum dwellers thus giving them a better say in negotiations with the builders.

My uncle, a builder and developer in the Mumbai suburbs runs his construction business through the model that Dilip suggests i.e. by redeveloping properties which have surplus FSI (Floor Space Index) and effectively giving free homes to the original residents while making the profit off the additional housing units that he sells at market rate. More on the impact of that strategy for the housing condition in Mumbai later.

Architect Vincent Callebaut’s latest project balances public galleries, meeting rooms and gathering spaces over canals and abandoned railroad tracks in the 19th Parisian district. Callebaut describes the process as an intention to “absorb and recycle by photo-catalytic effect the cloud of harmful gases (Smog) from the intense traffic near Paris” [source: Inhabitat].

Definitely a worthy and proactive effort at going beyond the traditional green architecture.