Time has not served Buffalo well since. Fighting rapid population loss and economic stagnation, the city’s attempts to revitalize itself have resulted in swaths of surface parking and clusters of vapid office towers that impede on its radial street grid. We pulled sections from this 1902 map via the Library of Congress and compared it to current satellite imagery to see just how much has changed.
[Source: The Atlantic Cities]
Sadly, too many parking lots.
Two factors are exacerbating the flooding risk to the city: global sea level rise and subsidence. In short, sea is rising and the city is sinking. Like other cities built on river deltas, the sediment beneath the city is compacting over time. In a natural setting, this compaction would be offset by the deposition of fresh sediment at the surface, but the rivers feeding the lagoon were diverted in the 1500s. As a result, the land surface is sinking, and the salt marshes are suffering for it.
I won't spoil on how exactly water is being used solve Venice's water problem.
[Link to Under pressure: raising Venice above water (using... water?)]
Unfortunately the system in most cities in India is broken, and most notably so in Chennai. The government-mandated meter is never switched on, and the passenger has to negotiate the fare upfront before boarding. Residents of the city consider the system to be highly overpriced, and a significant section doesn’t even venture to travel by it. In Bangalore and Mumbai, rickshaws refuse to ply to areas from where they are unlikely to get onward passengers, and in a number of cities, it is rumoured that the number of autos on the road far exceeds the number of licenses issued.
Reforming any form of dispersed and piecemeal transportation utilities is a gargantuan task in India.
[Link to A Fair Auto Fare]
…in one GIF [via].
America doesn’t do big projects anymore — we’re too broke, no one can agree on our priorities, that era of bold thinking is over.That canard has been repeated so many times that it’s now accepted as gospel. Except it’s not true. In cities in every region of the country, pie-in-the-sky ideas are moving from brainstorm to blueprint to groundbreaking — and 2012 will prove it.
[Link to The Bold Urban Future Starts Now]
…expounding on the wealth of the cities. But he has aged more than 30 years since then. Hmmm…I wonder what is he doing now?
Tis’ the season for gifts and what better gifts than books on urban planning. I revived the Urban Planning Bookstore on this blog after abruptly shutting it down last year. I later realized that plenty of people had in fact used it to find interesting books. Anyway, I am listing some books that I had the pleasure of reading this past year and think they’ll make excellent gifts:
Couple of books in this list are available in Kindle format. I have been using the Kindle app on my iPad to read books and find it really convenient.
The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. If the change produces too much congestion, then a great deal of time, money, and additional analysis must go toward the project's consideration.
[Link to The Transportation Planning Rule Every City Should Reform]
This survey is not based solely on quality of life, number of trees or the cost of a month’s rent. Instead, we examine some cities that aim to be both smart and well managed, yet have an undeniably hip vibe. Our pick of cities that are, in a phrase, both great and good:
Ice Cube talks architecture. Now when did you talk rap? Your turn, architects.