What would our world’s cities be like if they were filled with great public spaces, using human-dominated design instead of auto-dominated design? Our Cities Ourselves, a project of the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) imagines this in ten mega-cities across the globe, from Jakarta to Mexico City to Buenos Aires, asking some of [...]
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DW reports that Berlin’s former 950-acre Tempelhof Airport has opened for the first time under its new use as a city park. The interesting thing about the opening is that nothing has changed – runways, the terminal, the hanger are all just the same as they were before (until the city decides how to design [...]
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Architect Manit Rastogi is seeking to transform the canals of Delhi, India by using new technology to treat sewage and turning the now polluted corridors into a network of bike and pedestrian greenways. In a report and the below video on CNN, Rastogi says the city “will then be interconnected with an eco-friendly and safe [...]
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The newly unveiled global urban news website Citiscope has one of it’s first pieces on slum upgrading in São Paulo, Brazil. Writers Fernando Serpone Bueno and Veridiana Sedeh provide a nice overview of the multi-faceted efforts to improve the living conditions of people in the favelas, such as providing sanitary and drainage facilities, granting property [...]
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In this week’s “36 Hours” section the NY Times takes us to Buenos Aires, Argentina, recommending a visit to the 60-acre Parque Tres de Febrero (named after the date in which military leader Juan Manuel de Rosas was overthrown in 1852). The park is part of a larger area of parks that includes several museums, [...]
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From the Shrinking Cities project, there’s a great video (without audio) on change in shrinking cities from Detroit to Manchester/Liverpool, UK to Leipzig and the Essen area in Germany. The simulation shows that these regions are spreading out almost as much as they are shrinking. This seems particularly the case with Detroit and Manchester/Liverpool. In [...]
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With the Copenhagen summit taking place this week in Denmark, it’s a good time to highlight the merits of urban parks in combating global climate change. In fact, in a session this week there on reducing carbon through public transit, an official from Portland’s Tri-Met spoke of how cities need to be “places where people [...]
Filed under: international, planning | Tagged: climate change | 9 Comments »
The capital of Brazil, Brasilia is a planned city with parks and open spaces designed at the height of automotive thinking in the late 1950s. The city was laid out by Lucio Costa and the buildings by famed and still-living centenarian architect Oscar Niemeyer. Many of the buildings are iconic and beautiful in their modern [...]
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The folks at GOOD magazine have unveiled a “platform” on ideas and action in cities. As part of this, they put together the short, entertaining and informative video below describing initiatives from around the globe to reduce carbon emissions and make cities better places to live. The piece mentions bus rapid transit in Bogota, bike [...]
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Schenley Plaza in Pittsburgh continues to garner national and now international praise. The parking lot-to-park project of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy won a 2009 International Award for Livable Communities (the “LivCom” Awards) this past week in the Czech Republic and last month won the Pinnacle Award from the International Downtown Association. “It has been wonderful [...]
Filed under: international, partnerships, renewal, transportation | Tagged: downtown, parking, pittsburgh | 2 Comments »
