I’m preparing for the Car-Free Cities conference in Portland all this week. Given current events, it should be quite a gab-fest. What were once fringe issues and ideas have moved to centre stage, and will be taken with a new seriousness.
So, what could be more appropriate to fill in the week when I’ll be gone [...]
If you read about Paris’s elevated park - the Promenade Plantee - then you might be interested in the New York version: the High Line.
Everyone (at least who reads this blog) knows Portland has a dynamic urban culture. Naturally, there’s an online site - Portland Spaces - that brings together sources and ideas. And within that, they have the Burnside Blog.
Here’s a taste.
Urban Uprising: The Buildings
Take your average residential lot in Portland (That’d be 5,000 square feet), build a house [...]
As James Kunstler would observe (see below), you can tell a lot about a civilization by the quality of the “public realm” - the spaces jointly shared by every citizen. As opposed to the privileges of “the consumer,” who has no repsonsibilities for the commonwealth except, of course, to consume it.
Here’s a particularly nice addition to [...]
Kudos to Anthony Perl and my colleagues at SFU Urban Studies for bringing in James Kunstler (author of “The Long Emergency” 
as their first Fellow. That meant he had a week to tour the region, speak to students, staff, politicians and the public in a variety of settings (from the Carnegie to the Vancouver Club [...]
Every urban-design and architecture critic I read has a highly cultivated cynicism. Christopher Hume, he of the Toronto Star, is always good for an articulate scathing of TO.
But his recent column on the competition results for a new park at the foot of Jarvis Street on the lakeshore is almost optimistic:
Ah, the waterfront, the waterfront. [...]
The best analysis I’ve seen of the looming disaster - personal, urban, environmental - that is the Tata Nana.
“Where” blog - all about placemaking - went through their weekend reading and came up with best articles of the urban blogosphere for 2007 - here - in two categories: general urbanism and place-specific posts.
Under the latter, one on Toronto: ITEM SEVEN: More great stuff from Spacing: an Angelino’s take on Toronto’s messy urbanism.
Cameron, a PT reader, sends in an article from the New York Times:
A Place Just Like Every Other Place. Only Not. “Kevin Fry, president of Scenic America, believes the characterless environments in which Americans live are damaging our society.”A powerful audio slide shows accompanies:
I do a B.C. verson in Price Tags 96.
Once again, Chicago leads the way:
Chicago has decided to retrofit its alleys with environmentally sustainable road-building materials under its Green Alley initiative… In a green alley, water is allowed to penetrate the soil through the pavement itself, which consists of the relatively new but little-used technology of permeable concrete or porous asphalt. Then the water, [...]
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