Monday News Roundup

Happy Monday! Let's start out with the top links from last week:

From Sprawl to Complete Communities (Planetizen)

Galina Tachieva's new Sprawl Repair Manual creates a narrative and visual process for making suburbs more sustainable.

Presentation skills and techniques - For architects! (Life of an Architect)

The spectacular 'green' way to build affordable housing (Switchboard)
Via Verde (“Green Way” in Spanish) is a new mixed-income, mixed-use development nearing completion in a once-severely disinvested area of the South Bronx - but it is like no other affordable housing development you have seen.  It is much, much better.

Well-structured handbags fortified with concrete! (Design Milk)

Green Infrastructure: Making cities sustainable + hospitable (Switchboard)
Case studies demonstrate the successful application of ”green infrastructure” techniques that collect and process rainwater naturally before it flows into receiving waterways as polluted runoff.

Eleven of the Best Urban Design Ideas in the World (Planetizen)
From a penthouse dwelling above an air-raid bunker to an "inside-out" building where plants grow on the walls through rainwater irrigation...

Frii Bike (Wannekes)
Beautiful and eco-friendly, the Bike Frii is composed of recycled plastic elements.

Monday News Roundup

Top headlines from last week for architecture, planning and design:

The First Government-Sponsored Bike Sharing System (Planetizen)
The first North American community to offer a government-sponsored bike sharing system dubbed "Capital Bike Share" celebrates at one of D.C.'s newest parks, Yards Park.

Transitions Lenses for Buildings (Fast Company)

Windows that automatically change color to reduce heating and cooling bills are the next step of smart buildings. South Korean scientists just got a lot closer to automating them.

Bright Entryways (Apartment Therapy)
The foyer is your home's first impression. Why not make it a wow? Here are some inspiring bright entryways from across the spectrum.

"Re_Home" created for Natural Disaster Recovery (Inhabitat)

The central premise behind U of Illinois students' "Re_Home" is a fast response time in order to get families in more permanent housing. As such, Re Home is sustainable, flexible and easily set up!

 

Preservationists vs. Urbanists (Planetizen)

Preservationists are all about preserving our past while Urbanists harvest lessons from the past to create better places in the future. Seems like these two groups would get along quite well. But no.

Breathtaking Images of Spiral Staircases (1 Design Per Day)
Photos credited to Nils Eisfeld

Would you use plants to power your home electronics? (Design Milk)
Moss Table, from the 2011 London Design Festival, is an experimental table that uses plants to generate energy on a micro level.

How Temporary and Simple Places can Define City Life (Sustainable Cities)
In building urban community, it remains imperative to reassess—with simplicity in mind—and to always remember first principles, such as shelter and the wheel.

 

Monday News Roundup

The top news from last week's Twitter Feed:

Sustainable Communities Must Embrace the Familiar (Switchboard)
The path to a more environmentally benign future lies not in convincing consumers that they must change, but in giving them the things they seek in a more sustainable form.

Smaller Can Be Better When It Comes to Traffic Solutions (Planetizen)
Megaprojects like the Outer Beltway are promoted as the solution to D.C.'s traffic woes, but Schwartz says "...smaller, localized projects taken as a whole can be better than the larger, flashier projects."

Bike Shares Struggle to Work With Helmet Laws (Sustainable Cities)
Australian cities are still struggling to implement similar schemes due in part to the compulsory helmet laws.

The World's 12 Most Beautiful Train Rides (Infrastructurist)

Transportation Choices Can Keep Money Local (Sustainable Cities)
According to this infographic from Denver bikes, four of five dollars you spend on your car leave your local economy.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Kottke)
This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don't.

Urbanization Increases the Need for Sustainability (Sustainable Cities)
With the inexorable rise of urbanization come a variety of compelling reasons for making cities sustainable.

Is your city on the Top 10 List for Mass Transit Commuting? (Inhabitat)

An Agri-Cultural Perspective on the City of Vancouver's Transportation Plan

By Graham McGarva, Founding Principal
VIA Architecture


 The Vancouver Transportation Plan outlines an overall transportation strategy for the city 
(Credit: City of Vancouver)

After Vancouver was knocked from its perch as the world's most livable city by traffic tie ups on a Vancouver Island Highway, I began to think back to the fundamentals of the City of Vancouver Transportation Plan that was launched on May 12th this year. Especially since these traffic tie ups were 100km from the City, and involved an hour and a half ferry ride (plus waiting time) just to get to them.  For all anyone in Vancouver knew, these tie ups could well have been caused by agricultural tractors getting our 100 mile diet to market.

The good news story is that Vancouver is the only City in North America with increasing population, jobs and trips, coupled with a decrease in car trips - because urban development is focusing around the City's growing non-vehicular transportation networks.

The future for Vancouver is not about taking the drivers of today and getting them out of their cars; there is no problem with them continuing as they are.  Vancouver's success has been that thousands of new residents and workers are not choosing to use cars to get around town.

In response to the pretty pictures and video proposed for high level public consultation with a million people walking, wheeling, biking, busing and motoring in the sunshine, the stakeholder questions moved on from drinking our own kool-aid to emphasising the issues of our "rainy days in February" and "getting the goods in and out of town".

Following up afterwards with Jerry Dobrovolny, City of Vancouver Director of Transportation, we discussed the importance of canvasing Vancouverites' collective "culture of expectation" (or more likely cultures of expectations) with respect to the social contract around urban movement.  Thus, setting aside the question of absurdity of 'measuring' traffic impacts across 30km of ocean, there is a core livability question that needs be addressed, even if it cannot be answered. What does an amber light or a flashing do not walk sign mean to me, really -  not just when I am on my best behaviour taking my driver's license test - but every day when I walk, drive or cycle and interact with others (or not)? 

This issue of 'expectation' is a hot button with respect to Downtown Vancouver's separated bike lanes.  We have the paradox that the Vancouver bike lanes were designed with wide lanes and broad buffers and no right turns signs for motorists, precisely in order to attract uncertain cyclists who were fearful of mingling with vehicles.  The design outcome then resembles a freeway for cyclists, some of whom are clocked at above the vehicular speed limit.  Such expectation of aggressive and unimpeded mobile velocity can intimidate pedestrians and potential fellow cyclists alike (and scare the heck out of motorists trying to disobey the no right-turn signs). 

For the rest of this article and more of Graham's musings, visit his page on City Slices, a blog dedicated to the "poetic imagery of an architect"