The Petite Ceinture: the battle over Paris's abandoned railway

A stretch of the 19-mile Petite Ceinture – or ‘little belt’ – in Paris. Photograph: Palmryre Roigt

A unique 19-mile belt of neglected green space in the very centre of the French capital is sparking debate among environmentalists and entrepreneur around the future direction of development in the city.

A little-known wasteland nearly 20 miles long, the Petite Ceinture (“little belt”) is an urban phenomenon: an abandoned railway built more than 150 years ago in the centre of Paris. At a time when cities everywhere are struggling for space, the future of this expanse of land, precious in its biodiversity as well as its prime location, is a contentious issue.

“Foxes and various other wildlife use the railway as a passage to get from one place to the other in Paris,” says nearby resident Denis Loubaton. “To chop the Petite Ceinture up and sell it off in chunks would destroy the wildlife that lives here.”

A treasure trove for entrepreneurs, graffiti artists and nature-lovers alike, the disused line – Paris’s last great green space – also serves as a haven for social recluses and a shelter for the homeless. Sixty-year-old Daniel has lived on it for almost two decades after deciding to withdraw from society; Marc from Russia lives in a glass-roof hut he built himself; Michel has chosen to retire into the darkness of his cave to indulge in crack cocaine.

CBRE Urban Photographer of the Year 2014 – winning images

The theme of this year’s competition – Cities at Work – challenged photographers from around the world to capture the beauty and day-to-day reality of working life. The overall winner of the CBRE sponsored competition was German photographer Marius Vieth with his striking image ‘Masks of Society’

1am: Tokyo Late Night Dinner     Photograph: Chris Jongkind

The Nanny named State!

On a recent holiday in Europe, I found myself having the same thought over and over again: “this would not be allowed to happen in Australia”.

Enter the Nanny State, a term of British origin that conveys the view that a government or its policies are overprotective or interfering unduly with personal choice. The term “nanny state” likens government to the role that a nanny has in child rearing (Wikipedia).

The more I think about it the more it bothers me. Helmet laws, footpath width regulations, liquor laws, handrail requirements, alfresco dining permits, rubbish collection, house design, lighting etc. etc. etc! The level to which we Australians over regulate things is quite frankly astounding, and it is holding our cities back.

I have always felt a little hemmed in by Australian law and cultural norms but recently visiting France and Italy acted as a stark reminder that so much of what the world loves about Europe (it’s worth noting that France is the world’s most popular tourist destination) is actually illegal in Australia. Even though lots of us (planning and design circles particularly) want to, we simply can’t replicate key facets of the vibrant and exciting places found in great European cities because of our overly restrictive laws.

Plyscrapers: Skyscrapers getting back to their roots

Terrible heading I know but stick with me here.

In the past 100 years, the use of wood has generally been limited to light timber framing, generally no more than three to six stories high — structurally, the practical limit for that type of construction. But in the past 10 to 15 years, the development of new heavy timber products — cross laminated timber (CLT), glued laminated wood (glulam), and laminated veneer lumber (LVL) — has opened the door to taller and bigger buildings with wood as the primary building material.

Creating glitches in the matrix: Engaging and Playful Smart Cities

At a time where technology aims to remove all the friction from our daily lives, guiding us to exactly where we want to be, Playable Cities aim to interrupt this utilitarian efficiency with a touch of creativity and ludic intervention. From Stockholm’s Piano Staircase to Lisbon’s dancing traffic signals, there is a global trend of introducing playfulness into cities.

The Playable Cities movement is a creative response to the highly functional and structured urban environment. A situation that the Smarter City movement threatens to exacerbate. It’s by no chance that films such as the 1920’s Metropolis or the more recent film, LEGO present cities as machines and their inhabitants as workers. People in cities are often completely absorbed in getting from one place to another. It’s not called rush hour because people are going for a stroll.

Smart cities: The future of urban infrastructure

Infrastructure is not exactly the sexiest word in architecture. There are no “starchitects” proudly boasting about their pipe designs or subsurface drainage systems. By its very definition – the underlying structures that support our systems – infrastructure is inherently hidden from us, and therefore often overlooked. But without it our current cities couldn’t possibly exist. Without finding ways to improve it, our future cities will struggle to survive.

High Line-Inspired Copy Cats

To coincide with the opening of the final stage of the High Line in NYC, Inhabitat have conveniently collated a list of 6 High Line-inspired copy cats that are changing cities across the globe. Including Sydney's own the Goods Line in Ultimo.

Iconic High Line Park in NYC Opens Final Section To Public

NYC's most loved and iconic elevated park is finally complete! The third and final section of the High Line, aptly named The High Line at the Yards, is a verdant retreat incorporating real elements of its once standing original railway, as well as native flora and fauna. The serene half-mile pathway seamlessly blends nature into the surrounding cityscape, with more native plants than ever before.

Infographic: A Map Of New York's Hip-Hop Heritage

Yo yo! Listen up! P to the L to the A to the double N - ING. (Yes I am too fly for a white guy)

Following on from the popular post on how planning created hip-hop, I thought I'd share an inforgraphic that you may rekonize (see told I'm cool). Word out.

How Self-Healing Materials Could Change the World

Self-healing or "smart" materials may seem as magic as the alchemy of old, but they carry the very real potential to change our roads, buildings, and means of transportation.

Dr. Erik Schlangen, a Dutch civil engineer at Delft University has successfully created a road-ready material that’s practically self-healing 'with a little bit of help from the outside'. In the video of his TED talk, Dr. Schlangen demonstrates his miracle asphalt onstage. In front of an audience of undergrads, he karate-chops a block of asphalt into two. As he begins to talk about how nice it is to drive on asphalt, he places the two pieces side-by-side in an industrial microwave. MAGIC!!

Minecraft For Real Life: This Video Game Wants To Help Redesign Actual Cities

More than 100 million people play Minecraft, building virtual worlds out of virtual blocks. What if some of them started to use the same skills to redesign actual cities?

A new video game in development at the University of Southern California's School of Architecture is designed to make anyone a city planner. Using real city data, the game will start with Los Angeles but has the potential to be tailored to any city in the world.

"Gamescapes research seeks to democratize the design of the built environment through the use of video games," says Jose Sanchez, assistant professor in architecture at USC, who is working on the project with Satoru Sugihara and Sergio Irigoyen.

In the game, called Block, players build neighborhoods from components like housing, businesses, and parks, continually rearranging the pieces to find the optimum arrangement that citizens would most want to use and that would have the least cost for the city.

Movies about Planning: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Who'da thunk it? Although this isn't the first time I discovered that a favorite childhood cartoon was actually an allegory or a story with a much deeper meaning.

One of the themes in the film pertains to the dismantling of public transportation systems by private companies who would profit from an automobile transportation system and freeway infrastructure. Near the end of the film, Judge Doom reveals his plot to destroy Toon Town to make way for the new freeway system. This is an indirect historical reference to the dismantling of public transportation trolley lines by National City Lines during the 1930s in what is also known as the Great American streetcar scandal. The name of Doom's company, Cloverleaf Industries, is a reference to a common freeway-ramp configuration—an image of which was prominently displayed in the opening credit sequence of The Wonderful World of Disney.

Inside Johannesburg’s Infamous Ponte City Tower

The history of Johannesburg‘s Ponte City Apartments is a provocative one: built in 1975 and designed by Manfred Hermer as the height of luxurious (white-only) living in South Africa, the continent’s tallest residential building soon became a notorious vertical slum, filled with crime and poverty, its signature hollow core re-purposed as a trash dump and a suicide drop.

Since 2001, however, the building has been the centerpiece of a drive to regenerate the wider Hillbrow neighborhood. The building is gentrifying once again – an almost color-coded gentrification as white people move back into the tower, mostly taking the more expensive upper apartments. However, as the video by Vocative shows, in the case of Ponte, gentrification is not as simple as elsewhere: heavy security eases the fears of middle class residents in what is still one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Johannesburg.

What Gentrification Really Is and How We Can Avoid It

Gentrification is seen as a rising menace in many cities. The process whereby rich “gentrifiers” move into neighborhoods, driving up property prices and thus driving out those unable to afford those prices, has drawn criticism from activists and planners for years. However, this article by io9 writer Annalee Newitz, first published by io9 as “This is What Gentrification Really Is“, tells us that the issue is not quite the struggle between good and evil that it first appears to be. Gentrification is a process dependent on economy, political climate, and the mercurial nature of urban development itself – and sometimes fighting against it only serves to exacerbate the problem. Find out what we can do in the face of gentrification after the break.

Photo via Affordable Housing Institute

In many cities, it’s become popular to hate “gentrifiers,” rich people who move in and drive up housing prices — pushing everyone else out. But what’s going on in these rapidly-changing urban spaces is a lot more complicated than that.

The Top Ten Best Busking Hotspots in the World

Buskers are street performers that entertain a transient audience. As such, they create art that reflects the cultural, social and economic state of their audience in order to engage them in a short period of time. The result is that their music, dance, theatre and comedy has a different flavour in each city. Comparing how the buskers connect to their audiences in each location gives you more information about current local culture there than, say, the museums, restaurants, shops or bars, as a busker’s audience is much more diverse. Buskers are a real mirror of their surroundings, projected in a way designed to move you.

What follows is a top ten list of the best busker cities pitches in the world, based on nothing more than my own experiences. The buskers in each pitch have obviously affected my choices, so this is far from an academic list.

In Europe, knowing your neighbour doesn't necessarily make you happy

For Jean-Paul Sartre, hell was other people. Many in Europe seem to share the French philosopher’s view.

The UK’s Office for National Statistics recently published the results of a pan-European survey on happiness. Thousands of Europeans were asked a range of questions about their relationships, work, health, finances, and much else besides.

As is usually the case, in terms of overall life satisfaction, Scandinavians top the list, while Eastern Europeans are the gloomiest. But things get more interesting when you dig into the details:

Why commute times don't change much even as a city grows

For as much as U.S. metros have grown over the past few decades, commute times have remained oddly stable. One-way commutes averaged 21.7 minutes in 1980 and 25.3 minutes in 2010. That's not nothing — it's 30 hours more a year assuming 250 work days — but it's also not nearly as much as decade upon decade of urban sprawl might suggest. As bad as our daily commutes are, in many ways we're fortunate they aren't worse.

So why aren't they worse? Among the most compelling ideas to explain this phenomenon is that people have daily "travel time budgets" of about an hour that they refuse to exceed. (This budget is often called "Marchetti's Constant,"though it's better attributed to Yacov Zahavi.) But that alone isn't enough to explain what's happening. After all, if traffic increases and jobs stay in the same place, then our hour won't get us as far as it once did, whether we like it or not.

Then what else is going on? Two new papers target this classic question in a fresh way. Their findings suggest that much of what's going on is more people relying on public transit.

Dubai Unveils Plans For A 48-Million-Square-Foot Pedestrian City

Dubai has built a reputation as a shopper's paradise, but the emirate is undertaking a new real-estate project that includes an 8-million-square-foot (743,000 sqm) shopping center--purportedly the world's largest--to seal its place as a mall capital.

An Apartment Tower Designed To Help Residents Make Friends

A 24-STORY RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT IN BELGIUM IS DESIGNED TO GET PEOPLE TALKING.

It's hard to foster community in a tower. This is a realisation many companies are coming to about their high-rise headquarters, but the notion applies equally to high-rise housing. High-rise towers often lack common spaces that give people a reason to bump into each other or hang out informally. There's only so much interaction that can happen as people move straight from the lobby to an elevator, then into their apartment.

Social interaction is the main goal of a new mixed-use high-rise design in Antwerp, Belgium, by C.F. Møller Architects and Brut Architecture and Urban Design.

House of Vans Opens a Subterranean Skatepark Beneath the Streets of London

U.S. clothing and footwear brand House of Vans has transformed a series of five disused tunnels beneath the streets of London into an indoor skate park! The Old Vic Tunnels at London’s Waterloo were recently transformed into a subterranean cultural and entertainment hub with pop-ups and performances, but it was closed last year until the footwear giant gave it a major makeover. Now revived, the underground playground comes with a gallery, cinema, café and artist studios.

SCADpads: A Parking Garage Transformed into a Mirco Village

As city populations boom urban planners are pressured to seek out innovative ways to squeeze more people into less space.

The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) recently transformed the top covered-floor of a parking garage in Midtown Atlanta, into three 12.5 square metre mircohomes or SCADPads as they are calling them.

Can Subiaco cope with the loss of the Subiaco markets? Can I cope?

Non-investigative reporter Noah McDonald goes deep under cover to uncover the shocking truth!

The iconic Subiaco markets site is seemingly destined for redevelopment with reports a proposal for a four-storey complex that will include 4,850 square metres of office space is due to be lodged with the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority in the near future. Now of course re-development is the property owners right, and of course such a proposal is entirely sensible for an owner seeking to realise the development potential of a property within a redevelopment area, BUT, what about me and my needs?!

Can Inflated Concrete Homes Help Solve the World's Housing Woes?

Remember the DIY days of covering balloons with lots of glue, scraps of paper and paint, and then popping said balloons to reveal a masterfully created bowl? Well, imagine doing paper maché on a larger scale — a much larger scale. The Binishell, an idea for inflated concrete domes dreamed up by Dr. Dante Bini in the 60s, is basically that same concept brought to life.

A large, heavy-duty balloon gets covered with flexible steel rods and concrete before the balloon is inflated while the concrete is still wet. Once it hardens, the balloon is removed. Basically, it starts off as a flat shape and then gets inflated to its desired size. The balloon can then be reused to fill another domed building. It’s a super quick way of building structures that can take just a few days and, because of its shape, it’s also much more energy efficient than the traditionally built house.

I swear I've seen this design somewhere before..... http://youtu.be/sAb-fqBrUsY?t=1m

Roadside Assistance for Cyclists? There's an app for that!

Broken bikes aren't meant to be moved around. So what can you do? There's the hassle of searching for a nearby bike shop that’s open, not knowing if it will be fixed in time, how much it will cost and whether it will get fixed properly.

Or there's FlatTire, a new iOS app that uses today’s technology to make the process quicker, cheaper and much more convenient than regular brick-and-mortar bike shops.

The FlatTire app allows users to access the mobile bike services of Amsterdam's Flattire.nl more easily than ever before.

How Do You Move an Entire City? Ask Sweden

Northern Sweden may be most readily associated with the residential domain of Christmas-time characters, but the region is now turning fantasy into the future of sustainable urban planning — by moving an entire city of 18,200 people two miles east of its current location. Kiruna, founded in 1900, is an iron ore company town and home to the iconic Icehotel, but is slowly cannibalizing upon itself. As the ground beneath the city’s western edge has been mined, deformation is encroaching on the city’s very bedrock.

White Arkitetker unveils masterplan for Swedish city Kiruna relocation from Dezeen on Vimeo.

City of Sydney to trial light coloured pavement to reduce urban heat island effect

The City of Sydney last week announced a trial of lighter-coloured pavement as part of an investigation into ways of reducing temperatures in urban areas, with a short stretch of road in Chippendale selected for the experiment.

The trial will record temperatures across different locations, including the 600 square metre section of Myrtle Street, between Abercrombie and Smithers streets in Chippendale. Over coming months, monitoring equipment will determine whether or not there is a reduction in ambient temperate along the paler pavement.

According to the council, the 'urban heat island effect' means cities are often a few degrees warmer than regional areas due to surfaces such as roads, footpaths and buildings absorbing heat from the sun. Lighter-coloured pavements may be one solution to reduce this effect.

Rooftop Urban Agriculture

Large, flat, homogeneous and unused industrial rooftops offer great possibilities to install urban farms and provide food within the city. Industrial areas building codes normally do not constrain heights, so farming activities are a concrete opportunity to capitalize the unused industrial rooftop spaces. Urban farming has a lot to do with the use of unexpressed potential of the city space. It is a tool to turn them productive. It is a tool – I say – to grow the city. To cultivate it from all the possible aspects as a living environment.

Return our streets to the 'human' scale

How can a space constructed for a car be comfortable for a human being?

As soon as a street becomes uncomfortable for driving it immediately becomes more comfortable for walking.

This is why we need to rediscover the “high street”.

I remember every Saturday morning my Mother and I would travel into town and walk down the high street of Biloela in Central Queensland to buy some bread from the local bakery and meet with friends and family.

Very few shops had air conditioning so doors were wide open to the streets and in the morning you would escape the hot sun under the long line of awnings and by the afternoon you would switch to the other side of the street.

In winter we would do the opposite. Simple but effective.

This was all brought to my attention when I discovered Elizabeth St – the small but strong high street of Croydon.

Tucked away behind the freeways that are Port and South Road, I feel immediately at home in this informal, interactive community space.

Over 20 years, numerous high streets have been sunk by shopping centres turning our attention inwards and drawing our focus towards $9.99 FOR TODAY ONLY!!

These spaces are devoid of any external elements such as air, or light…

Read more at the Adelaide Independent News here

How to Design a City for Women

In 1999, officials in Vienna, Austria, asked residents of the city's ninth district how often and why they used public transportation. "Most of the men filled out the questionnaire in less than five minutes," says Ursula Bauer, one of the city administrators tasked with carrying out the survey. "But the women couldn't stop writing."

Women used public transit more often and made more trips on foot than men. They were also more likely to split their time between work and family commitments like taking care of children and elderly parents. Recognizing this, city planners drafted a plan to improve pedestrian mobility and access to public transit.

Additional lighting was added to make walking at night safer for women. Sidewalks were widened so pedestrians could navigate narrow streets. And a massive staircase with a ramp running through the middle was installed near a major intersection to make crossing easier for people with strollers and individuals using a walker or a wheelchair.

Forget Segways! Skateways!? The closest thing to a hover board this decade

Inventors in Silicon Valley are working on a revolutionary transportation technology. It’s called a skateboard. I recall my first skateboard, it had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on it. IT WAS AWESOME! Single kicktail and extra wide body for more Ninja Turtle action. Wicked!

But the new era of skateboarding isn't designed for your typical teen in a Ramones t-shirt (or Ninja Turtles), it's aimed at the growing number of urban professionals who don't want to drive to work yet want to be cool... and have deep pockets - the Boosted board (pictured below) costs a cool $US1995.

How Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning Will Change The Way We Design Cities

Researchers at MIT Media Lab are using crowdsourced data to create an algorithm that determines how safe a street looks to the human eye--information that could be used to guide important urban design decisions.

Inside The Forgotten Chinese Cities Destroyed By The Three Gorges Dam

A designer gathers and displays the artifacts of ancient towns now flooded by a massive dam as a reminder of what China loses as it develops at breakneck speed.

The Three Gorges Dam, a giant hydroelectric dam located along China's Yangtze River, has the biggest installed capacity of any power station in the world. But the project, finished in 2012, hasn't exactly been a triumph over dirtier forms of energy like coal power. Concerns about pollution, landslides, earthquakes, and biodiversity abound. And for about 4 million people, the dam project was mostly a disaster, as it flooded 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,352 villages. (Everyone was relocated to new settlements built on higher ground, which in an Orwellian feat, were given the same names as their former communities.)

Activist Robot Draws The Bike Lanes A City Should Have

The city of Wiesbaden was proclaimed the least bike friendly city in all of Germany by the country's cyclist club. In response, the Wiesbaden-based creative agency Radwende created a drawing robot that would trace the paths of bike riders, creating a map of a more bike-friendly city.

“It's a beautiful and rich city, with lot's of large SUVs and luxury cars, but riding a bike is only for the fearless, there is no culture of respect to cyclists,” explains Radwende Managing Director Peter Post. “The machine and art piece is a new way to promote biking locally.”

Why Your Local Cell Tower Looks Like A Half-Assed Tree

Cell towers, when they can't be hidden away out of sight on the tops of buildings, have to be disguised. They're pretty sizable pieces of equipment, and have to be made of a conductive material, which isn't necessarily conducive to sneakiness, but the owners of cell towers try their best. But why?

Haunting Photographs Of Modern-Day Ghost Towns

When the Irish housing bubble burst in 2008, construction halted suddenly on building sites, leaving a trail of ghost estates. Ghost estates are developments in Ireland where more than half of the homes are unoccupied or incomplete. These abandoned properties are the subject of a new photography book that will be exhibited in the upcoming Photobookshow in England.

Boston Doctors Can Now Prescribe Bike-Share Membership To Patients

Boston, has taken an aggressive approach to making sure that everyone, regardless of income status, has an opportunity to ride--and is aware that they can. While annual Hubway memberships cost $85, the city offers an $80 discount for anyone on public assistance. That means if you live in low-income housing, your membership just costs $5. And, as of late March, doctors can prescribe memberships for those who qualify.

Urban Sprawl: Get Fat, Stay Poor, And Die In Car Crashes

A new report on metro density says it straight: quality of life improves in compact cities.

How Zombies Help Siemens Design Disaster-Proof Cities

Cities Are Like Elephants: They Get More Economical With Size

Cities have long been compared to organisms—Plato talked about the city as a corporeal body, and the urban spaces we’ve created have come to resemble their creators. Structurally, they follow a distinctly biological design and obey the same metabolic laws that govern every organism. 

Below the skin and under the street lie the intestines, the metal intestines that allow suburbs to sprawl and skyscrapers to rise. The fiber-optic cables are nerves, and the subway tunnels are thick jugular veins. Energy is distributed, and waste is digested. All this generates a sort of animal heat, which escapes from the grates in the gutters. The foul steam is exhaled breath. But how true is this metaphor? Are cities really like living things?

A team of physicists and economists led by Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute recently set out to answer these questions. It turns out that, in many respects, cities act just like creatures. They obey the same metabolic laws that govern every organism. Their infrastructure follows a distinctly biological design, which helps explain why cities are able to grow.

Read more here

Reinhard Krug's City Islands

The Heritage of Goulburn

'From the Goulburn Desk 'by William Oxley

I’d like to discuss a topic that is particularly relevant to Goulburn, which is heritage. As a local government planner heritage is an important issue that consistently influences the decisions we make.

Heritage is such a deep and diverse aspect of planning that I could write pages and pages on the topic, however at this point I would like to focus on the main issue that heritage presents to a planner: conservation versus progression; essentially what are the advantages and disadvantages of preserving heritage sites? 

Planning Matters Competition

Show us your ideas!

A Dictator's Guide to Urban Design

Ukraine's Independence Square, and the revolutionary dimensions of public spaces.

An aerial view shows Ukraine's Independence Square during clashes between anti-government protesters and riot police in Kiev, on February 19

Glimpsing a Lost Paris, Before Gentrification

Before Google Street View and 'Pegman' there was Charles Marville, a 19th-century photographer who was commissioned by the city of Paris to document both the picturesque, medieval streets of old Paris and the broad boulevards and grand public structures that Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann built in their place for Emperor Napoleon III. 

Charles Marville: Place Saint-André-des-Arts (sixth arrondissement), 1865–1868, Musée Carnavalet, Paris

WWCCD: What Would Climate Change Do?

No, not what would ceiling cat do?

Docklands faces overhaul as Gehl report urges major changes

Y (p) Connect?

It’s that time of year again. Everyone’s back at work, uni is starting, and the traffic snarls and tram crushes are back with a vengeance. That week on the beach seems but an all too distant memory… But I’m excited - because it means that March is upon us! And that means its YP Connect time!

What's your Future City?

Check out the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s Urbanology game

The game seeks to teach players something about urban sustainability by asking them to give “yes” or “no” answers to a series of urban policy questions. It then produces some quick-and-dirty findings about the governing values implied by the answers, and identifies a real city that best matches those values. The eight values at issue are Affordability, Health, Innovation, Lifestyle, Livability, Sustainability, Transportation, and Wealth. Questions include items such as “Will you double the cost of public transport to fund its conversion to a carbon-neutral system?” or “Will you pay for a free bike service in your city”? Working with such yes/no dichotomies is not ideal, but it’s also not unreasonable as a starting point for conversation.

Link

Highs and Lows: Abandoned NYC Tram Station likely to become the World’s First Subterranean Park

You’ve most likely heard of, or even visited New York’s High Line, the elevated linear park recycled from the city’s former central railroad. But it’s time to get to know the “Low Line”…

A dark and abandoned one-acre underground space with loose wires and dampness all around– what could there possibly be here to ‘get to know’? This neglected subterranean site is the location of the former Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal, which from 1908 to 1945, served the tram passengers of New York City. It is also the location of one of the most exciting and unique urban project plans the world has ever seen.

New musical follows the life of a city planner

"If/Then," a new musical at the National Theatre, follows the life choices and regrets of a fictional city planner in New York. But does it also say something about the choices that cities face?

10 Inspiring Architecture TED Talks

Scientific Proof That Cars and Cities Just Don't Mix

A fascinating new study has revealed what many planners already know: cities aren't meant to be experienced from behind the wheel of a car. Researchers at the University of Surrey found that drivers perceive exactly the same things more negatively than those who walk, bike, or take transit, confirming the anecdotal experience of literally every person that's ever tried to find parking in an urban downtown.

"Participants who lived in denser or more developed neighborhoods reported a larger perceived risk of crime, but a diminished fear of it".

Read more at Planetizen - Link

"Auto"-Mobile Beijing

Beijing’s bicycle culture needs a comeback. Cars, roads, and smog now consume the city, as “modern” residents leave their bicycles behind. This project proposes a bicycle transit centre prototype for Beijing, woven as a network into the elevated highways that dominate the once human-scale city. The bicycle centres create an attractive alternative lifestyle to catalyse a bicycle revival in Beijing.

Read more over at Velo-City - Link or Bustler - Link

Bikehangar: 1 car = 12 bike spaces

Smarthangars are a compact communal bike storage solution that can be installed in any existing car parking space, providing those living or working locally places to securely store their bicycles. Operated by secure smart card system, the design allows spaces to be rented out for long term or short term use, creating a sustainable economic model for bike storage in the city. 

Bicycle theft and the lack of secure cycle parking is a huge problem facing many cities. This is one of the major inhibitors to the growth of cycling and research has shown that a third of those who have experienced theft stop cycling.

Bicycle shelters and lockers offer the best security by fully enclosing the whole bike away from potential thieves. However it is often expensive and difficult to find space to install these large and bulky structures in our crowded cities.

Where can we find space for bicycle parking? If we look at our streets, cars often line up both sides of the road. These large machines take up large amounts of space and make our streets less permeable.

The solution is to convert these readily available car parking spaces into bicycle parking.

1 car = 12 bicycle spaces
Read more at Velo-City - Link

The Secret Second Lives of Pizza Huts

The first Pizza Hut opened in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, the brainchild of hometown boys Dan and Frank Carney. It got its name, according to lore, from Dan Carney's wife, who thought the small building that housed it looked like a hut.

But the Carneys' project could not long be contained. As they expanded, they commissioned an architect named Richard D. Burke to design a building that they could call their own -- a hut in name only, recognizable to all comers. These "Red Roof" locations multiplied rapidly, eventually numbering in the thousands. The company has discontinued the design and changed its business model to emphasize delivery and other types of outlets. But the distinctive silhouettes of those buildings remain one of the most reliable and recognizable features of the suburban landscape, even if a lot of them are no longer Pizza Huts.

Read more on The Atlantic Cities - Link