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.