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.

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.

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

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

How to Design a City for Women

Don’t worry this is not about separating the genders, or some post feminist ranty power grab.

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."

The majority of men reported using either a car or public transit twice a day -- to go to work in the morning and come home at night. Women, on the other hand, used the city’s network of sidewalks, bus routes, subway lines and streetcars more frequently and for a myriad reasons.

"The women had a much more varied pattern of movement," Bauer recalls. "They were writing things like, 'I take my kids to the doctor some mornings, then bring them to school before I go to work. Later, I help my mother buy groceries and bring my kids home on the metro.'"

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.

Read more at Atlantic Cities - Link

Placemaking and the City

Cities are back in fashion; on television (Sex in the City), in music (with ‘urban’ now the codeword for black, popular and rhythmic), in architecture (where density generates the most rewarding opportunities), among international agencies (seeking ways of managing post-Fordist and post-industrial societies), and within the planning establishment (with the reversal of ideas on the uses of the city). One of the most important issues facing planning at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how to revitalise cities. Today, cities are seen as assets rather than liabilities. Their role as engines of economic growth is widely accepted and their spheres of influence the city is becoming recognised as fundamental building blocks in the national fabric.

Bench Bombing in Philly

One simple way to transform public space

Read more here - Link

Digital Placemaking - City Fireflies

"What is City Fireflies?

City Fireflies is a simple game that looks like tons of fun: Players cluster in a plaza in front of a large videoscreen showing a grid of 8-bit-looking "enemy" characters, which is superimposed on a live video image of the physical plaza itself. The goal of the game is for the players to physically move around the plaza to sweep the "enemies" off screen. (Or catch them like fireflies, if you prefer.) The game was meant to be casual: easily intuited rules, instant visual feedback, and a porous structure so that players could enter and leave the gamespace at will without disrupting the gameplay. Which meant that the interaction design had to be ultra-casual as well--so transparent that the energy barrier of joining the game was reduced to nearly zero.

The game designers programmed City Fireflies to track a much simpler indicator for each player: the glowing rectangle of light emitted by the smartphone screen itself. It’s the perfect solution: No apps to install or procedures to explain. City Fireflies simply directs players to point their phones at the giant game screen, and start moving around. The instant visual feedback is clear: The phone becomes your "net" for catching and removing the digital avatars onscreen.

[Read more about City Fireflies]

Sensual Streets - 7 Senses Streets

Residential streets are public spaces, at our front door. We engage with them throughout the day - commuting to work, afternoon walks with the dog, putting the bins out. Yet for most of us this space remains a placeholder between the traffic channel and our front fence. It's time to convert them into usable, inspiring place.

The above picture shows how the street is transformed into a tree-lined play and exploration zone, incorporating a sensory garden, community gathering space and improved connections between the street and the parklands that meet the cul-de-sac.


Here's the link to the article written by Tobias Volbert, a Landscape Architect and Project Development Manager at Playscape Creations.
http://www.placefocus.com/Blog/

Book Recommendation

The Endless City 

By The London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the world is faced with an unprecedented challenge. It must address a fundamental shift in the world’s population towards the cities, and away from mankind’s rural roots. The book’s foundation statistic is that in 1900, 10 percent of the population lived in cities. Today, that figure has edged over 50 percent and by 2050, within the career span of many of today’s urban design practitioners, 75 percent of the world’s population will be urbanites. This means serious change.

The book is the outcome of two years of investigation into six different cities: New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin. The cities chosen give a broad description of the shades of global urban change, yet because the book is so good, even after five hundred-odd pages it still feels as though there could have been room for a few more cities to really complete the picture.

The book’s power is in making vast quantities of data accessible and interesting to the coffee table browser, while its essays have enough depth to appeal to the professional urbanist. Definitely a worthy browse, even for the pretty graphics.

Book Recommendation

Welcome to the greatest young planner book review page! Here we'll scourer the interweb in search of the best books out there and what better way to start off with one of the seminal books that changed the way people view cities, none other than Jane Jacobs' "Death and Life of Great American Cities".

"Death and Life of Great American Cities" 
By Jane Jacobs

Jacobs challenged conventional modern city planning and city architectural design. In the opening sentence, Jacobs declares war on the major schools of urban planning:

“This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women’s magazines.”

Conventional planning, she noticed, did not seem to create vibrant, livable neighborhoods but rather killed whatever good had once been present. Looking into how cities actually work, rather than how they should work according to urban designers and planners, Jacobs effectively describes the real factors affecting cities, and recommends strategies to enhance actual city performance.

"Death and Life" made four recommendations for creating municipal diversity:

1. A street or district must serve several primary functions.

2. Blocks must be short.

3. Buildings must vary in age, condition, use and rentals.

4. Population must be dense.

These seemingly simple notions represented a major rethinking of modern planning. They were coupled with fierce condemnations of the writings of the planners Sir Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, as well as those of the architect Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford, who championed their ideal of graceful towers rising over exquisite open spaces.

Some critics, a few of whom had an axe to grind, such as Mumford, the eminent critic and social historian, wrote the following reply in a New Yorker article: "Like a construction gang bulldozing a site clean of all habitations, good or bad, she bulldozes out of existence every desirable innovation in urban planning during the last century, and every competing idea, without even a pretense of critical evaluation."

The book achieved a remarkably wide readership, perhaps because it's such a rare joy to read a book about cities written by someone who actually seems to appreciate what makes them fun to live in. Planners began to think about networks rather than grids; to whisper about pedestrians rather than motorists; to talk openly about urban infill rather than suburban sprawl; to speak out boldly on behalf of mixed-use buildings and diverse, self-governing neighbourhoods.

Jacobs’ ideas have been the foundation for the New Urbanism movement in an effort to promote social interaction by incorporating such Jacobean features as ground-floor retail in suburban developments.

You can get the 50^th anniversary edition on amazon for a mere 17.60 clamshells!! LINK

How Better Urban Design Makes Us Healthier, Happier, and Sexier

I knew I became a planner for a reason....to make people more sexier