INFOGRAPHIC
Quoctrung Bui, Matt A.V. Chaban And Jeremy White, New York Times, May 20 2016
As the zoning code enters its second century, it is worth considering the ways it has shaped the city; whether and where it is still working; and how it might be altered so the city can continue to grow without obliterating everything New Yorkers love about it.
SHORT FILM
Hugo Macdonald, Monocle, 2016
Choosing to live in a city is chooosing to enter into a relationship with it. And like any human relationship, the relationship you have with your city is one that requites nurturing, constant practice and work.
For Hugo Macdonald’s School of Life book of the same name click here.
TALK
Travis Kalanick, Ted Talk, February 2016
Now, in China everything is supersized, and so we’re doing 15 million uberPOOL trips per month, that’s 500,000 per day. And of course we’re seeing that exponential growth happen. In fact, we’re seeing it in LA, too. And when I talk to my team, we don’t talk about, “Hey, well, 100,000 people carpooling every week and we’re done.” How do we get that to a million? And in China, well, that could be several million.
To read Jarrett Walker‘s response in City Lab to Uber’s (and other tech “disruptors” of transportation) approach to public transport click here.
Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, 23 Oct 2015
ARTICLE
Technically, Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker is a biography of urban planner Robert Moses, but that description feels laughably inadequate on multiple counts. For more than four decades, this particular urban planner was the most powerful man in New York, an unelected emperor who dominated the mayors and governors who were supposedly in charge, and who physically reshaped the city through sheer force of will. Caro’s enormous book, meanwhile, is less a life story than an epic, meticulously detailed study of power in general: how it’s acquired, how it’s used to change history, how it ultimately corrupts those who get it.
See also Citizen Jane: Battle for the City.
TALK
Ben Wellington, Ted Broadway, 20 April 2015
So I consider those to be making impact as well … To do that, once again, I think you really need to think about some of the things about storytelling, like Connect with People, Try to Convey one Idea, Keep it Simple and Explore the Things You Know Best.
For more of Ben Wellington’s quantitative analysis of NYC Open Data click here.
ARTICLE
Sarah Goodyear, CityLab, 20 Mar 2015
The phrase “tactical urbanism” came into use just a few short years ago, coined by a group of young planners and activists and popularized by an online guide to phenomena such as guerrilla wayfinding, pop-up markets, and DIY traffic-calming.
Many of those nimble urban-improvement techniques, which often originated in the activist community, have since gone mainstream. Cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia, for instance, have been rapidly installing parklets where parking spaces used to go, a practice that originated with an annual grassroots action called Park(ing) Day.
To listen to a panel discussion about Tactical Urbanism, hosted by the New York Times and including Mike Lydon, click here.
To find out more about Mike Lydon and his Street Plans practice click here, for links to Street Plan’s books click here, and to download their guides to Tactical Urbanism click here. Several of these guides have been co-authored with similar placemaking firms around the world including Co-Design Studio (Australia), Ciudad Emergente (Chile), and TaMaLaCà (Italy).
TALK
Mark Gorton, Street Films, 22 April 2014
We know that for much of the history of urban planning and architecture the people who build our cities, who build public spaces, who create buildings and city systems, often they will tell us they are building for our happiness, it’s the end goal of everything all of us do anyway, except they rarely provide evidence to demonstrate that they are making us happier with their creations. So I found this very curious, and looking at the last couple of decades of terrific work being done in neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology, we’re actually starting to gain some evidence that tells us a little bit of the effect of the urban system on our our own well being, on how we feel and how we treat other people.
For see Charles Montgomery’s book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design on Good Reads click here.
TALK
Amanda Burden, TED, March 2014
… I knew that places like Paley Park didn’t happen by accident. I saw firsthand that they required incredible dedication and enormous attention to detail.
TALK
Janette Sadik-Khan, TED, September 2013
And so, I think that the lesson that we have from New York is that it’s possible to change your streets quickly, it’s not expensive, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. You just need to reimagine your streets. They’re hidden in plain sight.
To learn more about Janette Sadik-Khan’s work on streets and transportation, click here.
ARTICLE
Arch Daily, 11 August, 2013
In accordance with modernist ideals of progress (which encouraged the annihilation of tradition), The Radiant City was to emerge from a tabula rasa: it was to be built on nothing less than the grounds of demolished vernacular European cities. The new city would contain prefabricated and identical high-density skyscrapers, spread across a vast green area and arranged in a Cartesian grid, allowing the city to function as a “living machine.” Le Corbusier explains: “The city of today is a dying thing because its planning is not in the proportion of geometrical one fourth. The result of a true geometrical lay-out is repetition, The result of repetition is a standard. The perfect form.”
For images and information on Le Corbusier’s architectural projects on the UNESCO World Heritage List click here. See also Citizen Jane: The Battle for the City, The Human Scale and The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
What they needed was investment in their children. What they needed was safer streets. What they got? A monorail.
BOOK
Edward L. Glaeser, Penguin Press, 2011
Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution. The great prosperity of contemporary London and Bangalore and Tokyo comes from their ability to produce new thinking. Wandering these cities—whether down cobblestone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways—is to study nothing less than human progress.
For a talk by Edward Glaeser at UC San Diego summarising this book click here. For a discussion of Glaeser’s work on eliminating barriers to innovation for food trucks by The Urbanist, Alan Davies click here.
SHORT FILM
Monocle, 9 July 2010
What’s great about this now is that it’s a great model for other cities across the country, who are beginning to think that maybe high quality design of public space isn’t something that comes after the fact, but is maybe something that we invest in now, in order to spur significant economic development and ensure a higher quality of urban life.
To visit the Field Operations website click here.
TALK
Eric Sanderson, Ted Talk, July 2009
But every time I would return from my trips I’d return back to New York City. And on my weekends I would go up, just like all the other tourists, to the top of the Empire State Building, and I’d look down on this landscape, on these ecosystems, and I’d wonder, “How does this landscape work to make habitat for plants and animals? How does it work to make habitat for animals like me?” I’d go to Times Square and I’d look at the amazing ladies on the wall, and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them. I’d go to Central Park and see the rolling topography of Central Park come up against the abrupt and sheer topography of midtown Manhattan.
For the Manahatta Project and beyond click here.
DOCUMENTARY
William H. Whyte, Project for Public Spaces, 1980
One major finding began to shine through, and I’ll now share it with you. ‘People tend sit where there are places to sit.’ This may not strike you as an intellectual bombshell, but this simple lesson is one that very few cities have ever heeded – they’re tough places to sit in.
This documentary is not available on line at this time of writing, but if you can get hold if it, it is a great watch.