Category: (New) Traditional Cities

(New) Traditional Cities City Planners / Urban Designers City Solutions Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Streets, Roads & Mobility Sustainable Cities Talks The Public Realm

7 principles for building better cities

TALK

Peter Calthorpe, TED, April 2017

So there are seven principles that have now been adopted by the highest levels in the Chinese government, and they’re moving to implement them. And they’re simple, and they are globally, I think, universal principles.

One is to preserve the natural environment, the history and the critical agriculture.

Second is mix. Mixed use is popular, but when I say mixed, I mean mixed incomes, mixed age groups as well as mixed-land use.

Walk. There’s no great city that you don’t enjoy walking in. You don’t go there. The places you go on vacation are places you can walk. Why not make it everywhere?

Bike is the most efficient means of transportation we know. China has now adopted policies that put six meters of bike lane on every street. They’re serious about getting back to their biking history.

Complicated planner-ese here: connect. It’s a street network that allows many routes instead of singular routes and provides many kinds of streets instead of just one.

Ride. We have to invest more in transit. There’s no silver bullet. Autonomous vehicles are not going to solve this for us. As a matter of fact, they’re going to generate more traffic, more VMT, than the alternative.

And focus. We have a hierarchy of the city based on transit rather than the old armature of freeways.

It’s a big paradigm shift, but those two things have to get reconnected in ways that really shape the structure of the city.

To visit Calthorpe Associates website click here.

(New) Traditional Cities City Planners / Urban Designers City Solutions Talks Walking

4 ways to make a city more walkable

TALK

Jeff Speck, TED, October 2013

If you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that’s as good as a drive or better. What does that mean? It means you need to offer four things simultaneously: there needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable and the walk has to be interesting. You need to do all four of these things simultaneously, and that’s the structure of my talk today, to take you through each of those.

For more from Jeff Speck and his work as an advocate for walkable cities, click here.

(New) Traditional Cities Activists Articles Cities for People Codes, Density & Urban Form Garden Cities Mega Cities Modernist Cities

The evolution of urban planning in 10 diagrams

ARTICLE

City Lab, Emily Badger, 9 Nov 2012

The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.

For more about SPUR and their work in the San Francisco Bay Area click here.