Category: City Planners / Urban Designers

Canada Cities for People City Planners / Urban Designers Codes, Density & Urban Form Leadership & Decision Making Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Streets, Roads & Mobility Suburban Cities Talks

Brent Toderian on sustainable mobility

TALK

Brent Toderian, You Tube, 7 September 2018

Prioritisation was the key, this was in the 1997 Transportation Plan, which was a catalyst for – I call it the most important Urban Design Plan we’ve ever done as a city, even though it’s a transportation plan – because that prioritisation, walking first, then cycling, then transit, then goods movement, and then the car, priotirized last, has been the key to all our multi-modal city making. To be clear that is not an anti-car message, we don’t ban the car,  we very rarely have any places where the cars aren’t allowed, but we prioritise them last, in terms of how we think about our infrastructure, our spatial decisions in the city, and that actually works better for everyone – including drivers. 

For more from Brent Toderain click here.

Articles Australia Bring Data City Planners / Urban Designers Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Smart Cities Talks The Public Realm

Can our Tweets help us build better cities?

ARTICLE

Poppy Johnston, The Fifth Estate, 4 September 2018

By pooling publicly-available data from social media and other unconventional information sources – such as reviews and ratings sites, travel wikis, mapping sites, and event promotion pages – the company is able to depict in real-time the unique social fabric of a neighbourhood.

“We have memories and thoughts about spaces, and it’s that intangible stuff that makes somewhere sticky,” Ms Hartley, who is also the company’s chief innovation officer, told The Fifth Estate.

“It’s traditionally been hard to put data behind this and hard to put a value to it. Determining social value has also been hard because neighbourhoods are in a constant state of change,” she said

To visit Lucinda Hartley and co-founder Jessica Christiansen-Franks’s social analytics platform Neighbourlytics click here. To visit their placemaking consultancy Co-Design Studio click here.

Articles Cities for People City Planners / Urban Designers Streets, Roads & Mobility USA

There are better ways to get around town

ARTICLE

John Massengale, New York Times, 15 May 2018

New York City’s Department of Transportation has led the American movement for better streets …

The next step is to adopt congestion pricing below 96th Street in Manhattan and then:

1. Decrease the number of Manhattan streets that function as transportation corridors primarily devoted to moving machines through the city.

2. Design and build Slow Zones where people actually drive slowly.

3. Make the transportation corridors that remain better urban places, with a better balance between city life and moving cars.

Cities for People City Planners / Urban Designers Infographics Streets, Roads & Mobility USA

Automated vehicles can’t save cities

INFOGRAPHIC

Allison Arieff, New York Times, 27 February 2018

When we think about designing the future city, let’s focus on moving as many people as possible. For a starting point, considering how many people can move through a city using each transportation option:

Transit moves the most people – up to 25,000 people per hour, so make transit the first priority.

Next comes walking, with 9,000 people per hour on new, larger sidewalks.

Dedicated bus lanes carry 8,000 passengers an hour. Two-way bike lanes carry 7,500 per hour. Those come next. 

Whether they have drivers or not, cars move the fewest people per hour – about 600 to 1,600.

When we understand that urban transportation is about moving – people not cars – our priorities for space and investment become obvious.

Urban design is really the language of the city. When you walk down the street everything you see has been designed.

Amanda Burden, urban planner

Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect

City Planners / Urban Designers Global Housing Leadership & Decision Making Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Podcasts Populism & Digital Disruption Suburban Cities Urban Economics USA

The New Urban Crisis

PODCAST

Andrew Tuck, Monocle, 4 May 2017

Special interview: Richard Florida

Our cities have become small little areas of concentrated wealth and advantage for the global super rich, for knowledge workers, for the members of my own creative class. It’s not just the 1%, it’s about a third of us who can make a go, but then the other two thirds, falling further and further behind and surrounding these areas of concentrated advantage much larger spans of concentrated disadvantage, and those are not only in the city, what’s so interesting about The New Urban Crisis, that’s spread out to what we used to think of as the great affluent suburbs, so it really is a new geographic divide in our society, and that divide is not only causing inequality it’s causing this terrible backlash.

To visit Richard Florida’s website click here, for an article from The Guardian about his previous thesis on The Creative Class and it’s relationship to The New Urban Crisis click here, and for a longer discussion of The New Urban Crisis with the LSE Cities Ricky Burdett click here.

(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.

Biking City Planners / Urban Designers City Solutions Denmark Short Films

Top ten design elements that make Copenhagen bicycle-friendly

SHORT FILMS

Copenhagenize Design Co., 8 Dec 2016

#01 The Big Picture – uniformity of bicycle network 

#02 The Green Wave for Cyclists – cyclist orientated traffic signalling  

#03 Intermodality – cycling integrated into all public transport options 

#04 Safety Details – design of traffic flow, stop line for cars, traffic lights, bus drop offs, use of rumble strips 

#05 Nørrebrogade – redesign of city artery 

#06 Macro Design – showcase projects that increase cycling network 

#07 Micro Design – tiny details that improve quality of cycling network 

#08 Cargo Bikes – 40,000 cargo bikes in Copenhagen 

#09 Desire Lines – urban design reflects how people actually use (or want to use) the city 

#10 Political Will – people in positions of responsibility who understand how to design a city for people

To learn more about Copenhagenize Design Co. and their work developing bicycle mobility networks click here.

Articles City Planners / Urban Designers City Solutions Codes, Density & Urban Form Newspapers (Print & Online)

What makes a city tick? Designing the ‘urban DMA’

ARTICLE

Kim Dovey & Elek Pafka, The Conversation, November 2, 2016

When we talk about “urban DMA”, we’re talking about the density of a city’s buildings, the way people and activities are mixed together, and the access, or transport networks that we use to navigate through them.

For more from The Conversation on cities, click here.

Articles Australia City Planners / Urban Designers Global Leadership & Decision Making Smart Cities Social & Economic Inequalities Sustainable Cities Urbanisation

Ten things you need to know about the New Urban Agenda

ARTICLE

Lucinda Hartley, Landscape Australia, 24 Oct 2016

The New Urban Agenda represents a paradigm shift in global thinking, recognising what professionals have perhaps understood for some time: that our future is urban. From gender-equity to youth-empowerment, participatory planning to inclusive public space, The New Urban Agenda sets a high benchmark for the type of urban development we should strive for and a global accountability framework for achieving it. Its catch-cry to “leave no one behind” commits to reducing urban inequality. This is a challenge that we can take up and apply to every city and neighbourhood.

For UN Habitat‘s New Urban Agenda whiteboard video click here.

First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works. 

Jan Gehl, architect

Streets and their sidewalks – the main public places of a city – are its most vital organs.

Jane Jacobs, journalist

When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.

Robert Moses, public official

The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy.

Le Corbusier, architect