News Roundup › Urban Design

All of the great challenges that confront the 21st-century city — from class, race and environmental issues to the continuing duel between history and modernity — are crystallized in New Orleans.

Yet the kind of visionary urban plan that could address these issues in a bold and thoughtful way has yet to materialize. Instead, some of the country’s greatest architectural minds are inventing the future in cities like Beijing, Shenzhen and Dubai, where their talents are more appreciated.

Source: The New York Times

A year after the introduction of the sturdy gray bicycles known as Velib’s, they are being used all over Paris. The bikes are cheap to rent because they are subsidized by advertising, and other major cities, including American ones, are exploring similar projects.

Source: The New York Times

“The time has come to see the potential for this corridor not only be used as a path for people to walk or bike to work and to better their health, but also to knit communities along the greenway together,” said Bart Everson, the FOLC’s board chair.

Source: The Times-Picayune

“Ambitious projects will be put on hold, but I don’t think they’ll throw away the blueprints,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “A lot of inner cities are going through a bit of a renaissance for broader demographic reasons that will remain in place for a while. Aging baby boomers are becoming empty nesters and they’re thinking of moving back to the urban core.”

Source: Business Week

“New Orleans is a great place for biking,” says Lando, his enthusiasm undimmed by potholes and a paucity of dedicated bike lanes. “It’s flat, everything is so close together. I can get from the French Quarter to the Riverbend in 20 minutes. I can go from our house to Petco on Manhattan (Boulevard) and come back with 30 pounds of dog food in the same amount of time it takes me to go by car. And it’s a great way to see the neighborhood.”

Source: The Times-Picayune

Welcome to the “walkable community”— a design movement transforming American suburban neighborhoods just as the cul-de-sac and strip mall once did. It could be the new green wave of the future for Western New York, changing forever the built environment as we know it in an era of obscene gas prices.

Source: The Buffalo News

From Elysian Fields to the St. Bernard Parish line, St. Claude Avenue now hosts New Orleans’ first bike lane. Consider this a down payment on what’s to come.

Source: WWOZ Street Talk

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we’ll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We’ll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We’ll have to restore local economic networks — the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed — made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

Source: Washington Post

Nineteen grants totaling more than $581,000 have been awarded to help bring to life some of the neighborhood recovery projects envisioned in the Unified New Orleans Plan for rebuilding the city after Hurricane Katrina.

Source: Times-Picayune

“This is about the future of the Warehouse District and whether it is going to continue to be four- and five-story residences or whether it’s going to be a series of Miami South Beach towers. If I wanted to live in South Beach I would have moved there,” Rubenstein said

Source: City Business

“We built the opera house in two months, the botanical gardens in three months, Niemeyer’s museum in five months. We transformed the city’s main street into a pedestrian area in 72 hours. It wasn’t that we were chasing after records - it was necessity.”

Wally N’Dow, former head of the UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), has described Curitiba as “a wonderful example, because cities that follow this lead can jumpstart the economies, assist the poorest of their poor, and clean up their cities.”

Source: Guardian

It’s not necessarily the billion-euro development, star-architect-designed gallery or shiny new ferris wheel that makes locals feel good about their town. Monocle believes that the measure of a city is more about everyday wonders — pavements, well-designed schools, punctual transport — rather than one-off, grand projets. Here’s our list of the top 25 urban elements that make the city.

Source: International Herald Tribune

FOLC said the Lafitte Greenway will encourage economic revitalization; create transportation alternatives, such as walking, biking and connections to transit; improve public health; and promote cultural tourism by connecting to neighborhood attractions.

Source: City Business

The twin hospitals would consume nearly 70 acres of a national historic district, obliterating the Deutsches Haus, a German cultural center; the former McDonogh No. 11 school, a landmark that dates to 1879; and scores of classic shotgun- and sidehall-style homes, including four that were renovated after Katrina with $45,000 in historic preservation grants from the state. The Dixie Brewery and the modernist City Hall annex also sit inside the hospital footprint, although city leaders have indicated those buildings could be spared.

Source: Times-Picayune

In recent years, downtown Mississauga has amassed both significant density and a reasonably broad mix of land uses. But its sidewalks remain virtually empty, especially when compared with the attractive central areas of the world’s great cities. And it’s that lack of street life that Canada’s sixth-largest city hopes to address starting with Parkside Village by Vancouver-based developer Amacon.

Source: Toronto Star

Once completed, the concrete segment of the Wisner route will be among the city’s major paved off-street bike infrastructure, joining the 1.79-mile Mississippi River Levee path and the 1.38-mile West End path, said Jennifer Ruley, a bicycle and pedestrian engineer with the Louisiana Public Health Institute.

Source: Times-Picayune

The 2,500 square feet of space on the first floor of the circa-1820 building, which by the summer of 2009 will contain half a million dollars’ worth of exhibits, will launch what the superintendent calls the “soft opening” of one of 391 national parks.

It also could refer tourists and others to its satellite site, a $12 million “world-class jazz museum” under development at the Old U.S. Mint in the French Quarter, and to a jazz walk of fame along the levee in Algiers, a short ferry ride away.

Source: Times-Picayune

After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the Council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects here.

Source: New York Times

Far from being what the market wants, sprawl is a Ponzi scheme that depended on the securitization of mortgages into pools mixing form, content and risk into an unrecognizable hash. It was great bait—“what the market wants”—until the trawler nets came up empty.

Source: Counter Punch

Pre-Katrina, the St. Charles line, which extended from Canal Street to Carrollton Avenue and Claiborne Avenue, ran 24 hours a day, but the new Canal-to-Napoleon service will operate daily from 5:27 a.m. to 11:55 p.m. with a fleet of five 1923 Perley Thomas streetcars running 10 minutes apart.

Source: Times-Picayune

St. Charles Avenue, the “Jewel of America’s Grand Avenues,” has has been recognized as one of the top 10 avenues in America by the American Planning Association.

Source: City Business

The 162-acre site will be a mini-metropolis with movie theaters, restaurants, shopping, residences, gyms and schools, all helping revitalize Algiers, Kabacoff said. “Our concept opens up substantial portions of the base to community access,” Kabacoff said. “It includes public access to the waterfront area and the levee area of the base that will occur over time… . Our concept involves community participation with various groups in the area who would come on and try to reuse some of the existing buildings there.”

Source: City Business

The ORM has $2.4 million of an estimated $2.5 million needed to complete phase one, which includes developing a greenway between North Broad and Jefferson Davis Parkway. ORM will use $2 million from the $117 million authorized by the Louisiana Recovery Authority for the city, $313,000 from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development and a $95,000 grant from the American Institute of Architects to develop the park.

Source: City Business

Face it. We have a driving problem, and it’s killing us. We are addicted to driving, and we are in denial about it. We lash out at those who bring it to our attention and label them as “anti-car.” Unfortunately, that is about as constructive as labeling a doctor as “anti-food” if that doctor recommends a diet.

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinal

Launched in July, the “Velib” bikes were part of the Paris mayor’s idea of making the city more ecologically friendly and reducing traffic. Just two months on, the self-service bicycles have clocked some 3.7 million rides and seem to be changing the way people get around the city.

Source: National Public Radio

This illustrated list outlines the 10 simple steps to designing the city of the future.

Photographer Danny Lyon offers his ideas for improving cities.

“I have been asked to help design a city. I am flattered. In the past, this was the job of emperors and kings. Of course, today, things are a bit more complicated. Having benefited from a New York City public school education and 65 years of life, and with the peace of mind necessary for clear thought that I have now, living on my farms, where I raise my own vegetables and fish, I recommend the following:

1: First we kill the architects

2: Then we burn the malls…”

Source: The New York Times

Source: Times-Picayune

The model city for road closure is Bogotá, Colombia, which in 1983 embarked on a program called ciclovia (bike path), in which designated streets were closed to cars every Sunday but open for jogging, biking, dancing, playing ball, walking pets, strolling with babies — anything but driving. One-and-a-half million people now turn out each week for ciclovia. Other cities in Latin America followed suit, closing parts of parks or whole urban districts to cars — some intermittently, some permanently. A result: revitalized neighborhoods and an influx of people. Smaller US cities, from Davenport, Iowa, to Huntington Beach, Calif., are also starting to create car-free zones.

Source: Christian Science Monitor

The first time the group struck was on May 30. The gang spray-painted an illegal bike lane in the Annex, between Spadina Ave. and Bathurst St., along Bloor. To make the paths appear legitimate, painters stencilled the city’s bike lane logo - a bicycle and large diamond - along the road as well.

Source: The Star.com

[Louisiana] is getting ready to spend three hundred and fifty-eight million dollars on a gigantic automobile overpass along the northern edge of the Lower Ninth Ward, to connect downtown New Orleans with neighboring St. Bernard Parish. St. Bernard was home to sixty-seven thousand people before Katrina and to maybe a little more than a third of that now. Opponents call the overpass “the bridge to nowhere.”

Source: The New Yorker

Pease said the representative, an attorney for Victory, mentioned possible tenants but said no commitments had been made. But he gave examples including a 190,000-square-foot Target, an 80,000-square-foot Dick’s Sporting Goods, an 80,0000-square-foot Bed Bath & Beyond, a 50,000-square-foot bookstore and a 27,000-square-foot junior anchor.

Source: Times-Picayune

Frank’s team, like the other groups, found that areas with interspersed homes, shops, and offices had fewer obese residents than did homogeneous residential areas whose residents were of a similar age, income, and education. Furthermore, neighborhoods with greater residential density and street plans that facilitate walking from place to place showed below-average rates of obesity.

Source: Science News Online

Even with the reduction, the tower would be more than three times the 85-foot height limit allowed in the block by the city’s zoning law.

Source: The Times-Picayune

Penalosa made strides by ignoring some experts and their conventional wisdom. When Japanese consultants suggested he build seven elevated highways to solve the city’s traffic woes, Penalosa recalled, he did the opposite. Instead, the city invested in a world-class bus system, built pedestrian-only streets (one stretches 20 miles) and restricted car use in downtown Bogota. Thanks to a much-improved and “sexier” bus system, Penalosa said, public transportation in his city is actually too popular and 20% of rail riders own cars they don’t use.

Source: LA Downtown News Online

Councilman Tony Young, who joined the 5-3 majority, countered, “I have a vision for San Diego and that vision is about walkable, livable communities, not big, mega-structures that inhibit people’s lives.”

Source: msnbc.com

The main junction in Drachten handles about 22,000 cars a day. Where once there were traffic lights, there is a roundabout, an extended cycle path and pedestrian area. In the days of traffic lights, progress across the junction was slow as cars stopped and started. Now tailbacks are almost unheard of � and almost nobody toots a horn.

Source: Telegraph

The Regional Transit Authority will receive $43 million to repair its hurricane-damaged public transportation system.

Source: City Business

The office of Farr Associates is no next-generation green-building prototype — it’s located in the historic 114-year-old Monadnock Building, Chicago’s tallest all-brick skyscraper. But inside, green spores of sustainability burst forth. The open studio spaces have walls that have been painted by a local artist who used milk-based, non-toxic paints. The desktops are made of natural linoleum, and a translucent divider embedded with leaves separates one desk from another. “Occupancy sensors” trigger energy-conserving lights in the kitchenette, conference room, and main studio. Large, operable First Chicago School windows gaze over nearby Printer’s Row, letting in eastern and southern light that is welcomed by the many living creatures in the space.

Source: Grist

Lipman said many communities have identified a lack of affordable housing, traffic-clogged roads and longer commutes as critical issues but have not linked them. “One thing this study shows is the need to have regional solutions about both housing and transportation,” she said.

Source: Washington Post

The story of how the Army Corps of Engineers drowned New Orleans does not pack the kind of emotional power that leaves telepathic TV personalities almost speechless. It is a story that takes place mostly in the fine print of technical studies and appropriation bills, long before the rooftop rescues. But it’s still a story that should tighten your throat.

Source: Dallas Morning News

When the Central Artery expressway was built in the 1950s, it carved through Boston indiscriminately, destroying sections of Chinatown and effectively cutting off the North End from the rest of the city. Half a century later, as part of the massive Big Dig construction project, much of the elevated expressway has been torn down. In its place will be the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a nearly 30-acre stretch of parks and public spaces that promises to reunite neighborhoods long divided.

Source: Good Magazine

Question: How did you go from neighborhood rallies to running a nationally renowned organization?

Answer: Well, the street protests were cute and motivating and all, but eventually I decided it was time to get serious. In 2001, I founded Sustainable South Bronx — not as a moral crusade, but as an economic-development group that was about planning our future, not just reacting to environmental blight. I wanted to play offense, not defense. I wanted to give our community permission to dream, to plan for healthy air, healthy jobs, healthy children, and safe streets.

Source: Grist Magazine

While visiting Portland for the first time several years ago, the Stanleys wandered into Southpark Seafood Grill & Wine Bar in downtown Portland, where a bartender asked the couple where they were from and then said: “Boston, New York—these cities will be the same in 50 years. But Portland is changing, and you should be part of that.” It reinforced the idea that that’s going to be an adventure for us,” Natasha Stanley says. “We saw this energy and this opportunity.” And what young person doesn’t want an adventure?

Source: BusinessWeek Online

Construction will begin on Poydras Street in the first quarter of 2007 on the $400-million condo/hotel/retail project by real estate mogul Donald Trump.

Source: City Business

“We don’t need a facsimile of ourselves,” said David Waggonner, of Waggonner & Ball, a New Orleans architecture firm that has been active in post-hurricane planning. “There were some good ideas in old New Orleans. There are ideas worth studying, and we should learn from them, but it’s not my nature to think it’s natural to copy.”

Source: New York Times

“Louisiana residents need the tools to rebuild their homes and their lives,” said Donna Fraiche, LRA Board Member and Long Term Community Planning Task Force Chair. “The LRA’s Louisiana Speaks Pattern Book will guide Louisianans toward rebuilding their homes safer, stronger and smarter.”

Source: Louisiana Recovery Authority

Chicago is set to unveil new plans for becoming a bicyclist’s haven. And this time, it means business. The new Bike 2015 Plan wastes little time on breezy rides in the park. Instead, the city’s Department of Transportation is bent on getting people to bike to work, to school, to stores and to mass transit stops, cobbling together a 500-mile network of designated routes.

Source: Chicago Tribune

On May 25, at the urging of lame-duck Councilman Jay Batt, the council unanimously approved plans for a 14,700-square-foot Walgreens at the site. Although the store would face Carrollton, it would be built far back in the block, next to Claiborne and near Dublin Street, with a large parking lot in front.

But on Thursday, with Midura having replaced Batt in the District A seat and three other new members on board, the council voted 7-0 to reconsider the previous action and then to defer a decision on Walgreens’ plans until its June 22 meeting.

Source: Times-Picayune

“It’s a rare thing to see people just kind of come together in a collective to really tackle a project like this,” he said. “Most planning efforts tend to be top-down.”

Source: Times Picayune

So, Barbara Bush was right after all when she said, “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.” And Rep. Richard Baker, a 10-term Republican from Baton Rouge, was right when he was overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” The publication of both statements elicited public condemnation and was followed by a flurry of hairsplitting denials. But it is now clear that their only transgression was to say in unvarnished language what many pundits, politicians, and policy wonks were thinking.

Source: The Black Commentator

An agreement that will be discussed at this week’s WTO
ministerial meeting in Hong Kong poses a serious threat to state and
local authority over land use policy, according to Public Citizen. Big
box retailers such as Wal-Mart are pushing for new provisions in the
WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services that could further
undermine local zoning and other land use and development policies.

Among the local laws threatened by GATS rules are those that impose size and height restrictions on big box stores; limits on hours of operation; economic needs tests before stores can be approved; and limits on development to protect the environment or protect historic and cultural sites. No state or local group has yet recognized the threat posed to land use laws and local sovereignty by the WTO’s one-size-fits-all rules for service firms. One group that has recognized this threat is major
retail firms.

“Major big box retail corporations have been eyeing the GATS as a way of gutting local zoning and land use laws that have kept them out of
communities in Europe and the United States.”

Source: Public Citizen

As a resident of tech-savvy Austin, Texas, Adina Levin enjoys the benefits of widespread wireless Internet access. Austin is one of a number of cities in the nation that has built a system that allows residents to log on to the Internet without worrying about plugging into a phone or cable outlet. Levin wants the rest of the state to have the same advantage.

That’s why she spent much of the spring battling a bill in the state legislature that would have made it nearly impossible for other cities to emulate Austin. A provision in a lengthy telecommunications bill would have made it illegal for local governments to offer residents high-speed Internet access.

Source: Public Integrity

Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans will deploy the nation’s first municipally owned wireless Internet system that will be free for all users, part of an effort to jump-start recovery by making living and doing business in the city as attractive as possible.

Much of the equipment to run the network was donated by companies, but New Orleans will own it and operate all its components at the outset. The system, which uses devices mounted on streetlights to beam out fast Internet connections for wireless-enabled computers, is scheduled to be operational today in the central business district and the French Quarter and to be expanded over time.

Source: Washington Post

At one time, the quickest way to kill an idea in New Orleans was to suggest that it had worked well in Baton Rouge. Maybe, after all the good things that have been done around here for New Orleans and its people in the wake of two hurricanes, New Urbanism will get a better reception than it would have three months ago.

The New Urbanist philosophy of urban design guided the development of the highly successful Plan Baton Rouge master plan for downtown. It is in some respects a back-to-the-future idea: building more traditional neighborhoods and linking them with all forms of transportation to improve the quality of life.

New Urbanism can and should be the guiding philosophy behind rebuilding New Orleans, in part because there are parts of the city that already show the benefits of more than 200 years of “new” urbanism. But it can be improved through better use of mass transit and better building materials, and through replacing public facilities — from schools to parks to police stations — in better locations than today.

Source: The Advocate

Peering out from a white-fenced balcony that looks out on nothing much, Katrina evacuee Stephanie Gleason said, “To tell the truth, I don’t know where we live.”

There is no bus stop here. The nearest supermarket is a $20 cab ride away.

Gleason’s cookie-cutter apartment complex, Eagles Landing, feels more like a bird cage than a nest.

Flushed out of their city — one of the most dense and most vibrant in the country — many of the New Orleanians who came here car-less find themselves living amid Austin’s car-enabled sprawl.

More or less trapped, their lives are a quick, sharp study of the isolation of suburbia.

Source: Austin American-Statesman

Analyses of the failure of all levels of government to prevent or effectively manage the Katrina calamity in New Orleans have generally missed a crucial point. Alongside bias against poor people and African-Americans is automobile apartheid, born of fifty years of suburban sprawl. First-class citizens drive motor vehicles, second-class Americans walk, cycle, or ride public transit. Certainly many of the latter are poor, but millions more are middle-class Americans.

When emergency response largely ignores the plight of second-class citizens, no one should be surprised.

Source: Grist Magazine

The Mayors’ Institute on City Design will hold two special design institutes in Biloxi, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana for communities impacted by Hurricane Katrina. The institutes will bring leading experts in architecture and design together with mayors from these hard-hit regions to talk about rebuilding their communities.

The City Design Institute in New Orleans will be held on Tuesday, November 15 and will focus exclusively on rebuilding New Orleans.

Source: Planetizen

“Foundation grants are awarded to encourage and facilitate the design, development, construction, and operation of new skateboard parks and facilities in low-income communities. Grants may be requested in amounts ranging from $1,000 to $25,000.”

Source: Tony Hawk Foundation

“Shifting housing demographics are stoking interest around the USA in development near transit, according to a study for the Federal Transit Administration released last month. City living draws singles, aging baby boomers, minorities and young couples more than suburban families with kids. And those groups are growing faster than suburbanites.”

Source: USA Today

“Sound urban design and smart architecture create bustling streets and people-filled parks where young and old safely walk and talk, see old friends and feel confident they will not be attacked. Well-planned cities create communities where neighbors can meet in the local cafe, talk about their concerns, say hi to the other patrons and feel connected to the shared public spaces filled with old and new friends.”

Source: The L.A. Times

“The funeral is now being arranged for urban planning in Cincinnati — the first city in the country to have a comprehensive master plan (1925) and the birthplace of city and regional planning as applied in the U.S.”

Source: Cincinnati Post

The study showed that people living in sprawled cities are more likely to: drive further, own more cars per capita, breathe more polluted air, die in car crashes and walk less.

Source: City Business

“When there are laws on the books, you shouldn’t have to ask citizens to buy property to save their neighborhood,” he says.

Source: City Business