Tag: urbanism

Reviving Dead Spaces

In a dense city like New York, the residual space beneath the 1100km of elevated transportation infrastructure can no longer be an afterthought. The millions of m2 of these sites, nearly 4x the size of Central Park, arguably encompass one of the most blighting influences on the city’s neighborhoods, yet also constitute one of the last development frontiers

Peak Sprawl

We tend to think of urban sprawl in America as a product of the Interstate Highway System built in the 1950s and 1960s. Metro area residents who might have been inclined to live near work in the city took the chance to head up the road, find a parcel of land for a single-family home, and commute into work by car. Others followed and pushed development farther out until we got the sprawled out metros we know today.

Some new work published today in the journal PNAS challenges this timeline—showing evidence of sprawl dating back to the 1920s. Using precise, street-level data at the county level, Christopher Barrington-Leigh of McGill University and Adam Millard-Ball of UC-Santa Cruz report that sprawl was rising well before 1950, then grew steadily through the 1990s. The researchers also conclude that US sprawl peaked around 1994 and has been falling ever since.

Mapping Rome underground

We journeyed via the icy, crystal clear waters of subterranean aqueducts that feed the Trevi fountain and 2000 year old sewers which still function beneath the Roman Forum today, to decadent, labyrinthine catacombs. Our laser scans map these hidden treasures, revealing for the first time the complex network of tunnels, chambers and passageways without which Rome could not have survived as a city of 1M people.

Dubai Make Believe

Dubai’s Museum of the Future to be Partially 3D Printed. Inscriptions from Sheikh Mohammed’s Arabic poetry appears to be etched into the facade, while a massive hologram is shown to fill the structure’s oval-shaped void.

all of these middle east oil kleptocracies are creating some interesting infrastructure in their flailing efforts to attain cultural relevance.

Rebuild cities before population decline

What we need is for self-driving cars to become available and cheap enough in cities that are still growing fast enough, and which have legal and political support for driving such cars fast close together, so they can achieve high throughput. That is, people need to be sufficiently rewarded for using cars in ways that allow more road throughput. And then economic activity needs to move from old cities to the new more efficient cities.