opinion
Empowering the City:
London / New York
Gerald Frug contrasts the structures and powers of city government in London and New York in order to ask a crucial urban question: what are our cities empowered to do?
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Double Down on Density
Vishaan Chakrabarti responds to President Obama’s State of the Union Address and considers how heightened investment in the Infrastructure of Tomorrow could be our silver bullet.
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On Criticism 6: On Bias in Criticism
Every building, indeed every project of urban or landscape design, is a response to a multitude of questions, some intrinsic to the specifics of site, program and economics, others more general to the profession’s internal discourse and still others to the culture at large. It is the first job of the critic to list…
The Public Works
Nancy Levinson reviews some provocative positions on infrastructure and challenges designers to recast the relationship between individual initiative and political community.
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On Criticism 5
Landscape/architectural criticism today is often conservative and superficial. I attribute this to two main causes; the modern insecurity of the professions, and the mystification of the academic aspect of landscape/architecture and their concomitant critics and apologists. The first issue, the insecurity of the landscape/architecture professions, is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the fallout from Modernism…
The Need for Collaboration: Design Professionals are a Few Amongst Many
With the internet, all the information that we need for a design can be found online, yes? With the right software and training an individual designer can make a difference, championing the environment, fostering sustainability, and forging anew the zeitgeist of the day. Right? Even though our professions have enormous potential…
Being Dense about Denmark
With climate change talks raging in Copenhagen, Vishaan Chakrabarti imagines a city-focused national strategy to make our country healthy, prosperous and green.
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SeeClickFix responds to Letting Off Some Steam
I was intrigued by the post, Letting Off Some Steam, and would like to take a shot at answering the question, “What other infrastructures do you think are ripe for public involvement?” My observations are based on real use of smart phone, mobile web and web reporting on SeeClickFix - a…
Getting beyond hyperlocal
In 2003, as a grad student at NYU, I created a site called Neighbornode, which was a series of bulletin boards for local neighborhood residents to log on to and talk to each other in cities. The site was very simple, and to be totally honest a bit of a hack (I was never a fabulous coder). But the idea alone was enough to attract a good amount of attention and interest from...
Hyperlocal news makes news: the case of Everyblock
Yesterday's reports of MSNBC's acquisition of Adrian Holovaty's Everyblock have generally treated the latter as a "hyperlocal news service." And to be sure, this is abetted by some of the language Everyblock itself uses to frame and describe what it offers: a "news feed for your block" which can help you "find news nearby." But for whatever it's worth, I've never understood Everyblock's fundamental proposition in quite this way, and here's why I think understanding what it offers as "news" is giving it short shrift
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