Despite the impulse to marvel at Hong Kong’s sophisticated planning for and investment in infrastructure and urban density, might people there welcome some New York-style urbanism? Norman Oder, author of the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report, recaps two conferences that suggest that New York’s mechanisms for community input on development projects, imperfect as they are… 
Tuesday morning, I attended the final vote of the Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing on whether or not to confer historic protection to 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan. The commission voted unanimously (9-0) against protecting the site. For this…
Consider some simple math about people and land. If all of Earth’s six billion people were to live at the density we do here in the five boroughs of New York City, all of humanity would occupy less than one half of one percent of the earth’s land mass. Only…
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As oil spills into the Gulf, blood spills in the streets of Greece, and cash spills from terrorist wallets into the hands of willing airline agents, one wonders who can clean up this mess. We tell our children to clean up after themselves, but can we? Disciplining a child is a perilous affair, but in the end self-discipline is the challenge. Self-discipline requires introspection, but how much of it can we muster in a world careening towards 9 billion people? |
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For the past few days, something has been missing from the urban landscape of London. A quick scan of the city’s streets – red busses, black cabs – shows nothing amiss. Beneath…
Vishaan Chakrabarti takes Jaime Lerner’s transformation of Curitiba as a powerful call to action for designers to initiate change in architectural, ecological, political and urban terms.
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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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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. |
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 and…
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Nancy Levinson reviews some provocative positions on infrastructure and challenges designers to recast the relationship between individual initiative and political community. |
