urban planning in all places
An Ideal City - The 1912 Competition to Design Canberra 
A fascinating look at all of the 46 shortlisted entries for the 1912 competition to design Canberra, provided by the National Archives. Entries by Eliel Saarinen and Berrnard Maybeck are included.
Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute
“AHURI is dedicated to drawing together researchers, policy-makers, industry and the community in order:
- to achieve better housing market outcomes; and
- to achieve an effective and efficient housing assistance program; and
- to build viable communities”
City Comforts
a U.S. blog on, “cities, architecture, the ‘new urbanism,’ real estate, historic preservation, urban design, land use law, landscape, transport etc etc from a mildly libertarian stance.”
Cleantech Corridor & Green District Competition
The Southern California Institute of Architecture and The Architect’s Newspaper have launched the Los Angeles Cleantech Corridor and Green District Competition. The competition asks architects, landscape architects, designers, engineers, urban planners, students and environmental professionals to create an innovative urban vision for Los Angeles’ Cleantech Corridor, a several-mile-long development zone on the eastern edge of downtown LA.
The competition, which offers more than $11,000 in prize money, is presented with the Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles and the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), which established the Cleantech Corridor. It asks entrants to move beyond industrial uses- creating an integrated economic, residential, clean energy, and cultural engine for the city through architectural and urban strategies. Crucially, this competition will provide an open ideas forum for provocative, even revolutionary, new visions of LA’s urban fabric and infrastructure.
Professional and student competitors are also asked to consider the work already completed by the Urban Land Institute’s Advisory Service Panel for the Los Angeles Cleantech Corridor which is sponsored by the CRA/LA and the Department of Water and Power.
Ecological Urbanism vs. New Urbanism
An intelligent review of a 2010 debate at Harvard GSD, at Urban Omnibus.
Ecological Urbanism points out that New Urbanism, in its slavish devotion to density, ignores the urgent need to leave space for new, sustainable forms of urban infrastructure. Conversely, New Urbanism provides a counterweight to Ecological Urbanism’s obsession with infrastructure that ignores practical patterns of human settlement.
Lucio Costa's Pilot Plan for Brasilia
Lucio Costa’s presentation in 1957 of his hastily assembled plan for Brasilia, with pics.
“It was not my intention to enter the competition, and as a matter of fact I am not doing so – I am merely passing on a possible solution which was not sought but, so to speak, took shape almost spontaneously.”
Planetizen
Bleeding big website with a lot of contributors. They say: “It is a one-stop source for urban planning news, commentary, interviews, event coverage, book reviews, announcements, jobs, consultant listings, training, and more.”
Radiant City, 2006
Wow. I am in the midst of watching a documentary about the suburbs. It isn’t your usual documentary though. Maybe it’s even ground-breaking, and there is a lot of ground being broken out in the neighbourhood of Evergreen, in Cranston, Canada.
Spoiler alert
It’s a bit like David Byrne’s film True Stories, or Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, except it’s real. It follows a family about their daily lives in the edge city. But it follows them separately. Mum, instigator of the move to the ‘burbs, is nervy and defensive. Laid back Dad enjoys his ‘meditative’ daily two hour commutes, when he thinks over the local musical he is acting in: “The Suburbs”. It’s a tad satirical, so Mom hates it. The son finds play by climbing the mobile phone tower and playing paint ball on construction sites. The 10 year old daughter spends most of her time being chauffered between activities.
We also get to meet some of the people who’ve recently moved into the multi-residential ghetto, separated from the proper homes by a field. Separating the homes from the freeway and the big box stores.
Smart academics like James Howard Kunstler add their own take. Kunstler is fantastic as usual, an angry beat poet in a grey suit.
James Howard Kunstler
Um, thanks Canada, ad Joey Santiago (Pixies) for the music. Watch!
Ooooh, and there’s a big surprise at the end.
[ VIA SBS ]
Self made city / Self Made Urbanity
SELF MADE URBANITY is a multidisciplinary, collaborative and participatory research project initiated by urbanXchange.
The project observes the city of Rome as a cross point where urban phenomena of the Northern and Southern hemisphere are very near together.”
“SELF MADE CITY has changed name and address, to Self Made Urbanity- research.”
Sprawling from Grace: The Consequences of Suburbanisation
This U.S. documentary from 2008, freely available on Youtube, sells the virtues of the New Urban town centre to the general video-watching population. Unfortunately it uses scare tactics to do so. The first two-thirds warns of impending doom in the peak oil sense. It is only after about an hour of this that we get to their solution, which involves lots of footage of street-side cafes and light rail. The doco supports multi-residential developments alongside transit stops, but not really as a positive in itself, more because doing so will relieve the pressures on ailing freeway infrastructure without breaking the bank.
Many talking heads feature, stating the obvious. James Howard Kunstler is interviewed in a particularly garish chair, bringing to the doco some much-needed hard-hitting talk.
Possibly the most interesting thing about this film for me was the credit roll at the end. One donor was the public transport association, and most of the rest were american architectural firms, and even their institute. And that’s exciting to see.
The Future of the City
An Atlantic special report in May 2010 on American cities – though Wellington NZ does get its own review.