Cities that were sprawling before the Great Recession have begun to sprawl again. Space-constrained cities, meanwhile, have run out of room to build. That reality has spurred developers to focus on center-city neighborhoods where high-density building is allowed—and new units command exceedingly high prices. Source: America’s Cities Are Running Out of Room – Bloomberg
The question is so obvious that you could easily forget to ask it: why do cities so often have a poor east side? To be clear, the mystery is not why every city has its leafy and its grubby sections – it costs money to live in nice places and to avoid nasty ones, which tends to group people into them by wealth. The mystery is why the poor groups always end up in the east.Of course, the true picture is never neat nor simple, but by common consent a British-biased list of cities with poor eastern districts would include:…
Thousands of millennials are moving to the suburbs of Riverside, Calif., San Antonio, Texas and Orlando, Fla. The burbs of those three metro areas saw the greatest growth in the number of adults aged 25 to 34 between 2010 and 2015, according to data from the Urban Land Institute provided to TIME. “Riverside is a long way from Austin, Portland or Seattle in terms of coolness, but a lot of those things that make those cities attractive to the millennials — craft breweries, independent stores and restaurants — they’re now springing up here,” says local real estate developer Randall Lewis….
It is the whole mission of the church to speak the gospel. As to what sort of thing “the gospel” may be, too many years ago I tried to explain that in a book with the title Story and Promise, and I still regard these two concepts as the best analytical characterization of the church’s message. It is the church’s constitutive task to tell the biblical narrative to the world in proclamation and to God in worship, and to do so in a fashion appropriate to the content of that narrative, that is, as a promise claimed from God and…
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City tells the story of Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, who made herself the bane of New York’s powerful city planners from the 1950s to 1970s. Her nemesis was Robert Moses, the city’s powerful master builder and advocate of urban renewal, or wholesale neighbourhood clearance – what author James Baldwin termed “negro removal”.Moses dismissed the protesters as “a bunch of mothers”, and attempted to ignore their efforts to attract wider attention, which included taping white crosses across their glasses in the style of Jacobs.But through a combination of grassroots…
I am an architect and I certainly consider myself an environmentalist, but it appears to me that in a lot of cities, these new glass towers don’t add much at all to the city in terms of energy efficiency or quality of life. Often they don’t add many more housing units than the buildings they replace. I am also a heritage activist, not because I particularly love old buildings, but because there is so much to learn from them and from the neighbourhoods. and cities that were designed before cars or electricity or thermostats, and were built at surprisingly high…
We all know that art, music and nature are beautiful. They command the senses and incite emotion. Their impact is swift and visceral. How can a mathematical idea inspire the same feelings? Well, for one thing, there is something very appealing about the notion of universal truth — especially at a time when people entertain the absurd idea of alternative facts. The Pythagorean theorem still holds, and pi is a transcendental number that will describe all perfect circles for all time. But our brains also appear to respond to mathematical beauty as they do to other beautiful experiences.
In many ways, Esolen’s book can be seen as a response to Mencken, a meditation on why beauty and truth are such inseparable mates—or contrariwise, why falsehood always begets ugliness. Certainly, Esolen’s concern for the absence of beauty in our culture has all of Mencken’s passionate solicitude. “Our young people are not only starved for nature,” he writes. “They are starved for beauty. Everywhere they turn, their eyes fall upon what is drab or garish.” Their schools, their music, their dress, their fast-food restaurants are unlovely. Indeed, even their churches are ugly. To gauge the quality of Esolen’s appreciation for…
Controversial response to YouGov survey results that people prefer traditionally designed buildings, as architects lash out at traditional architecture. The architectural profession has responded to the results of the recent YouGov survey to determine whether people prefer contemporary or traditional buildings and this has now become controversial.As the results of a new YouGov survey reveal that more than three quarters of the public prefer traditional buildings to “contemporary” buildings, architects have lashed out at traditional architecture. Leading the professional attack is the new president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Ruth Reed. Source: ADAM Architecture – Press Releases
In Brooklyn, Gowanus Canal Conservancy’s Executive Director Andrea Parker said the promise of a cleaner canal has already fueled considerable development in the surrounding neighborhood, even as the amount of affordable housing in the area decreases and some residents worry about displacement. But other locals remain optimistic that the project will be completed despite the threat of cuts to the Superfund program. Source: As hundreds of toxic sites await cleanup, questions over Superfund program’s future | PBS NewsHour
