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Urban Design

New Study: Highways Block Social Connection

March 16, 2025 Eliana Perozo, Next City. , , ,
A new study confirms what urban residents and advocates have known for decades: that America’s urban highways are barriers to social connection. The research, published this month in the journal PNAS, quantifies for the first time how highways have disrupted neighborhoods across the 50 biggest U.S. cities. Every single city studied showed less social connectivity between neighborhoods where highways are present. “Nobody could put a number on the disruption, and now we can give a score to every single highway segment,” says Luca Aiello, a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen and the study’s lead author.

One Year Ago, Brazil Banned Hostile Architecture

December 30, 2024 Raphael Tsavkko Garcia, Next City. , , , ,
In February 2021, at the height of the pandemic, images of a lone priest standing beneath an overpass with a sledgehammer in his hands captured Brazil’s attention. Father Julio Lancellotti, a São Paulo-based priest known for his work with trans people and those living on the streets, had crushed hundreds of stones placed there by São Paulo’s mayor to prevent homeless people from taking shelter beneath the overpass. Lancellotti was protesting hostile architecture, the design of public spaces or structures to discourage their use. From removing seating from train stations to installing metal dividers on benches, hostile architecture attempts to keep the “unwanted” away from certain spaces — especially keeping unhoused people from seeking shelter, sleeping, sitting or existing in the public.

Phoenix Is Launching A New Shade Plan

December 7, 2024 Maylin Tu, Next City. , , , ,
This year, temperatures in Phoenix soared over 100 degrees for 113 consecutive days, a deadly streak for the hottest big city in America. In November, the city approved a new plan, Shade Phoenix, to add 27,000 trees and 550 shade structures over the next five years — a plan that could save lives and provide some relief, especially to the city’s most vulnerable residents. The city unveiled its last shade plan in 2010, but progress has been slow. David Hondula, director of heat response and mitigation, doesn’t dispute that the follow-through on the last shade plan was “incomplete or uncertain.”

The Missing Link In Europe’s Sustainable Food Future

November 25, 2024 Anna Scavuzzo and David Dessers, Resilience.org. , , ,
As we face increasingly urgent global challenges, including climate change, urbanisation and growing inequality, Europe must transform its food systems to ensure resilience, sustainability and inclusivity. The Strategic Dialogue for Agriculture, convened by President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was designed to depolarise the contentious debates surrounding food and agriculture. It brought together a wide range of stakeholders who unanimously adopted a comprehensive set of recommendations for the future of Europe’s food systems.

Try Imagining Another Urban Existence

November 23, 2024 David Graeber - Nika Dubrovsky, Counter Punch. , , ,
In thousands of ways, we are taught to accept the world we live in as the only possible one, but thousands of other ways of organizing homes, cities, schools, societies, economies, and cosmologies have existed and could exist. We started a project called Made Differently: designed to play with the possibility and to overcome the suspicion—instilled in us every day—that life is limited, miserable, and boring. Our first focus is Cities Made Differently, exploring different ways of living together. Read and imagine four different kinds of cities taken from our book which are listed below, and continue your exploration, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.

An Atlas For Urban Commons Of The World

October 6, 2024 David Bollier. , , ,
Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and at the same time more accessible than most national or international policy venues. "The history of urbanization is intricately entangled with the history of industrialization and capitalism," said Gruber, citing thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. "Cities provide access to a high concentration of labor and production, infrastructure, trade, finance, and consumption markets."  Yet even though cities have contributed to capitalist growth, Gruber noted, "they have also been the arenas where the contradictions of capitalism, such as inequities, the environment, and class struggle, have played out most visibly."

How Should Cities Use The Land Freed Up By Highway Removal?

August 19, 2024 Morgan Florsheim, Next City. , , ,
The 20th-century era of urban planning saw highways carving scars across the landscapes of many American cities, leaving in their wake a legacy of displacement and destruction. Today, removing freeways seems to offer a path to repairing some of this harm and moving away from car-centric infrastructure. But highway removal alone is not enough. Whether removal projects make good on their promises to mend some of the damage caused by freeway construction and redesign cities at a more human scale depends entirely on two questions: Who controls the reclaimed land when a freeway comes down, and how will those decision makers use it?

Rural ‘Buffer Ring’ Can Reduce Urban Heat Island Effect

August 11, 2024 Ada Carpenter, Resilience. , , ,
Rural land cover surrounding a city has the potential to reduce the “urban heat island” (UHI) effect and cool the city centre by more than 0.5C, new research shows. While heatwaves around the world are becoming more frequent and intense because of human-caused warming, they are made even more severe in cities by the UHI effect, which traps heat in urban areas and keeps them warmer than their rural surroundings. The study, published in Nature Cities, analyses 20 years of data from 30 cities in China and finds that a ring of rural land around a city can bring the urban temperature down. A buffer ring that is at least half the city’s width can have the biggest cooling effect.

Why So Many Congestion Pricing Critics Change Their Tune

August 4, 2024 Akielly Hu, Next City. , , , , , ,
New York City’s plan to charge most vehicles $15 to enter downtown Manhattan would have eased traffic, cut pollution, and raised billions for mass transit. But Governor Kathy Hochul — in an 11th-hour reversal — placed congestion pricing on hold indefinitely, leaving a $15 billion gap in the city’s transit upgrade plans. Hochul, a Democrat, cited a slow economic recovery from the pandemic and the burden the tolls would place on low-income residents, but sources say she also feared upsetting swing district voters who could decide key elections this fall. Most people balk at the idea of paying more for anything, and congestion pricing plans are no exception.

Report: People Want To Ride Shared Bikes And Scooters

July 30, 2024 Maylin Tu, Next City. , , ,
People want to ride bikes and scooters, per a new report on shared micromobility from the National Association of City Transportation Officials. It’s hardly a revelation — but many cities have yet to match rider enthusiasm with the financial investment, political will and physical infrastructure that it takes to keep bike and scooter share going. “It’s a really popular form of public transportation and people are using it that way,” says Camille Boggan, program manager of policy and practice for NACTO. In the U.S. and Canada, people took 157 million rides in 2023. That’s a 20% increase from the previous year, beating the previous pre-pandemic record of 147 million rides in 2019.

What We Can Learn From Cities With Transit-Oriented Development

July 25, 2024 Shonda Wang, Next City. , , , , , ,
In my early twenties, I lived in Chofu, a city of over 240,000 people on the west side of Tokyo Metropolis. My apartment building was less than a 10-minute walk from Chofu Station, which is at the center of a bustling, fully “amenitized” mini-city, with easy pedestrian access to an urban-scale grocery store, ever-busy retail shops and restaurants, multiple schools, and small-but-mighty parks. Walking and taking transit every day was easy, and without question, my mode of choice. That was more than 20 years ago, but the memories of Tokyo’s transit system and the feelings I had experiencing it stayed with me. And they’ve informed my efforts to build vibrant, livable communities around — and integrated with — public transit stations in Vancouver, Toronto and Mexico.

The Battle For Car-Free Streets And Community Celebration

July 23, 2024 Asia Mieleszko, Resilience. , , , , ,
I first found myself in West Philadelphia in 2019 during Porchfest, an annual music festival that exists because approximately two square miles of Philadelphians collectively decide it should. And so it does, whether the city grants the annually requested street closures or not. In 2019, almost every other street was closed to motorized traffic, lined with rehomed cones and handmade signs stretching from one end of the intersection to the other to communicate the closure. Free from cars, the streets welcomed sprinklers, grills and bouncy castles. Swarms of kids muraled the asphalt with chalk while musicians crooned from the hallmark wooden porches of West Philly’s twin Victorian homes.

New Green Bank Is Powering A Net-Zero Development With Affordable Housing

July 21, 2024 Cinnamon Janzer, Next City. , , , , , ,
For nearly a century, Hillcrest Golf Club was home for golf aficionados in St. Paul, Minnesota. Opened in 1921 on land that was originally home to the Dakota people, the 110-acre course was designed by the brother of pro golfer Harry Vardon, grandfather of the modern golf swing. Over the course of its storied existence, the property was bought by Jewish businessmen as a haven for Jewish golfers facing antisemitism and survived challenges from caddy strikes to a fire that engulfed its clubhouse. In 2017, its owners sold the property. Two years later, as owners struggled to find a buyer due to soil contamination issues that would complicate redevelopment, it was purchased by St. Paul’s Port Authority.

Canada Makes An Unprecedented Push For Multifamily Housing

July 19, 2024 Akielly Hu, Scheer Post. , , ,
For more than a century, zoning ordinances rooted in segregation have encouraged the construction of single-family homes, often at the expense of apartment buildings and other structures that promote urban density. Beyond contributing to a mounting housing shortage and spiraling prices, such policies have contributed to sprawl and dependence upon automobiles. Canada has decided to try something different.  The government has taken the unprecedented step of offering provincial governments billions of dollars in infrastructure funds with one catch: To receive it, they must require cities to abandon single-family zoning laws and allow the construction of fourplexes.

Towards Democratic And Ecological Cities

June 11, 2024 Yavor Tarinski, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , , , , ,
Cities are an integral part of human history. With their creation a public space emerged, which allowed their inhabitants to experience true political freedom. The city gave birth to direct democracy and the concept of the polis – both based on the idea that citizens can and should collectively and equally self-manage their common urban life, in all its spheres. Such free cities networked with each other into democratic confederations. Their relation with the countryside was one of symbiosis and mutual aid. With the expansion of empires, nation-states and capitalism, cities were submitted to the paradigms of political oligarchy and unlimited economic expansion.
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