The Salem Harbor Power Station will close in June 2014. Initially, the field looked wide open for exciting new redevelopments, but now it appears that the site might see another power plant. Strike one for Realpolitik, zero for vision? Green Drinks invited Jan Schlichtmann, Lori Ehrlich, et al., to debate on June 26, 2012.
A city of villages: that’s what they call Portland, and it’s true. Clustered along most major corridors, it seems, nodes of vibrant market activity suddenly appear – and if the shops are indies, they look to be thriving and attracting lots of customers. I wrote previously (here and here) that the city strikes me as […]
The title of my post is semi-serious, semi-ironic. I’m ambivalent about gentrification: if it means unslumming, I figure it’s good; if it means homogenization toward a single class (typically privileged) at the expense of economic diversity, it’s probably not-so-good, right? When I write “Gentrification 2.0,” I’m saying that I’m not sure how this particular example […]
Matt Jones’s presentation, “People are walking architecture,” offers much food for thought: on architecture and ubiquitous computing, Debord and Jobs, Saarinen and Shirky, and finally Jane Jacobs.
Got controversy? Density and building height are sure to push city dwellers’ buttons, particularly if the culture to date favored sprawl and single-family homes.
The way to make sure absolutely that all you ever get is utter crap change is to resist development at every turn: that’s almost guaranteed to deliver nasty surprises.
Streetfilms has produced a great ~4minute video, “Fixing the Great Mistake: Autocentric Development,” that makes the case for taking city streets back from the automobile. As it happens, I had the same idea in the early 1970s. It’s finally getting mainstream traction!
“On Jane Jacobs” by Richard Florida (Creative Class Exchange) Nice synthesis by Richard Florida (written for his Globe & Mail column) of Jane Jacobs’s approach to thinking about economies. Let’s hope it makes more people read her 2000 book, The Nature of Economies. tags: jjacobs, economic_development
And some other comments on creative societies… Let’s start with this interesting item from Ananova, which I bookmarked several months ago: Help for mummys’ boys The Italian government is handing out grants to help mummys’ boys leave home. The move comes after economists warned almost 60% of young adult Italians stayed at home and were […]
Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
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