• Transforming Blight Into a Destination – Design – The Atlantic Cities

  Fantastic. Putting imagination back into infrastructure. (How much we could have needed that in Victoria BC, both with regard to the Johnson Street Bridge and with the View + Vancouver streets intersection…
  QUOTE
  “The strategy is how to integrate the entire community so that in the end they feel that it is theirs, that they own it. The city and the developers start to fall away in the background. If that happens then you’ll probably have a successful project.”

  Aquino says that these strategies haven’t really been figured out yet. Public-private partnerships seem to be important for maintaining new parks, but initial funding can be hard to come by. When infrastructure projects are necessary, Aquino says the money will come through. Making that money work harder to create more than a new alleyway or drainage canal is a strategy more cities are likely to take.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: landscape_architecture landscape_infrastructure infrastructure cities urban_renewal urban_parks

• Amazon E-Library Is Publishing’s Profit Model: Virginia Postrel – Bloomberg

  More on Amazon.
  QUOTE
  One thing is certain, however. Publishers are in trouble. They think their problem is that they are losing their retailers. But the real danger is that, over time, they are going to lose their authors as well. No wonder they are afraid of Amazon.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: virginia_postrel amazon books publishing

• Ann Patchett Bucks Tide of Bookstore Closings by Opening Her Own – NYTimes.com

  Cool. Customer service. Niche. Go.
  QUOTE
  Daniel Goldin, the owner of the Boswell Book Company, lavished her with advice over dinner at Beans and Barley, a health-food cafe on the city’s East Side. Put the children’s section as far away from the front door as possible. Hang signs from the ceiling, and customers will buy whatever is advertised on them. And make your store comforting and inclusive, smart but not snobby.

  “The world has changed so much — it’s sort of everybody against Amazon,” Mr. Goldin said last week. “The customer relationship is way more important than it used to be.”

  Parnassus, like hundreds of other independents across the country, will also sell e-books through Google, to lure the many customers who have shifted to Nooks, Kindles and iPads.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: bookstores ann_patchett karen_hayes nashville nyt books commerce

• WorldArchitectureNews: The Atrium, D’Ambrosio Architecture + Urbanism

  Nice shout-out to Victoria BC architect Franc D’Ambrosio’s Atrium building:
  QUOTE
  A transparent ground floor, housing cafes and restaurants, invites people to approach, look in and stay a while. Rain gardens edge the site, a first for a private development in Victoria, catching and cleaning polluted street run-off, and softening the cityscape. The building is organised around the seven-storey wood-clad interior atrium, which introduces daylight into the heart of the structure. The wood, visible from the street night and day through a full-height glass wall at the atrium’s south end, distinguishes the building and invites the public to animate this urban room.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: victoria franc_dambrosio architecture atrium urbanism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 11|20|11 at 9:40 pm. Filed under: links.

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