Strip malls are the inbetween places produced through car-centric (mis-)planning, and will be the hardest places to bring to adaptive re-use. So ugly they can’t be directly looked at, we avoid seeing them lest we turn to stone.
Julia Vitullo-Martin: Don’t Wreck the Authentic New Harlem Renaissance – WSJ.com Sharon Zukin takes on gentrification (in Harlem especially), while Harlem-ites dismiss her critique. “Gentrification” v. “authenticity”? Between black and white there might actually be plenty of shades of gray (no pun intended)… QUOTE It should also be said that these talented, innovative African-Americans are […]
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!
The tremendous natural beauty that surrounds us bestows a false sense of entitlement, although we’ve done nothing to earn natural beauty. Stewardship lets us earn it, but now Victoria must at last wake up to earning built beauty.
“Competing Values: Land Use and Public Consultation” (2/20 forum in conjunction with “Bamberton: Contested Landscape,” an exhibition at Open Space in Victoria BC) illustrates the need for design thinking to help bridge gaps between validity (outcomes favored by the community) and reliability (assurances required by developers and quantitatively-oriented planners and engineers).
Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort and Archie Bunker’s inability to avoid rubbing up against people explored as an issue of urban form and domestic architecture.
There’s a new exhibition at Victoria’s LegacyGallery, a UVic-affiliated downtown art venue. It’s called From a Modern Time: the architectural photography of Hubert Norbury, Victoria in the 1950s and 60s (the link goes to the Legacy Gallery’s “Upcoming” page – no specific web info otherwise). On Vibrant Victoria, a forumer posted a pointer to the […]
It won’t come as news to those of us who love and defend cities, but it’s nice to have scientific research backing up what we espouse as urban positives: High population density triggers cultural explosions, according to a new study by scientists at University College London. The study was published in the journal Science; see […]
It seems everyone is going green, or will be. Today I went to Victoria’s UDI (Urban Development Institute) luncheon to hear Terasen Energy Services‘ Gareth Jones present “All About Geo-Thermal: Learning from Local Projects.” Some basic take-away points: unless I severely misheard, British Columbia prices for energy (or electricity) will rise 80% in the next […]
Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
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