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.
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.
An aerial view street view brings into clear relief the house I was born in – prompting some observations on urban density and what makes it appealing to me.
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.
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 […]
It has been up on Scribd for a while, but I haven’t yet given this article a more detailed blog post: Victoria’s Urban Forest, published in FOCUS Magazine last month (March 2009). My description: Urban forests are more than just trees in cities: they are the complete ecosystem, including the trees and understory shrubbery and […]
Bear with me, gentle reader, as I try to describe in words a spatial relationship. Something about how the combination of roads and a school near my house affects pedestrian movement has been bugging me. Around the corner from where I live are two east-west running arterials, Yates (one-way west-bound) and Fort (one-way east-bound), that […]
Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
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