selophane.blog » Urban Planning

An Urban Plan for a New New Orleans

spencer — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 06:19:35 +0000

I submitted the op-ed below to the editorial desk of the New Orleans Times Picayune two weeks ago. I have not received any response to my inquiries, so I assume that they are not interested; if that changes I may have to remove this post. In any case, I would like to present my solution for a sustainable redevelopment of New Orleans: An urban plan for a new New Orleans. Although New Orleans avoided GustavÊ¼s wrath, we need to learn as much as we did the hard way from Katrina. Instead of rebuilding the city and the levees as they were, we need to make it so that New Orleans will never worry about a hurricane again. New Orleans has had a past fraught with disasters: twice ï¬res wiped out the bulk of the French and Spanish colonial city and there have been numerous ï¬‚oods and levee breaks which have altered the cityÊ¼s shape.Â Over the last century we believed that we had bent nature to our will by controlling the course of the Mississippi River and preventing the annual ï¬‚ood.Â At the same time developers drained the surrounding swamps to make new low-lying easily ï¬‚ooded subdivisions.Â The damage caused [...]

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An Urban Plan for a New New Orleans

The Metro, The Metro, The Metro’s on Fire!

spencer — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:09:18 +0000

So this past week there were a number of fires and closings of stations within the DC Metro system. While the fires and the maintenance issues that caused them (and many more during the previous years) are one issue, the greater issue at hand is that these incidents completely incapacitated the Red and Orange lines. On a system with three major corridors downtown serviced by 5 lines, the loss of two (one of which runs alone on its corridor) is tantamount to a 50% loss of service. This is unacceptable in the 21st century, and especially in the Nation’s Capitol, where a 30 mile commute can take 2 hours by car. On Sunday, The Washington Post ran an article identifying the double track system as the achilles heel in the Washington Metro. I have to agree with them. One of the greatest strengths of the NYC subway is that it can divert around stations and segments of tracks which are under repair or out of service. With the current system if a single track is out of service all trains must share a single track to bypass the problem. If both tracks are incapacitated by jumper or a fire than [...]

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The Metro, The Metro, The Metro’s on Fire!

Urban Parkland

spencer — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:13:59 +0000

So I’ve been digging through the archive of articles that I have meant to write about, but have not had the chance and came across this article from boston.com which discusses Green Roofs, specifically the the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in Washington DC, and discusses their popularity in Europe and compares them to standard roofs. Green roofs are one of the areas where building design in the US lags behind the rest of the developed world. In Europe, green roofs are more ingrained in the culture, for lack of space and in the northern climates, as a pre-modern cultural adaption. It has only been recently that this urban parkland has been identified as a environmental boon, and not just a social one. In the US contractors balk at putting dirt, substrate, plants and a drainage method on a roof, complaining that ti will be too costly, need more structural reinforcement that the design calls for, and pose greater chances for leaks. Yet rooftop gardens have been a fixture in NY for years and not just in skyscrapers. But green roofs should not just be urban elements. The suburban strip mall is perfect for green roofs or PV panels. [...]

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Urban Parkland

Organic Planning?

spencer — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:14:24 +0000

Recently I have made a number of posts regarding green buildings and the paradigm shift which will be necessary if we are even going to have a truly green architecture (see posts here and here). I bring this up again because i recently read two different articles online from two different architectural professionals from two different cultures, Martha Schwartz â€“ a Boston & London based landscape architect and Harald Bodenschatz â€“ a professor of Sociology and Planning in at the Technische UniversitÃ¤t in Berlin and they both discuss similar goals for a more environmentally friendly development. Schwartz focuses on the urban landscape and its development (or lack thereof) currently as opposed to in a truly green environment, and Bodenscahtz focuses on the development of inner cities and suburbia as sustainable growth tactics and in such a way to help the European city thrive. While neither of these articles explicitly states my previously argued hypothesis (that in order to be a truly sustainably designed society we need to increase our population densities and thus maximize our transportation schemes), both provide intellectual support to my arguments. Without a new 21st century version of urban renewal – one which is culturally, environmentally and [...]

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Organic Planning?

Article: Un velo a day keeps the traffic away.

spencer — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 01:41:55 +0000

Horns honking, cabbies swearing, streets filled with a slow moving mass of metal particles, pedestrians choking on exhaust fumes: Traffic. Nothing says Urban center like a heaping helping of fossil fuel consumption, or does it? Paris and Vienna have both rolled out free short term bicycle rentals (albeit at different scales) as a social experiment and attempt to reduce reliance on automobiles and ease traffic within the urban centers of these two European Cities.

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Article: Un velo a day keeps the traffic away.

Article: New Urbanism, is it old hat?

spencer — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:48:29 +0000

Whether you know it by name or not, most of America has at one time or another come into contact with New Urbanism. This anti-modernist anti-sprawl post-modern offshoot which has been with us for almost 30 years, since the development of Seaside, Florida in 1980 held a conference in Old Town Alexandria, VA. If you understood the nature of New Urbanism, the fact that their conference was being held in one of the oldest downtowns in virginia is quite the irony. New Urbanism stands for the creation of artificial suburban (and sometimes urban) downtowns and mixed use communities, something, which like the path to hell, is paved with good intentions. The problem I have always had with the New Urbanist movement is its non-organic nature. Communities get branded before they are built; house styles and strict zoning rules are pre-planned and approved by designers preventing any straying from the ideal image from entering the perfect new (sub)urban town. They also stand in direct opposition to Modernism; instead of drawing on both the strengths and weaknesses of modernism, they look to its failures and piece together historical pastiche architecture in an attempt to meet the needs of the present. Which is ironic, considering that modernism's creed was to disregard all architecture that came before it to re-discover the natural forms of building.

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Article: New Urbanism, is it old hat?

Article: New York as the City of Lights

spencer — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:22:33 +0000

If you can’t be London, why not be Paris? At least that’s what NYC seems to think according to an article in New York Magazine. The article discusses that with the failure of the congestion surcharge, New York City officials are looking towards the changes that Paris has made since the turn of the century (from 20th to 21st) to be a more resident/pedestrian friendly place; specifically Paris-Plage, bike sharing and the new bus lanes and routes. It appears that NY may be looking at making some streets pedestrian only during the summer, and adding more bike routes. Having lived in Paris for a summer, I believe that parts of New York City that the are the most talked about – lower manhattan and midtown – are already as Paris-like as they can get; It is the outer boroughs that need to be brought up to speed. The reason for this is mass transit. The Métro is extensive within Paris much as it is in Manhattan (though the Métro does seem to run more trains it closes at 2am). This allows rapid movement within the city for pedestrians, sometimes it can be faster than driving. In addition, nothing short [...]

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Article: New York as the City of Lights

Article: Reinventing the Cul-de-Sac

spencer — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:25:34 +0000

The other day I was discussing the mortgage crisis and mentioned that I believe that we should be moving towards a more dense mass transit rich residential development model. Treehugger recently posted about a possible reinvetion of the the Cul-de-sac. This interesting article revisions suburbia as a series of duplexes, triplexes, quadruplexes, and sextuplexes which could be tessellated to efficiently fill space and allow for a maximum of residents on their own quiet cul-de-sacs.

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Article: Reinventing the Cul-de-Sac

Article: Proposal Would Relocate Arts Center to Transit Hub

spencer — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:59:22 +0000

Today, The New York Times ran an article about moving the proposed performance space from the as of yet still unbuilt World Trade Center Plaza to the proposed transportation hub at Fulton Street and Broadway. I just have to wonder if the people who propose these things have ever ridden mass transit? The last time I went into the City I took the Long Island Rail Road and arrived just as a Nicks game was letting out of Madison Square Garden: Penn Station was a Nightmare. I felt like a salmon swimming upstream just to get out of the system. I can’t imagine someone trying to get on a train or worse, enter the subway there. Post from: selophane.blogArticle: Proposal Would Relocate Arts Center to Transit Hub

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Article: Proposal Would Relocate Arts Center to Transit Hub

Article: Real Estate Road Trips Scout Troubled Market

spencer — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:44:58 +0000

So I don’t know how I missed this, but apparently on Monday, March 31st The Washington Post ran an article about the new phenomenon of Foreclosure Tours in the DC/NOVA metro area (Click here for the article). This strikes a sore spot with me, it makes me think of the Katrina tours that sprung up in New Orleans once tourists started to return to the city. Now I know this is a different sort of animal; the article describes these tours as “foreclosure seminars on wheels” and they are intended to help fill in neighborhoods instead of to educate. Yet in the end, I wonder, aren’t they both ways of profitting off of the pain and suffering of others? Now i know that this in and of itself is not really architecture or design related, but I feel as if the whole foreclosure mess stems from the modern architecture and urban development of the US. For the past century we have been spreading farther and farther from urban centers and the average american living space has ballooned, this has not only affected us mentally and physically, but it is also affecting us environmentally and monetarily. As we move farther from [...]

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Article: Real Estate Road Trips Scout Troubled Market