All urbanists should bike where history lies waiting.
Welcome to the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City by bicycle at night.
Category: sustainability
elemental land use and first principles: the overview
As a legal commodity, land is controlled and subject to various ownership rights and remedies. At both the human and regulatory scales, land is used, accessed, settled as places called villages, towns and cities. In these places, human stories are told, belief systems flourish and codifications emerge about the relationship between land use and the common good.
This week, we are visiting places of first principles, where biblical tenets, Crusades and conflict merge with the familiar balance of modern sprawl, density and urbanism.
As Seattle and peer cities struggle with how best to wed transportation modes and land use, battle lines form over what modes of transportation should be prioritized and the “who gets and who pays” of public infrastructure provision, consider the same debates against the backdrop of the fundamental human history and a seemingly never-ending search for conflict resolution.
Stay tuned.
avoiding the pitfalls of density, redux
The March 14, 2010 piece, “Practicing Cautionary Placemaking: Urbanism and the Venetian Ghetto”, was featured in Planetizen on March 15, and has been viewed by thousands worldwide. The May 18, 2010 Real Estate Law & Industry Report (a Bureau of National Affairs publication) will include a reformatted version, which is embedded below:
measures of prosperity in a time of change
Megan Dietz in Pittsburgh has written a thought provoking piece in her blog, Bright Green Burgh, about new ways to measure prosperity in a time of change. Thanks to Megan for the myurbanist reference. Her piece, also premised on a recent article by Alex Steffen, is embedded below:
“waiting for the aqua-urban” and other shoreline tales
Not unlike the street edge, the shoreline offers a range of human impacts and activities at the merger with a common domain. Transport, religion, water, work, and waiting all grace the cross-world scenes below.
“Waiting for the aqua-urban”
Urban waves
The mosque of future past
Water transport of future past
The working waterfront
The fishing waterfront, skyline in view
“Waiting for the aqua-urban” in the southern hemisphere, skyline in view