Thanks to BNA’s Real Estate Law and Industry Report, the June 1 myurbanist piece appears anew:
Category: transit oriented development
myurbanist republished: Real Estate Law & Industry Report examines light rail and Jerusalem
Posted by – August 25, 2010
urbanist online discoveries, part 3 and myurbanist sustainability sightings update
Posted by – August 15, 2010
This entry presents two of my favorite, cutting edge blogs, one venerable and accomplished, one new.
First, long-time blogger and thought leader of the built environment-social media interface, Cindy Frewen Wuellner (@urbanverse), continues to innovate on her blog, urbanverse’s posterous, particularly with recent entries on sustainable design under the “True Green” moniker. Be sure and review.
Second, from Venezuela, architect Ana Maria Manzo’s (@anammanzo) “the place of dreams” will charm you with compelling imagery and straightforward introspection about career and on-the-ground outcomes. Great reading for we lawyer/designer-wannabe’s. Please follow the link just provided.
Finally, thanks also to two accomplished online portals for recent references.
Richard Layman, of the comprehensive well-researched placemaking standby Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space provided a valued link to myurbanist yesterday.
Acknowledgements as well to the ever-diligent Seattle Transit Blog, for its recent use of myurbanist material in ongoing coverage of light rail expansion issues in the Seattle area.
the streetscape of light rail opposition
Posted by – August 1, 2010
Bellevue, Washington has been alive with debate about planned light rail alignments in and around its downtown this year, with Sound Transit, the regional transit agency, often at loggerheads with local elected officials about the preferred route to be selected for study and eventual implementation.
Last month, Sound Transit selected a segment adjacent to a close-in residential neighborhood for further evaluation in the project Environmental Impact Statement.
The situation remains a textbook application of the challenges which Paul Symington and I addressed in our recently republished report, “Urban Centers and Transit-Oriented Development in Washington“, (the “Barriers Report“), downloadable here. In keeping with our discussion of political, organizational and interagency implementation challenges, the Bellevue City Council and many residents oppose Sound Transit’s preferred alternative.
On the ground, opposition is clear from the landscape of signage, and from an imaginary train ride captured below–well over a decade before completion of Sound Transit’s East Link. Regardless of which alignment is chosen and constructed, consider rides with memories of where planning-era signage was located along the way!
announcing more urban insights at urbanpointofview.com
Posted by – July 30, 2010
Today marks the launch of a related site, UrbanPointofView, which provides a compilation and “portfolio” of my interdisciplinary approach to urban land use issues.
For an integrated summary of urban insights, at home and abroad, please see the embedded link below.
my-turbanist, camels and transit modes: the postcard
Posted by – July 25, 2010
In another postcard for your urbanist, transit-oriented friends, an interurban transit operator guards himself from the sun.
For an additional reference, consider Stephen Killion’s June 24 Architizer post, which provides the nineteenth century history of the U.S. Camel Corps as a prologue to a discussion of transit issues in Los Angeles. He ironically warns that without care, new transit proposals of the Obama-era could go the way of the failed allocation of 28 camels to the city for cargo purposes as part of the Camel Corps’ downsizing in 1863.
high urbandwidth and city texture: two postcards
Posted by – July 24, 2010
Rich city texture (complete with pedestrian and transit opportunities and magnetic color) is another feature of high urbandwidth. Below, renderings of Nice, France display the remade city center focused around the Nice Tramway, which I described in seattlepi.com (click here) last year.
the mission ahead: recalibrating “urbandwidth”
Posted by – July 19, 2010
Writing and conversing about the urban experience has made one thing clear. Short of the word “urbanism” and its modified variants, there is no one English word which holistically captures the qualities of livable cites or the associated metrics that many commentators tout and exemplify.
Portland’s Jason King supports this point in his wonderful article,”[Fill in the Blank] Urbanism,” which I noted in March. King’s article profiled the range of paired terms which modify the basic urbanism premise–and asked readers to name a favorite.
Others have described the inadequacy of commonly used catchwords. Writing in the Washington Post, on May 8, architect Roger Lewis called for terms far more descriptive than “transit-oriented development” (TOD) to describe the qualities of walkable cities, calling for “multimodal TOD’s”.
Similarly, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab Director, Liz Dunn, working with Walk Score’s Matt Lerner, have advocated for a Jane Jacobs-based comprehensive metric, the Jane Score, to more completely measure urban diversity and “granularity” and supplement the increasingly recognized Walk Score tool.
With such ever-expanding and thoughtful efforts to diversify the measures applicable to a renewed, compact, walkable, and multimodal urban fabric, it would help to have one word to describe the phenomenon.
I suggest that we are talking about recalibrating urbandwidth around the world.
Consider the recalibrated urbandwidth of City Square in Melbourne, Australia
(This article appears in slightly different form in seattlepi.com on July 21, here. Thanks also to Planetizen for incorporating the original form of this article under the headline “For Lack of a Better Term,” here.)
urbanists at work
