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+15 +1
Lives Displaced By Central Park Take Center Stage In New Play
The land that became New York City's Central Park was once home to Manhattan's first-known community of African-American property owners. A new play explores how eminent domain forced them out.
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+24 +1
How to Make Architecture Human
Witold Rybczynski’s new book skewers the avant garde, but overlooks prisons and urban shrinkage.
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+19 +1
What I Learned From Talking to My Neighbors About Gentrification
How conversation helped me connect with longtime residents in my rapidly changing neighborhood.
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+25 +1
Remembering Architecture Through Fragments and Impressions
Artist Liene Bosquê explores a range of memories that are evoked by historical images, architecture and constructed real and fictional urban environments.
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+28 +1
Giving housing to the homeless is three times cheaper than leaving them on the streets
The final week of January saw an annual ritual in government statistical gathering that few people know about — the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Point-in-Time survey of the homeless population, in which HUD recruits volunteers around the country to go out and try to count up all the homeless people living in America. This year, White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough even joined up, volunteering as part of the San Francisco PIT crew.
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+47 +1
Is it time to rethink recycling?
Criticize recycling and you may as well be using a fume-spewing chainsaw to chop down ancient redwoods, as far as most environmentalists are concerned. But recent research into the environmental costs and benefits and some tough-to-ignore market realities have even the most ardent of recycling fans questioning the current system.
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+44 +1
The car century was a mistake. It’s time to move on.
Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about car-free cities. Need a primer? Catch up here. We must first remember that all cities were car-free little more than a century ago. Not all cities responded to the advent of automobiles with the same enthusiasm as the cities of the United States. In fact, some cities never did adopt the car. Venice was unwilling to destroy itself in order to build...
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+26 +1
The Cemetery in the City
Austin's Cemetery Master Plan is a revolutionary idea, but it shouldn’t be. How Austin’s Cemetery Master Plan preserves 160 acres of urban cemeteries
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+18 +1
Fascinating maps reveal what our cities sound like
How researchers mapped the spectrum of urban sound.
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+23 +1
A New Way of Walking
Artist-explorers called psychogeographers are changing the way we experience the city
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+54 +1
L.A. council OKs law limiting homeless people's belongings to what can fit in a trash bin
The Los Angeles City Council approved a law Wednesday to rein in the tent-and-tarpaulin encampments whose dramatic spread has raised the political stakes of handling one of the nation's worst homeless crises. The ordinance -- a revised version of the law known as 56.11 that was adopted in June -- limits storage on sidewalks, parkways and alleys citywide to what homeless people can fit in a 60-gallon container, about the size of a city recycling or trash bin.
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+10 +1
Why Are America’s Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?
When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, patting themselves on the back for yet another example of “innovation.” Countless employees, tech bloggers, and design fanatics are already lauding the “futuristic” building and its many “groundbreaking” features. But few are aware that Apple’s monumental project is already outdated, mimicking a half-century of stagnant...
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+15 +1
What Are Bollards, and Why Are They So Beautiful?
How does one become a bollard photographer? For Andrew Choate it all started inadvertently, when he was living in California's Canyon County—“an abysmal suburb where everything had been built within the past 20 years,” he says. On bike rides that would take him on path behind a bunch of strip malls, Choate would photograph the backs of buildings, and eventually he started noticing that the strongest compositional elements in those shots were the bollards
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+22 +1
Germany's bicycle autobahn: pedaling nowhere?
Construction on a bike highway - hoped to connect communities to make high-speed, emissions-free commuting possible - is underway in Germany. But with funding in question, will this bikers' dream still come true? German autobahns are famous for lacking speed limits - now, bike autobahns may continue the trend. Following in the footsteps of other northern European countries, Germany is building a traffic-free bicycle highway: the Radschnellweg Ruhr, also known as RS1.
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+13 +1
The Psychological Cost of Boring Buildings
Scientists are investigating the emotional toll of ugly architecture.
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+26 +1
How the slum women of Ahmedabad led a housing revolution
The Indian city where Gandhi established his first ashram can be gruelling if you live in a slum: 50C temperatures, poor ventilation, no running water. A group of women had had enough and agreed to work with developers.
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+25 +1
A Brief History of Co-Living Spaces
Those Millennial-filled compounds aren’t all that different from 19th-century boarding houses. Co-living isn’t just a product of our current housing crisis. It has served as a de facto social network of urban transplants for generations.
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+27 +1
The Fading Distinction Between City and Suburb
As high-income people return to cities and urban neighborhoods, they bring much of their suburban lifestyle with them.
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+20 +1
The Value of a City's 'StreetScore'
An ongoing project from MIT uses an algorithm to predict the safety of streets, helping researchers and urban planners better understand cities.
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+41 +1
Singapore Is Taking the ‘Smart City’ to a Whole New Level
In Singapore’s “Smart City,” sensors deployed by the government will collect and coordinate data on an unprecedented level. Now Singapore may soon be known for something else: the most extensive effort to collect data on daily living ever attempted in a city. As part of its Smart Nation program, launched by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in late 2014, Singapore is deploying an undetermined number of sensors and cameras across the island...
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