Cities & Planning

A Summer-Holiday Listicle, Straphanger-Style // People often ask me: Grescoe, what do you have against automobiles, anyway? I sometimes tell them it all goes back to when, downwardly mobile after university, I worked as a delivery driver. Forty hours a week, I watched the world from behind glass, getting angry at

The Washington State Legislature should exempt Sound Transit from local permitting processes to avoid snags and make it easier to build light rail in public streets. This would expedite transit projects that voters have approved.

WSDOT is scrapping the planned SR 520 bike and pedestrian tunnel, forcing people who travel outside cars into dangerous territory. It's not too late to push back and contact policymakers.

New material promises to help decarbonize manufacturing

A new book, Kiosk: The Last Modernist Booths Across Central and Eastern Europe, celebrates a 20th-century era of tiny urban icons.

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and build a gaff.

Seattle's single family areas have seen their Black population plummet by 9,126 since 1990. Meanwhile, "urban village" neighborhood have added more than 8,000 Black residents in that span. Why then is low-density zoning expected to blunt displacement?

The word "scientist" often conjures images of people wearing long white coats working in labs, but ecologists like Jen Vanderhoof often find themselves

Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer (September 14, 1885 – May 6, 1967) was a German architect and urban planner best known for his ties to the Bauhaus and to Mies van der Rohe, as well as for his work in urban planning at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology), in Chicago, Illinois.[1][2]

I ran across these distinctions between economies in a talk I went to awhile back. An extractive economy takes away from ecology. A sustainable economy lessens the damage to ecology. It focuses on things like reducing and recycling. A regenerative economy helps build back ecology.

Seattle Neighborhood Greenways hosted a Town Hall Seattle event on building great streets featuring two leading practitioners. Check out the video and synopsis.

Telraam puts citizens in control of local mobility policy. Telraam is a high-quality tool for carrying out traffic counts that can be found transparently on a website and is freely accessible to everyone.

Allowing livestock to graze under renewable developments gives farmers a separate income stream, but solar developers in Australia have been slow to catch on.

In downtown Atlanta, shipping containers have been transformed into an oasis for dozens of previously unsheltered people who now proudly call a former parking lot home.

SDOT seems to assume Aurora Avenue cannot accommodate pedestrians, bicyclists, transit, cars, and freight simultaneously, but this design proposal that will do just that. In the process, it'd make the deadly corridor much safer for all users.

In this blog, to mark World Homeless Day on 10 October, we look at how the Finland city’s Housing First approach has successfully decreased street homelessness Homelessness is the ultimate product of a broken housing system, but World Habitat knows that there are beacons of excellence that provide hope for everyone working to end street […]

Jefferson Center and WellPower of Denver are building permanent supportive housing complexes modeled after a 2017 Denver building that still has a waitlist.

Dominion Energy, the state’s largest utility, says new natural gas plants will be needed to meet rising electricity demand, while the state studies how this booming sector will impact Virginia’s transition to renewable energy.

Delve into the world of architectural documentaries with Wim Wenders and the innovative approach of Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine in capturing spaces.

Carbon dioxide can be ‘charged’ like a battery – and then capture carbon dioxide

"Rather than looking at how to stimulate domestic demand by building bridges or roads, we should provide a proper environment for our future generations because children are Japan's best investment" - Hayao Miyazaki Key points: Hayao Miyazaki argued in 2008 that investing in children and families should take precedence over stimulating domestic demand.

This eco-friendly heat pump offers a sustainable and versatile heating solution, saving energy costs and reducing carbon emissions.

The relationship between universities and urban neighborhoods must be strengthened.

On Riding Dublin's Human Transit-Redesigned Bus Network. // In last week's post, I wrote about the relative lack of rail transit in Dublin, a city with a population of 1.28 million (2.12 million in "Greater Dublin"). Much smaller cities in Europe have metro systems of their own; Dublin is

Fresh water from snow, at 70 below!

The city of Valencia has ambitious plans of developing the largest urban solar farm by using solar panels in its cemeteries.

Citizen coalitions prevented the 1963 freeway from being extended through the Central District, splitting a mostly Black neighborhood. Some ruins remain.