On what makes a good urban design: "cities are too complicated, too far beyond our control, and affect too many people, who are subject to too many cultural variations, to permit any rational answer."

"The modification of settlement is a human act, however complex, accomplished for human motives, however obscure or ineffective. Uncovering those motives gives us some first clues to the connection between values and environmental form."

our group was called the inconspicous yellow office and here are a few posts made at the time...

http://liveproject.wordpress.com/2006/10/21/sheffield-platform-hit-list/

http://liveproject.wordpress.com/2006/10/12/can-the-roles-for-the-participants-involved-in-a-live-project-ever-be-changed/

http://liveproject.wordpress.com/2006/10/13/what-is-alternative-practice-trying-to-acheive/

http://liveproject.wordpress.com/2006/10/27/negotiating-accrington/

this live project was one which became part of the urban act publication, which can be accessed at:

http://www.peprav.net/tool/spip.php?page=recherche&recherche=urban+act

there are so many brilliantly exciting strategies within this... i will hopefull write and show some examples from here at a later date...

i also contribted a little about what i was doing at the time... bit I had just joined sharrow forum and we hadn't really written a brief... i didn't know what the distinctiev sharrow project would be at the time or how i would act, what links i would make... so i dont answer the questions or see the signifcance of why they were asked... so am quite seperate from others in the book... it is clear that i am still more student at the time of writing... (its funny how you can understand theory but you have a different kind of understanding when you come up against a situation in real life!)

but on the positve side we are hopefully going to collectively return to the publication and update where we are now- i can't wait to do this and may start to think about my response to this on this blog...

Those of us at the Ambrosia Centre on Fisgard noshed on scrambled eggs as we witnessed a spirited debate. The four candidates answered questions and sparred with each other over homelessness, affordable housing funding and what the Federal parties platforms were. I haven't been following the Federal Election with much interest until now and don't have a strong liking to any candidate or party this time around so it's fair to say I watched with an unbiased albeit slightly cynical eye.

PC candidate McClintock (Jack Layton's separated-at-birth twin) touted Stephen Harper's pledge of $1.9 billion to combat homelessness. Several times he reminded us that a strong economy is the key to solving homelessness. Penn called for more rentals, secondary suites and a rollover of the capital gains tax which would spur rental creation. Savoie played up her housing record while on Victoria City Council and called for inclusionary zoning rules. Lewis said income splitting would help.

The debate inevitably veered towards environmental issues with much discussion over retrofitting older homes. Several candidates noted that achieving greenhouse gas emission targets for residential housing was impossible when so many houses are old and in desperate need of fixing. But environmental upgrades are expensive and many owners of older homes don't have the funds to undergo extensive renovations.

Penn took McClintock to task over voluntary environmental compliance, saying they simply don't work. She was fiesty and was well-prepared, giving tangible solutions and dishing out facts. When McClintock mistakenly referred to the Harper "administration", Penn shot back saying, unless we've recently been annexed by the United States, we have a Government, not an Administration. McClintock was at a disadvantage as all he really was able to bring to the table was the $1.9 billion pledge which was called merely a rehash of previously announced programs. Still, he surprised some with his endorsement of the Woodwynn Farm project. Savoie scored points with some with her Council accomplishments, while Lewis kept up with the others but didn't say much that stuck to my memory.

It was a worthwhile and entertaining morning and I was happy to hear Federal candidates talking about our most pressing local issue. Also it was great seeing all Victoria's housing advocates together in one room. Thanks to Jim Bennett of the VREB for organizing the event. Remember to press your local Municipal, Provincial and Federal candidates on their plans to provide affordable housing options in the upcoming elections.

entering the area by car...

entering the northern parking area...

inside the parking. leaving the car behind and...

switching to public transport

the residential area fading into the big green common in the west

overview, looking towards the north-east

----below are our presentation posters (click on the link to open the large pdf file):

finalplansjejaaaa

Pao is a Milanese street artist who in 2000 trasformed one of Enzo Mari's roadside bollards into something totally different. His urban penguin, close to street-life and pop art, became a symbol and soon won the hearts of passers-by. Many others were to follow, with a whole fantasy world, changing desolate corners of city life onto oases of colour. His work is a fight against the grey everyday life in Milan.

The Paopao penguins, lurking in the urban habitat they were born into, meet the public face on, without any "artworld" intermediaries, and lead then into the hectic world af new Milan's underground scene. Starting literally from the street, Pao started a series of experiments with styles and forms, in a melting pot of art and communications that soon led him to become one of the leading exponents of Street Art in Itay.

AB 32 FACT Sheet

Gov. Schwarzenegger kills clean port bill

Port storyhttp://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-me-bills1-2008oct01,0,3102245,full.story">

The dream city of Coruscant in Star Wars

The dream city of Not London in The Golden Compass

Like the dream cities of Le Corbusier and his modernist colleagues, the dream cities of artists have in common the fact that none of them have ever been realized. Leon Krier's dream city, Poundbury, has been realized by the capital backing of a supernaturally rich patron, and even then it has been built very slowly and carefully. In the time it has taken to develop Poundbury, millions of urbanisations have occurred elsewhere. Like the New Urbanist TNDs of America, no matter how much we enjoy their architectural quality, we cannot consider them to be real cities. The real city has been built in the emergent dimension, not by the mind of a single artist but by the material necessities of all people. While it is fairly straightforward for an artist like Leon Krier to invent and apply his own form language to imagine a complex cityscape, in order for this design to be adapted to the material necessities of millions it must also involve millions. We obviously cannot burden a single artist with this task.

And so urbanism has a wholly different starting point from architecture. The artist does not have control. No one can possibly ever have control. Everything is happening all at once everywhere at once. To attempt to stabilize this process has caused chaos everywhere.

The starting point of urbanism is the same starting point that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, set for himself when he established the Internet's now most indispensable website. Instead of asking how to publish the expert opinion of specialists as an encyclopedia that would compete with the print powerhouses (a venture he had already attempted and failed at), Wales based his system on the theories of economist and complexity scientist Friedrich von Hayek. The idea that Hayek proposes is that there exists specific knowledge that only individuals possess, and that can only be utilized with their cooperation. Wales saw his task as the aggregation of this knowledge into one coherent system.

The world-wide-web had, since the early 90's, become a massively hyperlinked knowledge network that everyone could publish in. The reality at the time of Wikipedia's creation was that this power had not produced any kind of coherent system for basic knowledge. Aggregating knowledge had up to then been too complicated. Wales wanted, in his own words, to "make the Internet not suck." Overcoming this deficiency meant simplifying the production of web pages and hyperlinks, removing some unnecessary choices in the process. This is what the interface of Wikipedia did. Within a year, Wikipedia had grown explosively and exponentially. Making information easier to create and access had made it possible for the sum total of encyclopedic knowledge to be rapidly constituted.

This has come at a cost, however. While there is in theory unlimited freedom to add content that one considers relevant to Wikipedia, the form that this content will take on screen is very rigidly defined. This is necessary in order to achieve the complexity of the system. The design of Wikipedia is constant across every page in order to make it possible to rapidly navigate through all the information without having to relearn the rules for every article. Nevertheless, when we click on a link to a Wikipedia page, we never know what we are going to get. The design acts not as a constraint on the content, but as an enabler of the content. Without the rules enforced by Wikipedia, none of the content would have been added.

Wales and his foundation have been extremely controversial. On the one hand, in order for Wikipedia to work as it does, the foundation must provide all the support structures necessary to enable the users to create knowledge, and on the other hand it must also blindly trust the users to create information that will be accurate. It simply is not possible to control the content of so many millions of articles. To attempt this would necessarily shrink the size and reduce the complexity of the system, destroying what makes Wikipedia useful in the first place. The emergent dimension must either be embraced or rejected.

The lessons learned from Wikipedia can also be learned from the very rich past of urban planning. Historically the most successful cities have not been those who have had the least planning but the most enabling plans. The Manhattan plan of 1811, for example, provided for the flexible extension of a street grid without interfering in what could be built within the blocks, and so enabled a surge in urbanisation that was unmatched in history. Eventually this model reached its complexity limits and a new design for Manhattan was applied (with varying success), such as the building codes that gave us wedding-cake skyscrapers, and the metropolitan transit system of subways and later on expressways.

The darker side of this phenomenon has been the creation of city designs that inadvertently enabled the creation of a type of city that no one wanted. Every city, no matter how loudly the local authorities claim to be planning-free, have a design. Take the classical example of a "no planning" city, Houston. Although it has no zoning codes, Houston has a system for laying down a grid of roads that implies necessarily a large-scale, long-ride, automobile-dependent city. By their very form, these roads make some types of urbanisation easier and others more difficult. Who is going to build for a walkable neighborhood when there are no sidewalks? How can a TND make a walkable city when at every mile a thoroughfare cuts off the pedestrian links? How can a sustainable city emerge when only one form of link, long-range auto trips, can be made between destinations?

The threat that we face today is not suburban sprawl. New Urbanism and Smart Growth have been victorious in that aspect. The danger we face is dense sprawl, (see Eric Eidlin, The Worst of All Worlds Los Angeles and the Emerging Reality of Dense Sprawl) where our disconnected cities become denser and denser without becoming more complex, resulting in even poorer urban conditions. The suburb is not the design. Sprawl is the design.

Our cities may not be what we wanted, but they have not been accidents. They are the result of designs applied by the local (and sometimes not-so-local) authorities. They will only change if we invent and apply new designs for them. They cannot be architectural designs founded upon control of the artist. They also cannot be the endless grid of highway strips. Yet they must have both art and highways. It is a whole new method of design, emergent design, that we must master.

Reference

Wikipedia and Beyond: Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision

Sam dropped by Vancouver for a day or two (not long enough) on his way  to Seattle, but that was at least enough time to take him on a walking tour through the West End and Coal Harbour.  He made it to Yaletown and Granville Island the next day - and reports on it all here.

An excerpt:

The most striking thing is the attention paid to the quality of the urban environment. Some things are quite simple. Parking is either on-street or underground, not in surface parking lots. Streets are lined with trees. No blank walls - in fact, buildings are required to have numerous entrances from the sidewalk and even high-rises have rowhomes facing sidewalks. Commercial corridors are lines with shops, have few gaps and fewer parking lots, are relatively uniform in height, no more than two stories, and stores are required to have awnings so Vancouverites don’t need an umbrella. How civil!

Lots of pics here.

Bottom line: Juxtapose the maps of the city layout for quick insight and livelong knowledge!

Here, via spacing toronto - what wonderful visuals! Thank you.

And finally the outdoor mall arrives in a country with a long tradition of open air markets. And it had wait for Charles Correa and Ambujas to work together. A well written article by Himanshu Burte in livemint expounds the merits of Correa's foray in creating a decent quasi-public domain for upwardly mobile Indian middle class - though I would have liked to see some more critical observations.

Years ago while waiting for a friend of mine outside Barton Center in Bangalore, I seated myself along the the entry steps only to be promptly reprimanded by the security personnel that I am not allowed to sit on the steps. The only other public place where I was not allowed to sit down was under the dome of St.Peters in Rome. I sat down to start working on my sketchbook to be politely reminded that I can only do that in the pews...perhaps only barbarians sat on the floor, and a catholic church is no place for such uncivilized behavior. But Barton Center is not St.Peters....and the steps leading to a shoddy shopping mall is a bit different from pope's home office. Contemporary architectural practice in India had to wait till twenty first century to provide outdoor seating in a planned commercial space. How exciting !!

If it takes a Charles Correa to convince the developers not to have any gates and to make sure the mall is seamlessly integrated with the public realm, the prognosis is pretty bleak for most other talented architects to pull off a similar act. The city center mall was open for business in 2004 and we are yet to see more examples based on similar planning concepts and thats a bit depressing.

Link to LiveMint Article

Our society will need to re-learn these techniques of place-making, not only to respond to a post-car future but also to a growing population that doesn't want to drive while on vacation -- or at least needs an antidote to the mind-numbing stress of the suburban daily grind. The century-old remnants of railroad tourism around Banff, though, are not unusual: many of North America's resort towns were carved out of the scenery by (not just around!) railroads looking to drum up passengers; CPR's president was not alone in declaring, "if I can't export the scenery, I'll import the tourists." Many resort towns in the northeast retain their compact, railroad-era fabric: Kennebunkport, Wildwood, Key West, Santa Fe, and Santa Barbara, to name a few. Countless other American resorts grew up entirely in the sprawl era, as well -- Daytona, Gatlinburg, Hilton Head Island, Palm Springs, Scottsdale, Branson -- and higher gas prices have socked many of them, with Branson attractions (for example) reporting 10% declines.

Ski resort towns are the big exception to the postwar era's resort sprawl, but possibly only due to basic practicality: the same challenging terrain that skiiers demand makes servicing sprawling development (almost) prohibitively expensive. Similarly, a lot of yesteryear's resort towns were built on environmentally sensitive lands, and their ability to sprawl has been limited by environmental regulations or land protection. However, the ski towns just might offer us a way out of the mess. I know of at least one new consulting firm started by people who cut their teeth building (immensely profitable) ski towns -- and have now moved on to the bigger challenge of building real towns in the suburbs.

Some early initiatives to promote wide-scale car-free travel have appeared in progressive (and scenic) jurisdictions. Quebec recently debuted, to much fanfare, a province-wide Route Verte network of scenic bike routes -- complete with a network of certified-bike-friendly B&Bs along the way. Switzerland has gone even farther, incorporating walking and boating routes into a new national route network.

[Adapted from a comment left at TNAC Daily, title is a play on the Car-Free Day {yesterday!} slogan, In Town Without My Car]

It is sad that in this age of wealth (really, we're the richest we've ever been, at least in North America) we have such a lack of beauty in our public spaces.

On a trip to Prague this past spring, I saw this on the side of a building. How incredible. So gorgeous.

What do we spend all our wealth on? Home stereo systems? Cars? And for buildings, we slap on some stucco or some vinyl siding and go on our merry way.

Whiddon Residence / Atlanta, GA
Quality Cabinets / Hancock Cherry / Burgundy / Amber Cherry Accents
Designer / Todd Whiddon
Installers / Todd Whiddon / Tyler Whiddon / Randy Rumpf

The kitchen my loft came with needed some SERIOUS work!

This is NOT the NKBA recommended method for removing cabinets. But since this is my kitchen, I wanted to experience how kitchens were remodeled before power tools were invented...

Kitchen remodeling isn't quite like an artist having a blank canvas, it more like someone else dripping paint on your canvas and then you having to finish the painting and make it a masterpiece. When designing a kitchen remodel, you often have to measure around appliances and plan designs without knowing exactly what's inside your walls. If you are changing the structure of your kitchen it is not only a good idea to hire experienced professionals, but you should also at least pull off the sheetrock and see what surprises are lurking in your walls that may affect the final outcome.

I found some unexpected water pipes for the loft above mine that I had to incorporate into my design.

My vision of a bigger, better, brighter kitchen begins to take shape...

And Here it is! Bold Colors, Exquisite Materials, Open Contemporary Design

I actually designed and installed this backsplash myself by out of 1" travertine tiles with 1" glass tile accents

These countertops ROCK! Literally! I used Stellar Night from Silestone which is engineered quartz with little chips of mirror in them. It is harder than granite, NEVER has to be sealed, and has micro-ban built right in! You should see the way all TWENTY TWO lights in the kitchen reflect off them at night!

Remember that laundry room door from the before Pics?

This kitchen design move is REALLY popular in high end designs these days, secret cabinet doors into pantries and other rooms in the house is a great way to impress your friends and potential home buyers! From the looks of my laundry basket...perhaps I forget I have a laundry room a little too often :)

Knocking out these walls made such a big difference in this space! And who couldn't justify a NEW TV to go with their NEW kitchen view!

The accessories available in today's cabinetry are great! I couldn't live without my integrated trash cans! This is a 9" spice pullout, DO NOT buy a 3" spice pullout! Everyone and their brother comes to me wanting to buy the 3" versions they see in magazines but those are pretty much the most useless things every invented because you can't really fit anything on them...not all spice bottles are created equal!

Does your kitchen need an extreme cabinet makeover like this one?

Remodel Experience + Design Creativity = The Custom Design team at CDG!

Imagine my surprise when I learned that this fine (looking) institution is Lane Tech High School. The high school is located on the north side of Chicago at the corner of Addison Street and Western Avenue, not too far from Boystown. The high school is a college-prep high school and students come from all over the City of Chicago to attend here. This has got to be one of the best looking high schools I have ever seen. Its football field and track are just to the rear of the building and were recently renovated. I had only wished that it was a clear, blue sky kind of day when I was (unexpectedly) taking the photos. But I had to make do with the overcast.

Its architecture is reminiscent of what my high school looks like. However, my high school was not as impressive, architecturally-speaking.

The quibble is in the detail. A couple of earlier bus shelters had well finished stainless steel fittings with rounded edges, and a nice buffed (matt) finish to the metal. This must have proved to be just a little costly to the diamond merchants who run the Times Group. With a possibly little elbowing, they have managed to slip through the newer shelters that have ghastly sharp edges, and an extremely unattractive glossy surface finish that has also lesser longevity.

When we build public amenities, what is the time span that we consider? Is it break-even period, or something more? Today the grand daddy of the wonderful Delhi Metro, Sreedharan is in the news for raising his voice against the model of private participation being followed in the Metro projects in Mumbai and Hyderabad. PPP is usually just a convenient escape route for government agencies wanting to avoid getting their hands dirty, but keeping their palms greased either way. It is illogical to think that a privately owned entity would keep the best interests of a 'general public' at the heart of its decisions.

That is solely within the purview of a people's body. We have them. We need to make them work.

My last post, Rivers Lost to City, noted that we've been losing creeks for a long time. In fact, so many have been literally buried in the last century that most angelenos don't even realize we ever had streams, much less that some still exist, and as a native I can also say that it's hard to understand why it even matters.  In a city that has so many problems, why put time into this one?  

The answer for that will be highly individual, I can give you some institutional reasons, but will start with a personal one, which may take on the tone of a tent revival confessional.  

I grew up in Hawthorne, and as a kid never experienced nature there.  Hawthorne had some good people, but my impression of it was marked by a sterile landscape of front lawns and hostile grey streets, bullies & gangs, cruising perverts.  A mask of boredom concealed fear and anger.  My inheritance from this place was a desire for structure, safety, walkability, and beauty.  These things were interpreted within the limits of my experience, as they are for all of us, and I sought a career in architecture to manifest them.

The best days of my childhood were completely disconnected from this, spent in a creek in Kentucky, that ran next to my grandfather's house.  We splashed, swam, caught tree frogs, dodged copperheads and imaginary cottonmouths, clambered along steep ledges, and tried to fish.  We'd collect fossils and old bricks that we found in the creek, screeching and oohing and ahhing over all the discoveries and stimulations of the place.  But that was Kentucky, there was nowhere here I knew of to transfer those vivid moments.

So fast-forwarding a bit, learning of a creek in Hancock Park touched something deep, and amidst the upwelling of questions about what LA was before we paved it, and how we came to make the decision to bury so many of our waterways, was a real sadness tinged with outrage, to think that there could have been places here for youthful exploration and escape, for me and so many other children. And indeed earlier generations have those memories and connections. This is vital, for it is through this play and discovery that we understand and interpret the world around us, relate to other creatures as beings with their own integrity, purpose, and right to exist, and perhaps most importantly, come to know what it means to feel alive. 

I won’t deceive you, I still have enough Hawthorne-infused cynicism to believe that creeks in our urban neighborhoods, like every other unsupervised place in the city, could become a dumping ground for illicit activity, and that they pose unique hazards of their own.  And so we obviously need to be vigilant and wise about how we introduce our children to waterways, and how we conduct ourselves.  

But creeks connect high and low, they unite neighbors, like the folks in Brookside Estates, who love and tend to their little creek in Hancock Park. They sustain life to a wide array of plants and animals, including us. Creeks are as old as the land itself, their vitality and character are essential to the sense of place so many long for in Los Angeles.

Do you love a creek?  Would you like to protect and restore our creeks?  Tell us!  

I am currently coming to this realisation as we speak.  I knew of these theory and the ideas and logic behind it for some time now.  But I never experienced or lived these ideas up until now.  How did this all happen? I simply did not maintain my car.  Apparently there was a knock in my engine which meant something inside my engine is broken.  Now I have to spent close to $2000 to fix this problem.  And as it stands at this moment in time, I am trapped in my house and have nowhere or no means to travel anywhere. 

The area where I live in is still being developed.  As I type this right now, there are cement trucks and earth movers roaring away right behind my house.  They are busy digging large holes for basements, paving streets and so on.  Because of all this development, we don't really have any buses coming out this way.  There is a bus that comes every now and then but its schedule is so messed up that its better to consider it as not having a bus come by.  And within the community itself, there is not one store or plaza where I can go to grab a slurpee or a snack.  There is a shopping centre close to the house actually.  In fact, I can see it from my kitchen window.  It has literally has everything you could ever want...a Rona, Shoppers Drug Mart, KFC, Starbucks...some furniture store, etc.  But as it currently stands, its not easily accessable.  If I wanted to go to grab a coffee for example, It takes a good half hour walk to the Starbucks that I can see from my kitchen window.  This is because there is only one road in and out of the community.  So I have to walk around the entire community.  Not only that, I then have to cross a major artery that is frequented by bulldozers and large dump trucks filled with earth just to get my coffee.  THEN I have to walk all the way back.  So it takes me literally, one hour just to get my chai latte back to my house.  And by the time I get back home, into my comfortable sofa, the chai is cold. 

So if it takes me that long just to get a warm beverage, one can imagine that I am literally paralized in this suburban wasteland.  In order to live in these areas, one absolutely needs a car.  And not just any old car, you literally need a car that will not ever...EVER break down on you.  Because if you have a car that fails you, consider yourself to be a dead man because you'll never get out of your house. 

As of right now, I literally don't know how I will get to school tomorrow.  And if I do get to school, I don't know how I am going to get back. 

Thus is my current life in Suburbia.

Esterni tries to make Milan a city with a better way of living: examples are projects like Design Pubblico or Movimento Centrifugo, which tries to move the life from the centre to the suburbs (a great thing in Milan, which is not a polycentric city).
In these days there is MilanoFilmFestival: an independent festival of cinema with movies from all over the world. The strange thing is that an event like this was born thanks to Esterni and not to the government of Milan: nobody has thought to invent a film festival like in the other cities (Berlin, Venice, Locarno..). Now MilanoFilmfestival has a great popularity, also abroad.

[gallery]I think that for a person who doesn’t live in Milan it can be very useful to go in the web site (esterni.org) in which there are all the information about Esterni’s projects. I have a lot of material about it because I made a report last year with other three girls about Esterni, for a University class about cultural institutions. I upload some of our work, so you can read it (it’s written in Italian). There are also some interview to people who work there. esterni_presentazione

The Planning Dept. generally supported the new massing but didn't have enough time to fully evaluate it or offer a recommendation.

There was some heated discussion around this project at the Council table. After looking at Westbank's presentation, the Councillors offered their comments. Charlayne Thornton-Joe wanted to see that staff report, as well as community input as this design is radically different from what was previously commented upon. Geoff Young more or less liked the new design but did not like the bonus density deal, saying we should not be selling zoning although a higher density is OK. He said the preservation of views, while not sacrosanct, were worth considering. Pam Madoff was very protective of the current T-1 zoning (tourism primary), saying this may be the wrong building for the site. That was an important point, and one reason why I thought the Art Gallery was a perfect fit for the project. Helen Hughes echoed other commenters who preferred a single-tower massing over the twin tower model. Young asked, "ignoring the current neighbourhood boundaries for a moment, what would the optimal massing be in a larger urban context", to which head planner Deb Day replied, at or under the Empress Hotel eaves. Sonya Chandler was silent throughout the conversation, despite the significant impact this proposal will have in the areas of accessible public green space, environmental standards and affordable housing funding ($443,000 was offered by Westbank to the Affordable Housing Fund which Council wavered on as it was seen by some as buying density--a practice frowned upon outside Downtown's boundaries).

In the end, Council voted to move the project to APC, ADP and neighbourhood comment at which point it will come back to CotW and then possibly to Public Hearing.

Here is the timeline so far:

July 15, 2007: Rezoning Application
July 18 2007: Rezoning Submission
Dec. 20 2007: Rezoning Application Amendment
Feb. 20 2008: Rezoning Re-submission Amendment
Feb. 26 2008: Rezoning Re-submission Amendment
May 12, 2008: Rezoning Re-submission Amendment
June 13 2008: Rezoning Re-submission Amendment
June 19 2008: Rezoning Re-submission Amendment
Aug. 01 2008: Rezoning Re-submission Amendment
Sep. 09 2008: Rezoning Re-submission Amendment
Sep. 18 2008: Rezoning Re-submission Amendment

Talking to those on all sides of the issue afterwards, the one thing that could be agreed on was that the process has taken an unacceptably long time to get to where it's at now. More than two years after it was first conceived, no-one can agree on an acceptable use for the site, causing dissention among staff and Council at City Hall, driving the developer and architect to the point of desperation and taxing the resources of the neighbouring Community Associations.

Recently there have been many studies on localization of economies to keep a steady economic base in a community. It has been shown that in use of local business, the local economic base grew substantially versus shopping at a chain as this video covers.

This can be applied to architectural consulting firms who use inter-industry linkages, therefore creating an aspect of an agglomeration economy. An agglomeration  economy can be defined as a result in cost reductions that occur because of a concentration of economic activities in a confined space.

All across America, this correlation between urban design and regional economics is becoming more prominent. Cities and small regions are putting money into revitalizing their downtowns in order to not only beautify the city, but also to boost the economy in that area and promote commerce. By restoring downtowns physically, these cities are also restoring themselves economically. This is exemplified by central business districts in which property owners vote to raise their taxes in order to receive development grants, etc. Cities with desolate downtowns can become beautiful and useable through economic development which can occur alongside architectural development.

In other news, an American Fork school teacher was nearly killed this week by a motorist who wasn't paying attention.  I don't know to many details, but you can read what KSL reported here.  I hate to see this happen, and it happens all to frequently.  I hope by working with our political and planning officials we can make things safer for everyone.  See you all at the meeting!

Street furniture is an integral part of the urban landscape -- they could be designed to merge with urban public spaces to achieve a harmonious environment by considering their sense of unity and identity. They should interact with its people, users... representing the different needs, different predilections...

Sydney's Oxford Street has acquired a reputation as the city's main gay district, and is closed to traffic annually for the famous Mardi Gras celebration. Oh well, there is definitely no doubt that the street furniture along this street embodies the uniqueness of the locality and its regular users.