Bringing Urbanism Home I love big cities, but I often find small cities more compelling. The dispiriting and encouraging aspects of urbanism are more immediately juxtaposed, often heart-rendingly so, but the disparity between them seems bridgeable. Surely, this place can be made to work, if only. Hudson, N.Y., a settlement of 8,000 residents two hours north of Manhattan, is a two-square-mile snapshot of America’s urban disparity. Its main avenue, Warren Street, is a stunner; it looks as if eight very charming blocks of Brooklyn left the big city a century ago and moved to Columbia County.
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Cities of Tomorrow The 2009 Oscar winner for best picture, Slumdog Millionaire, may have introduced Hollywood to the ragpickers of Mumbai, but that city’s scrap-heap squalor is all too common everywhere else. In 2003, the United Nations reported that almost 1 billion people—about one-sixth of humanity, and a third of all city dwellers—lived in the slums of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the number was projected to double by 2030. Planning can’t keep up, so people ad-lib housing, often illegally, in the space they can find on urban fringes.
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How to Design for a Post-Consumption Economy We are all consumers. As we continue to gain a deeper understanding of the impacts of global growth, it has become clear that our consumption-centric lifestyle has challenged our planet's ability to support us. Recent market meltdowns, regulatory limitations on off-shore manufacturing, and the social and environmental impacts of a consumption-oriented economic model has given rise to a challenge -- does our economy need to be focused solely on spurring consumption in order to survive?
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A Natural Path to Curb Lighting Costs In the revenue-squeezed world of business, where the search for cost savings has left no paper clip unturned, you might say a lightbulb has gone on -- and, consequently, many others are going off. Corporate leaders are increasingly heeding the call of the '60s hit "Let the Sunshine In," using some high-tech innovation and creative open-air designs to ensure that natural light washes across the office landscape. "It's a real critical component right now" in bolstering the corporate bottom line, said Donald Young, spokesman for the International Facility Management Association in Houston. "If you can reduce that part of the [operations] bill, that frees up capital to reinvest."
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Dubai's Ruler Downsizes Ambitions Amid Crisis There was a time when Dubai's annual property fair was a gilded stage for the ruling sheik to unveil his latest, anything-goes dreams: the world's tallest towers, canals in the desert and artificial islands in the sea. As this year's fair begins Monday, the global recession has sharply downsized those visions and taken much of the boomtown bravado from the city-state's CEO-style ruler. The Cityscape expo is expected to be far more subdued than in years past. The shift reflects Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum's passage from big-ticket visionary to more cautious steward of the Gulf emirate's sand-to-skyscraper transformation.
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AGC Releases Plan to Restart Construction Spending Frustrated by the slow pace of stimulus spending for all but a few transportation-related projects, the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) announced a recovery plan for the construction industry today. "Build Now for the Future: A Blueprint for Economic Growth" aims to restart construction spending, an economic engine that drives broader financial growth—"Every billion dollars invested in nonresidential construction activity adds $3.4 billion to the gross domestic product, increases personal earnings by $1.1 billion and creates or sustains 28,500 jobs," the AGC notes in its proposal.
