The Price of Walkability This is a community post, untouched by our editors. Not so long ago, walkable neighbourhoods had a price penalty associated with them – not a price premium. However, a structural shift is occurring, which demonstrates a fundamental change in demand in our cities. The Atlantic Cities recently released an article based on research from the Brookings Institution that shows just how much more expensive walkable, mixed-use, dense, and amenity rich neighbourhoods are in comparison to the typical suburban communities. Photo c/o ifmuth (Flickr) Of course, the flip side of this coin is that retail businesses do better in walkable neighbourhoods, due to increased footfall, houses are worth more per square foot, and even rent for office spaces increases. Although baby boomers and millennials (those born between the early 1980s and 2000) are extremely different in a number of respects, they share a similar desire to live in dense, walkable, urban communities with easily accessible amenities.
WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE? Archinect | Connecting Architects Since 1997 Sophie Chevalier sophie.chevalier7@wanadoo.fr Sophie Chevalier est maître de conférences en ethnologie à l’Université de Franche-Comté depuis 1996. Elle a aussi enseigné ponctuellement en Grande-Bretagne, en Suisse et au Brésil. Après une licence de droit à l’Université de Genève, elle a étudié à l’Université de Paris X-Nanterre où elle a obtenu sa thèse de doctorat ; puis elle a passé deux ans post-doctoral comme chercheur associé au Department of Social Anthropology de l’Université de Cambridge (GB). Elle s’intéresse à l’anthropologie économique, plus précisément ses travaux concernent la culture matérielle contemporaine, les pratiques de consommation et les échanges. Elle a ensuite mené des recherches en Bulgarie, sur le passage d’une économie planifiée à l’économie de marché, vu à travers les pratiques économiques quotidiennes des habitants d’une petite ville. Par ailleurs, elle vient de terminer une recherche européenne qui incluait huit pays, « Parenté et solidarité » (6ème PCRD). Co-direction :
Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist Parlour | women, architecture, equity. New book by David Harvey: Rebel Cities | Pop Theory Between trying to take a day off and teaching overload (at the same time), I have been speed-reading David Harvey’s new book, Rebel Cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution, bought on a day out in Bath. I know, this is the sort of book you are meant to buy at Booksmarks or somewhere like that, but Bath is the closest place to where I live with decent book shops (Oxford doesn’t count, because it doesn’t actually have great bookshops, apart from Blackwell’s, and the OUP bookshop, both of which are more like academic libraries where you can buy the books, if you see what I mean). It has some familiar limits, shall we say – an aversion to rights-talk when thought of as anything more than a convenient strategic fiction, and a simplistic contrast between ‘individual rights’ (not to be trusted), and ‘collective’ rights (more of these, please). The two most interesting pieces in this new book are in the middle. [The baby's just been sick, I have to pause]. Like this:
Exiting The Anthropocene and Entering The Symbiocene. | glennaalbrecht Exiting The Anthropocene It has been proposed that humans are now living within a period of the Earth’s history appropriately named ‘The Anthropocene’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The name is derived from the observed human influence and indeed dominance of all climatic, biophysical and evolutionary processes occurring at a planetary scale. Gone is the relative stability and predictability of the past 12,000 years as the established patterns and regularity of Holocene phenology begin to fall into chaos. In the Anthropocene, the so-called ‘new normal’, or what I prefer to conceptualise as ‘the new abnormal’, life will be characterised by uncertainty, unpredictability, genuine chaos and relentless change. We need to get rid of the foundations of the concept of the Anthropocene before it covers many more decades of history of Earth. Dominance by powerful vested interests has also become characteristic of what is called democracy. Entering The Symbiocene Imagining The Symbiocene Sumbiocracy
IAKC Home - InteriorArchitectureCommittee The American Institute of Architects Board of Directors awarded the 2013 AIA Architecture Firm Award to Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, who blend exquisite care for detail with subtle, reverent architecture that's both timeless in its abstracted, meditative forms and materially specific to context and place. The AIA Architecture Firm Award, given annually, is the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm, and recognizes a practice that has consistently produced distinguished architecture for at least 10 years… Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects respect the Modernist legacy of orthogonal, functional minimalism, but place it in a wider context of earthen, material richness. Read the full interview with Billie Tsien. Read our previous interviews with Lauren Rottet / Clive Wilkinson / Todd DeGarmo / Rand Elliot
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey – review Echoes of the Paris Commune? … The 2011 London riots. Photograph: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images The increasing urbanisation of the globe is frequently discussed and worried over. This is ironic, as there has seldom been a period less preoccupied with how to create the city as a positive, active, collective polis rather than an atomised, accidental antheap. The essays here revise certain old-school Marxist judgments while making equally critical remarks on the young, "horizontalist" left dominant at, say, the Occupation outside St Paul's. Harvey's reworking of Marxist political theory places the city first and foremost, in terms of its position as a generator of capital accumulation, as opposed to, say, the factory. That's not the case with his frequent recourse to the Paris Commune of 1871, a brief and bloodily-suppressed socialist experiment in working-class self-government. For Harvey, there are two principal adversaries to organisation. But how to get to that point?
Panarchy Panarchy What is Panarchy? Panarchy is a conceptual framework to account for the dual, and seemingly contradictory, characteristics of all complex systems – stability and change. It is the study of how economic growth and human development depend on ecosystems and institutions, and how they interact. It is an integrative framework, bringing together ecological, economic and social models of change and stability, to account for the complex interactions among both these different areas, and different scale levels (see Scale Levels). Panarchy’s focus is on management of regional ecosystems, defined in terms of catchments, but it deals with the impact of lower, smaller, faster changing scale levels, as well as the larger, slower supra-regional and global levels. The development of the panarchy framework evolved out of experiences where “expert” attempts to manage regional ecosystems often resulted in considerable degradation of those ecosystems (Gunderson and Holling, 2002). Adaptive Cycles