Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff talks to Charlie Rose about the future of cities

Thousands of people a week are signing up for New York City's free WiFi hotspots: https://t.co/HK28T0BOE9 #LinkNYC pic.twitter.com/DRMdHZzVyZ

— Brian Fung (@b_fung) April 8, 2016

Jaime Lerner in The New York Times — How to Build a Sustainable City

Global warming, drought, migration and population growth have put our cities under heavy strain. What does the future hold for them — and all of us — in this scenario?

Cities have a very significant impact on climate change: It’s estimated that urban areas are responsible for 75 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Before the climate conference in Paris in December, developed and developing nations alike pledged to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in an effort to reach worldwide consensus. But does this consensus absorb the world’s many different realities, cultures and levels of economic development? And is looking at the issue on a country scale the best one to take effective action? Read more: How to Build a Sustainable City - The New York Times

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"Something special about cities with compact urban places, they stimulate innovation, entrepreneurship, create opportunities"

—@globeandmail @shanedingman “something special about cities w/ compact urban places stimulate innovation, entrepreneurship create opportunities"

Posted by The Sidewalk Ballet on Sunday, July 19, 2015

From Next City — We Put 31 Artists, 25 Architects and 18 Urban Planners in a Room. Guess What Happens Next...

Credit: Ashton Lance

The team: 31 artists and designers, 25 architects and housing experts, 23 community members, 18 urban planners, 11 local foundation and city representatives, 2 landscape architects and between them, eight Next City Vanguards. Read more: We Put 31 Artists, 25 Architects and 18 Urban Planners in a Room.

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@transitmixapp — from amateur sensation to agency consideration @CityLab

Post by CityLab.

From @ArchDaily — Unfolding Accommodation and Panelized Modular Housing

Post by Architecture Daily.

Architecture Daily shared Homesthetics's video. - Architecture Daily

From Vancouver Public Space Network — 50 Ideas for Improving Public Space

The Vancouver Public Space Network is a volunteer-run non-profit doing advocacy, education and outreach on Vancouver’s public realm. Since 2008, the VPSN has produced Last Candidate Standing and simultaneously released a series of policy recommendations for improving the state of Vancouver’s public spaces. Here are the VPSN’s priorities for the consideration of candidates for local government to take action on from 2014 to 2018: –  you can read more here: http://bit.ly/1zq9y7Y And on Facebook.

From @LeanUrbanism — Lean Sprawl Repair – Mall Retrofit

The past decade has seen the demise of hundreds of shopping centers and malls. Out of roughly 1,000 enclosed malls in the US, approximately 30% are dead or dying. In places of weak recovery and population loss, malls may languish for years, negatively impacting the surrounding suburban communities.

Malls are sprawl types that are normative and repetitive, and the tools for their repair can be the same. In places of economic and population growth, malls will be retrofitted into urban cores with multiple uses: offices, residential, live-work units, and hotels that will rebalance the existing retail space.

Municipalities, developers and planners need new ways to utilize and adapt such underperforming commercial properties. Having already outlived their lifecycles, these properties can provide inexpensive space for business incubation and/or affordable housing that has become scarce in recent years, as downtowns and inner-city neighborhoods have experienced a redevelopment renaissance. Read more: Lean Sprawl Repair – Mall Retrofit | Lean Urbanism

Fun #dataviz: A Day in the Life of a New York City Taxi. @chris_whong

Fun #dataviz: A Day in the Life of a New York City Taxi. http://t.co/vt68jmloNQ pic.twitter.com/IfSDl68GW2

— Chris Whong (@chris_whong) July 14, 2014

Spur — a festival of politics, art and ideas Vancouver May 22 - 25 Live tweets #spur14

Tweets about "#spur14"

Seattle Builds Itself a Woonerf!

Seattle builds itself a #woonerf, ahem, street park. Lovely! http://t.co/0pE1Qi5EU6 http://t.co/Ois7T2J92U @svrdesign @pps_placemaking

— Charles Montgomery (@thehappycity) April 11, 2014

From Medium — You’re a Street Designer (you just don’t know it yet) — The Design Principles Behind Streetmix

Chances are that smaller streets around you are changing,  — as is our way of thinking about them. While streets were originally built with people in mind (a century ago, it wasn’t uncommon for parents to just feel safe to tell their kids to go play in the street, even in a big city center), throughout the last century we largely surrendered them to car traffic. However, many city planners and urban designers are revisiting that approach and re-imagining streets as once again more pedestrian-, bike-, and public transit-friendly.

A typical way to communicate new ideas is via a “street section” — a slice of the road illustrating all of its parts side by side, from the building on one end, to the building on the other.

This web-based street section editor was built as a side project by a small team of fellows at Code for America, a non-profit dedicated to finding ways to apply modern technology practices to city governments. Code for America believes in open source, open data, and citizen engagement through web applications, and Streetmix is a direct extension of that way of thinking. More at: You’re a street designer (you just don’t know it yet) — Medium 

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Recently here in Nanaimo on a Facebook neighbourhood group page discussion turned to traffic calming on a residential thru-street and with Streetmix I was able to contribute this street redesign: 

From FastCoDesign.com —The Car As You Know It Is Dead

The tech world has been abuzz about the developments of the self-driving car, visions that are supplanting the earlier visions that would have filled the sky with flying cars. But beyond the hype and the promise, how will autonomous vehicles--and their accompanying technologies--really enter our lives? Read more: The Car As You Know It Is Dead | Co.Design | business + design

From theguardian.com — The Best City Blogs Around the World

To get a better view of what's really happening across the world, get to know the local urban voices who cover their home cities most insightfully. Here's an initial list of friends, from Detroit to Addis Ababa ... Click on the pin points to reveal the blogs. Plus, you can follow the global city bloggers on Twitter More at: The best city blogs around the world – an interactive guide | Cities | theguardian.com

Tweets from https://twitter.com/guardiancities/global-city-bloggers

From Quartz — What a City Needs to Foster Innovation: Cafes, Bike LanesAnd 3D Printers

Once upon a time, innovation was an isolationist sport. In America’s innovative economy 20 years ago, a worker drove to a nondescript office campus along a suburban corridor, worked in isolation, and kept ideas secret.

Today, by contrast and partly a result of the Great Recession, proximity is everything. Talented people want to work and live in urban places that are walkable, bike-able, connected by transit, and hyper-caffeinated. Major companies across multiple sectors are practicing “open innovation” and want to be close to other firms, research labs, and universities. Entrepreneurs want to start their companies in collaborative spaces, where they can share ideas and have efficient access to everything from legal advice to sophisticated lab equipment. Read more: What a city needs to foster innovation: cafes, bike lanes, and 3D printers - Quartz

From Metropolis Magazine — Game Changer: Alastair Parvin's WikiHouse

The brain behind WikiHouse, an open-sourced platform that promises to remake the field. Is it a threat to the primacy of the architect, or a glimpse into our digital design future? Read more:

Game Changer: Alastair Parvin - Metropolis Magazine - January 2014

RT @SketchUp: Our favorite part of the WikiHouse project is that it's a wiki. Case in point (via @SketchThis): http://t.co/CStIdmxFZY
— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) January 23, 2014

RT @WikiHouse: Just stumbled across this brilliant video (note the super model to music sync) http://t.co/KoMlxBE5qT #WikiHouse @wikihousefr
— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) January 23, 2014

How To: Collaborate with Government - @codeforamerica HT @PPS_Placemaking https://t.co/FWo8JI3NJL
— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) September 30, 2013

Phenomenal job MT @DDMBoro: @CommunityMttrs @NEAarts Here is our #TacticalUrbanism project from October https://t.co/htBUykF4Qq

— Mike Lydon (@MikeLydon) January 9, 2014

From Cities for People —Living Innovation Zones in San Francisco

It is in our common interest to create a city where quality of life is the key objective. We all have an opportunity as well as a shared responsibility to help the city to become an attractive place to live and work.

But what does it take to inspire private companies to invest effort and money in developing the quality of the public space? Over time numerous financial models for private investment and operation of public spaces have been tested – models for POPS (Privately Owned Public Spaces), BIDS ( Business Improvement Districts) , PPP (Public – Private – Partnerships) have all been implemented and many lessons have been learnt. Now something new is happening in San Francisco. The acronym for this new initiative is LIZ – Living Innovation Zones. They have been developed in partnership between San Francisco’s planning department, the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation MOCI and Gehl Architects as a spin-off of the three-year development of the Better Market Street project on Market Street in San Francisco. Read more: Crowd-funding Public Space | Cities for People

From the National Film Board — Highrise: The Towers in the World, The World in the Towers

Interactive views from the global highrise. A 360° National Film Board documentary by Katerina Cizek. You see them all over the world. Concrete residential highrise buildings are the most commonly built form of the last century. On the outside they all look the same. But inside these towers of concrete and glass, people create community, art and meaning.  An Emmy-winning, multi-year, many-media, collaborative documentary experiment at the National Film Board of Canada, that explores vertical living around the world. More at: Highrise