From The Atlantic Cities—The True Cost of Unwalkable Streets

Perhaps the single most alarming public health trend in the United States today is the dramatic rise in the number of people who are overweight and obese, bringing serious risks of heart disease, diabetes and other consequences leading to life impairment and premature death. This is bad enough as it is, but I contend that it is particularly unfortunate that we do not sufficiently recognize the extent to which these trends are caused by environmental factors, particularly the shape of our built environment.

Read more: The True Cost of Unwalkable Streets - Commute - The Atlantic Cities

City Builder Book Club — Roberta Brandes Gratz on ‘Gradual Money and Cataclysmic Money’

“Putting it figuratively, insofar as their effects on most city streets and districts are concerned, three kinds of money behave not like irrigation systems, bringing life-giving streams to feed steady, continual growth. Instead, they behave like manifestations of malevolent climates beyond the control of man – affording either searing droughts or torrential, eroding floods.”

Read more at citybuilderbookclub.org

We encourage you to leave comments on our blog letting us know what you think of the book as we read it together!

City Builder Book Club » Death and Life of Great American Cities 

From Spacing Vancouver — Price Points: The Social Life of a Small Urban Place

It is one of the most extravagant public spaces in Vancouver - if measured by the care and cost of its design. And yet it feels lifeless, barely used, in the heart of the city's business district.Yazmín Hernández Bañuelas, Daniel Martin and Kevin Jingyi Zhang explain why. They are all SCARP* students in a course conducted by Larry Beasley - and produced this video as their assignment: an analysis of a chosen urban space in the city's core.

Price Points: The Social Life of a Small Urban Place « Spacing Vancouver

Museum of Modern Art ‒ A Tour of New York City with Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera. Production and Manufacture of Engine and Transmission from the mural cycle Detroit Industry. 1932–33. Fresco, approx. 17' 8 5/8" x 45' 1/4" (5.4 x 13.72 m). The Detroit Institute of Arts. © 2012 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Diego Rivera was enthralled with New York City from the moment he arrived here in November 1931, six weeks before the opening of his retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. Fascinated by modern technology, he felt an immediate connection to the city, which at the time was in the throes of one of the largest construction booms in U.S. history, known as the skyscraper race. Rivera funneled his fascination into the creation of three New York–themed portable murals, which were included in his 1931–32 MoMA show. Two of these fresco panels, as well as an 8-foot drawing for the third, are currently on view in the exhibition Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art. We have identified most of the sites referenced in these works, and with this information plotted the various places Rivera visited while here. You can compare present-day views of these sites with photos taken around the time of the artist’s visit on the exhibition’s website.

MoMA | A Tour of New York City with Diego Rivera

City Lights at MOV

http://museumofvancouver.ca/ Visitors will get a glimpse of Vancouver’s big city lights of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in this exhibition of the Museum Of Vancouver’s neon sign collection. The remarkable signs, some lit for the first time since they were rescued from the junk yard, are accompanied by the tale of how the city went through a war of aesthetics that resulted in a transition of the very way Vancouver imagines itself. To Sunday August 12, 2012.

From The Pop-Up City — The Urban Apartment As A Pinhole Camera

Stenop.es is an experimental and dreamy visual project by the Paris-based photographers and camera men Romain Alary and Antoine Levi. The project uses a primitive technique: the Camera Obscura. Applied to an original scale, the project is based on projection from the outside to the inside. Two layers are merging while the landscapes become the background of the interior. The results are awesome. Here’s episode 1, ‘Pushkar, India’:


Ghat from Romain A on Vimeo.

Exploring new ways to enhance their photography skills, Alary and Levi darken an entire space, blocking out all of the light except for a small beam from the window. They use stationary DSLR cameras to capture the imagery as the outside landscape merges with the indoor space. The men are looking for new places they could use with interesting views, so give them a shout if you’d like your apartment to become the set of a new episode. Click here to check out the series.

The Urban Apartment As A Pinhole Camera — The Pop-Up City