From Next City —Determining How Subsidized Housing Factors Into a More Affordable San Francisco

Building more market-rate housing in the Bay Area may reduce displacement pressure at the regional level, but building subsidized housing has over twice the impact, according to researchers at UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project. In a report released this week, they note that at the level of San Francisco blocks, neither market-rate nor subsidized housing production has a significant impact on displacement though, likely due to “the extreme mismatch between supply and demand.” Read more: Determining How Subsidized Housing Factors Into a More Affordable S.F. – Next City

From PBS NewsHour －Urban designers transform these streets into pedestrian paradise

New York City’s streets underwent a radical transformation under the leadership of Janette Sadik-Khan, who served as transportation commissioner from 2007 to 2013. In the new book “Streetfight: A Handbook for an Urban Revolution,” Sadik-Khan and co-author Seth Solomonow share the lessons from six years of redesigning the streets of New York City with more plazas, bike lanes and rapid bus lanes. Read more: Urban designers transformed these five spaces into pedestrian paradise | PBS NewsHour

From Co.Exist — Car-Free Neighbourhood Redesigns Suburbia

It's possible that some people might own a car in a new neighborhood designed for Mannheim, Germany. But they won't be able to drive up to their doors: The entire neighborhood is car-free, with parking hidden underground.

Instead of roads, the neighborhood will have sidewalks that connect with paths in a surrounding park. "Essentially the project recreates the park experience on a residential scale, and removing the road allows the park to permeate throughout the site unrestricted," says Johannes Pilz, one of the architects from the design firm MVRDV, which worked on the development for Traumhaus, a German affordable housing developer. This New Car-Free Neighborhood Redesigns Suburbia | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

Jane Jacobs' "big R&D lab" in downtown Toronto industrial sites redevelopment

20 years ago Jane Jacobs was given the chance to put her ideas into practice in the renewal of two large downtown Toronto in-decline industrial sites. The King Street neighbourhoods were a priority of then-mayor Barbara Hall and she asked Jacobs’ advice. Details of this fascinating story are told in the links below by Spacing Magazine’s Shawn Micallef in Curbed.com and in a Globe and Mail piece by Stephen Wickens.

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401 Richmond in the western neighbourhood of the "Two Kings", which the Zeidler family purchased in 1994, is an illustration of Jacobs’s arguments about urbanism and a piece of her legacy in Toronto. Eberhard Zeidler, the patriarch, was the architect who designed the Eaton Centre. When the Zeidlers purchased 401, the old steampunk neighborhood around it, once the heart of Toronto’s schmatte trade, was dead. "There was one restaurant in the area, just a greasy spoon. Now there has to be like 20 or 30 in that section there," says Margie Zeidler, Eberhard’s daughter and the driving force behind what would become the vital building beloved by so much of Toronto today. Today that 1994 landscape is unimaginable and the building is at the heart of one of the most intense areas of development in North America, with condo towers sprouting where there were once acres of parking lots and buildings left fallow after deindustrialization. Read more: Jane Up North - Curbed

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She wasn’t at all surprised to see people saying 

what would Jane Jacobs have thought; 

but what Jane Jacobs would have thought 

was think for yourself. — Jim Jacobs

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Richard Florida in CityLab — Inner-City Growth and Competition

Two new studies explore the movement of businesses and people back to the city, but outside the central business district. Over the past decade or so, inner cities have staged a comeback, leading to what’s been dubbed a “great inversion” as people and jobs move back to and near downtown, and poverty and disadvantage increasingly take up residence in the suburbs. Read more: Inner-City Growth and Competition in the U.S. - CityLab

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From Guardian Cities — Barcelona’s plan to give streets back to residents

From Urbanarium — City Debate #5: Let Experts Plan

Should citizens be more empowered to decide what gets built and where in Vancouver? Or is the process already too prone to public pressures, stifling the creativity, knowhow and vision that professional planners are hired to provide? More at: City Debate #5: Let Experts Plan | Urbanarium #urbanariumvote Tweets