Tag: Urban Planning
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Density without Delight: Vermonniitty’s Lessons for Urban Planners
Vermonniitty’s design highlights a pressing need: reinventing our approach to suburban design for a better future.
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Seven Takeaways from the Urban Future Conference
Top ideas to improve cities from the UF22 conference.
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Collaborative learning and an updated toolbox: two ideas for cities to make a U-turn on car-centric planning
Helsinki’s car tunnel plans show how taking action is the hard part in sustainable mobility policy. Turning transportation departments into learning organizations can help untie the knot.
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Inspiration for a “15-Minute City” Action Plan
The pandemic has highlighted the need for sustainable city development. The 15-minute city concept, promoting walkable, multi-purpose neighborhoods, is gaining traction. Explore the potential of this vision as a post-Covid-19 recovery policy.
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The Power of DIY Urbanism: How a Group of Skateboarders Changed the City
There’s a lot of talk nowadays (this blog included) about how bottom up movements have become more important in shaping and solving problems of the 21st century city. The drivers behind the trend include the rise of the internet and social media: It has become very easy to mobilize people around any issue. In addition,…
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‘This Waterfront Needs a Highway’: The Huge Mistakes Cities Keep Making
Making mistakes is an important part of life. It’s an opportunity for growth and a lesson to others. Unless, of course, you’re a city. Too often, cities think they’re unique and repeat the blunders that others have made before them. Here are three of the worst ideas that keep getting recycled. This article was originally…
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From Life-Filled Imagery to Dead Plazas – Why Cities Need a Place-Driven Future
Does anyone else pay attention to this: many times the renderings of new urban development projects include a plaza or similar open space, sitting somewhere in front or between the proposed new buildings. Scaling purposes aside, the glitzy visualizations paint pictures of future plazas teeming with life. People are lounging around, meeting each other and…
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Could Your City Benefit from DIY Urban Planning? Yes, the Experience from Pro Helsinki 2.0 Suggests
It’s been a bit more than a year since I and my urbanist comrades accomplished one of the most exciting things ever – well, at least as far as urban planning goes. Following about 10 months of work during evenings, weekends, and holidays, in October 2014 we finally published Pro Helsinki 2.0, the alternative master…
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Retrofitting Suburbia – A New Life for Vantaa’s Myyrmäki
Goodbye underperforming asphalt. Bringing urban feel to the suburbs is now officially on the horizon in the Helsinki area. In September a community-based do-it-yourself initiative called Myyrmäki-liike (Myyrmäki Movement) invited me to talk about contemporary urban development trends. They had staged an event to generate discussion around a set of nine proposals to transformation the…
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Could Europe’s Refugee Influx Trigger a Shift Towards Leaner Urban Policies?
The sudden need to make room for asylum-seekers may gather momentum for inventing new ways to solve housing shortages in Finland’s growth centers. Urbanization is a highly transformative force in Finland. Our seven biggest urban centers are projected to grow by one million new residents by 2050 thanks to rural-to-urban migration, the geography of natural…