Posts Tagged ‘new urbanism’
Tonight: How New Urbanism Advances Mobility and Safety Goals
This is a “must-see” event for fans of the blog. Eric Dumbaugh will be making the transportation engineer’s case for New Urbanism, backed by loads of useful data and case studies. I’ll be introducing the speaker, and I’ll be hanging around a while afterward in case anyone wants to chat.
$2.50
I was browsing through some data about historical gas prices, when I found some an interesting graph from the Energy Information Administration. Immediately something jumped off the page at me: when looking at historical inflation-adjusted gas prices, every time the price goes above $2.50 we’ve had a major economic meltdown.
Solving the Ashby Paradox
The Ashby Hi-Rise situation has put the problems with Houston’s development regulations in the spotlight. The way the city does business today offers neither the protections that residents desire, nor the predictability that developers need to do business. If we’re not careful, the backlash from this event could make things even worse. Fortunately, there’s a win-win alternative that can solve this problem and make Houston a better place to live and do business.
The Urban Network
A few years ago Peter Calthorpe, one of the leading urban designers of our generation, was looking at a bunch of the tools that are advancing good urbanism today (like the Transect, Context-Sensitive Streets, and SmartCode) and felt that something was missing. What we needed, he argued, was a pattern for holding these things together [...]
Smart Code
Continuing in our look at the basics of Urbanism, I’d like to introduce another concept today: the SmartCode. SmartCode is a highly refined, form-based model development code. It was produced by Duany Plater-Zyberk during the 80′s and 90′s, and released to the general public in 2003. The entire code and a lot of supporting material [...]