Climate Buildings
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Swedish cities could connect via bike superhighway
In Sweden, city planners and the country’s traffic authority are looking into building a four-lane bike superhighway between the university town of Lund and Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest cities and one of its most diverse. Cities like London have invested in protected lanes that they call “bike superhighways,” but this one would be one of the […]
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Critical List: Shale gas could squash renewables; scientists fiddle with photosynthesis
New York City promises to double the percentage of waste diverted from landfills within the next five years.
Increasing shale gas production could squash renewable energy development.
The Obama administration released a draft plan for protecting the country's oceans.
Scientists are fiddling with photosynthesis in order to make biofuel. -
A traffic light that knows the difference between bikes and cars
No matter how strong a cyclist's legs are, a bike cannot go as fast as a car. Duh, right? But traffic lights are not as smart as humans, and they do not instinctively understand that. So they’re programmed to assume leg-powered vehicles can make it safely through lights in the time allotted to things with engines. Luckily, some human was smart enough to invent the Intersector -- a traffic light that respects the difference between bikes and cars.
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Photographer turns unrelenting boringness of suburbia into art
Jason Griffiths is an assistant professor of design at Arizona State, and apparently living in the middle of all that desert sprawl got to him after a while. In the early aughts he jumped into a car, drove all over the country, and made a discovery so banal it’s practically a tautology: Suburbia is the same everywhere.
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Green cities on the cheap: Low-cost solutions for a sustainable world
This interview originally appeared in The Dirt. Jaime Lerner was elected mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, in 1971, and reelected two more times before serving as governor of the Brazilian state of Paraná. As mayor, Lerner devised a number of low-cost solutions and innovative partnerships with the public and private companies that turned Curitiba into a […]
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In Madrid, a highway becomes a park
Smart cities all around the world are getting rid of highways, and in Madrid, not only has the city built a tunnel to drive a urban-fabric-ripping highway underground, it has turned the reclaimed land into a park. In the New York Times, critic Michael Kimmelman tours the park and reports that, while "still a work […]
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Here’s a parking garage that doubles as an urban farm
Even the most utopian visions of a low-carbon world include cars, and even if they're fueled on electricity or ethanol, cars need places to park. But if parking structures have to exist, at least they can double as urban farms. In Vancouver, a company called Valcent Products is building a high-density "VertiCrop" farm on the […]
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IKEA to design an entire neighborhood
Exciting news for those whose entire house is populated by IKEA furniture (we know you're out there): the Swedish furniture company is going to be building an entire neighborhood in London. We know. It'll be like living in the IKEA store! With a Swedish meatball shop on every corner and 24/7 access to lingonberry jam. […]
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Infographic: World’s tallest buildings OF THE FUTURE
(click to embiggen) Buildings are getting to be so tall that the Council on Tall Buildings came up with a new name for their most extreme versions: Megatall. This is density taken to an extreme that may not be all that helpful. For one thing, people, goods, and water have to be moved all the […]
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Cities: Not quite as awesome as we like to think
Photo: David Graham If you Google the term “a scholar and a gentleman,” the first result to pop up is a picture of Witold Rybczynski — or it would be if there were any justice in the world. Rybczynski is an architect, author, and professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written […]
