On Tuesday night, SPUR (San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association) brought the future of city living to the present. At their Mission Street Urban Center, SPUR opened the "DIY Urbanism" exhibit with some city living of their own. Read more »
What if there were a better way of living? A way that was more environmentally sound, more economical, more conducive to the building of community, and didn't require huge monetary investments? What if this new method of existence was already vis. Read more »
Architecture can both dictate, and facilitate, our behaviors. Christopher Alexander’s influential A Pattern Language illustrates the concept best. His book explores the underlying code, or “pattern,” found in our environments. Read more »
Before he invented the safety razor, King Camp Gillette was a futurist. In 1894, he published plans for a porcelain, hexagonal city with transparent sidewalks. Read more »
The domination of the American landscape by the car is so complete that it is difficult to envision cities and towns where bicycles form more than a token part of the transportation backdrop. Read more »
San Franciscans tend to view the artificial Treasure Island as a blur on the bridge to the East Bay: the 400 acres have been semi-abandoned since the Navy shut down its base in 1997.
That's about to change. Read more »
One chilly Wednesday afternoon in late May, I joined a small group of technologists, researchers, architects and urban planners on a field trip through Lower Manhattan and three distinct neighborhoods in Brooklyn to get a glimpse of the future of wor. Read more »
The dictionary may narrowly define “commune” as just a community that shares resources, but for Stephanie Smith, a Harvard-trained entrepreneur and designer, the commune “seems like the answer to everything. Read more »
Is it enough for our lives, our economy, our cities to become “sustainable”? If being sustainable means no more than being able to maintain the status quo of strife and never having enough, of contests over who gets the most of the scarce. Read more »
Recent comments