Posts tagged Urban Renewal
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Hope for DC’s waterfront
DC’s Southwest Waterfront neighborhood is a classic example of failed urban renewal - old row houses and tenements (some nice, some less so) were razed, replaced with a freeway and 1960s/70s-era buildings where cars enjoy more square footage than people. The dinner cruise on the Potomac Stefanie and I took for our six-month anniversary departed from a pier in Southwest, and… Keep reading…
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“Improvement”
Before: Keep reading…
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Save Our Superblock
One of the travesties of 1950s-era urban planning was the “superblock”, where cities disrupted the regular street grid to build large towers surrounded by windswept plazas. Most of these superblocks are now recognized as mistakes, such as Boston’s City Hall Plaza, a huge barren space nearly empty all year round, and the World Trade Center superblock,… Keep reading…
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Which is better?
Which street would you prefer? Keep reading…
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Three visions of the city
As Boozy so entertainingly informed us, Le Corbusier’s vision for a city was the Radiant City, of rows of identical buildings and skyscrapers separated by parkland. Robert Moses’ vision for the city included wide expressways (which eventually became choked with traffic) cutting across boulevards of urban renewal style projects. And Jane Jacobs famously… Keep reading…
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Slower, messier, safer, better
Reading about urban planning it often sounds like the engineers back in the 60s had no clue. They thought it was just great to bulldoze whole neighborhoods to build freeways partly because freeways made people drive faster, thereby reducing the amount of pollution they emit because cars are more efficient at higher speeds. But really it just encourages people to live… Keep reading…