DailyDirt: We Built This City On [Insert Concept Here]
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The projects of rebuilding/revitalizing cities are becoming more important, and some new concepts of how to proceed are changing how various kinds of infrastructure are designed. We’ve already noted the end of cul-de-sacs and left turns, so here are a few more interesting developments in infrastructure planning.
- Several cities are apparently tearing down freeways and replacing them with tree-lined boulevards. Highway construction used to be a sign of progress. Are information highways taking their place? [url]
- Looking at just a month’s worth of data, San Francisco saved about $1M by tracking its street cleaning trucks and re-optimizing their routes. FYI, the Code for America Institute is looking for more data like this that could help cities become more efficient. [url]
- NYC’s first sustainable home will include solar, wind, water collection and treatment technologies in a 6-story unit (with a 2-story livable space). So this building will be off the grid, despite being in the middle of one. [url]
- Hate running over potholes all the time? There’s an app for that. The Street Bump app automatically reports where potholes are by correlating accelerometer “bumps” and GPS coordinates. (It doesn’t actually fix them.) [url]
- If you’re looking for more architecture projects, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Filed Under: city, freeway, infrastructure, pothole, sustainable
Companies: code for america
Comments on “DailyDirt: We Built This City On [Insert Concept Here]”
Any habitat that does not include the production of materials in it is not that green.
The tricky part is to transform houses into organic factories that do something with the waste they produce otherwise they are creating just pollution.
What goes into into a house, how that can be transformed and reused?
Can houses breath in polluted air and purify it a little and use the filter as something else after?
Can we use syngas to boil water and keep the heating systems in a house and somehow separate the gas constituents after to see if they can be used for something?
Can people produce their own gas needs from organic leftovers? with some kind of artificial house intestines?
Can we produce our own food inside boxes that use the energy of the sun to power lights for them to grow?
I think the “green projects” projects of today are not that green and are not that bold enough.
“Street Bump app automatically reports where potholes are by correlating accelerometer “bumps” and GPS coordinates. (It doesn’t actually fix them.)”
Let me know when there’s an app for that!! (fixing them, that is)
Re: Re:
Someday, the potholes won’t have to be fixed by pouring asphalt… cars will just know how to avoid them with active suspension:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSi6J-QK1lw
NYC’s first sustainable home will include solar, wind, water collection and treatment technologies in a 6-story unit (with a 2-story livable space).
Nice idea, but the cost will make it impractical. It’s going to cost more to build and maintain than a traditional building and an apartment there will probably rent for much more than a traditional one.
So how much does SU pay you guys for these regular posts?
Several cities are apparently tearing down freeways
“This is the city planner’s dream: Take out an underused freeway, open up land for new businesses or parks and magically more workers will move back to the city and property values will soar. So far, though, the results have been mixed.”
Anyone else see the problem with the above statement? If you remove or reduce the capacity and them have more businesses and traffic added due to the increase in business the streets can reach a point over capacity. Then they will need to build new roads or replace the smaller one that is now in place.
I guess since they are hoping “magically more workers will move back to the city” they hope that magically they will get to work.
Tearing Down Highways.
Well, of course, you know that the first urban highways, as it were, the European boulevards, were generally created by tearing down defensive walls in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, good examples being Paris, Milan, and Vienna. Highway was a relative term, of course. At that date, it meant a horse carriage at five or ten miles an hour, or a horseman (say, a dispatch rider) at twenty. In the late twentieth century, China did much the same thing.
So, what goes around, comes around.
London is a rather different case. It is a port city, and its traditional artery is the Thames. Sixteenth century maps and drawings show hundreds of docks up and down the river. Outside of the Square Mile, settlement ran in a thin belt about two blocks deep along the river, extending for miles upstream and downstream. Essentially no public buildings were built more than easy walking distance away from the river. A few years after Louis XIV of France built the first Parisian boulevards, a patriotic Londoner named Thomas Doggett instituted a perpetual prize for the best rower among the Thames boatmen. London’s expansion away from the river only got going in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the railroads arrived. Significant portions of the key London Underground lines were in place as early as the 1860’s, just about the time the building boom in the outer suburbs was taking place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Doggett
DailyDirt: We Built This City On [Insert Concept Here]
Umm, [Rock & Roll]?