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Tech NewsTechbrats and Tech Buses: What’s Ruining San Francisco This Week
It’s been a tumultuous week in San Francisco. The city’s transit agency held hearings to regulate the ubiquitous tech buses, but protesters say the buses have already ruined the city’s real estate. It’s a What’s Ruining Our Cities San Francisco Special Edition. Tech buses are ruining affordable housing On Tuesday, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation … Continued
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Tech News
Where Homelessness Is Getting Worse (It’s Not the Places You’d Think)
Overall, homelessness seems to be on the decline in the U.S. Since 2007, the rate of homelessness for all Americans declined nine percent; however, for about half of the states in the country, homelessness is still getting worse. ThinkProgress compared datasets from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2008 and 2013 to see … Continued
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Tech News
Photos of Tourists Staring at the WTC Are Weirdly Riveting
If you’ve ever taken a lunchtime stroll in Lower Manhattan, you’ve seen them: Sightseers (and locals, too) with their eyes raised skyward, watching the construction of One World Trade Center. Annoying to some, but revealing to photographer Keith Goldstein—whose photo essay Looking On captures the craning. Goldstein is a professional photographer who has worked in … Continued
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io9
Here’s how city life is actually affecting your health
There is a truism, often bolstered by pseudoscience, that people in the country are healthier than people in the city. Certainly there are many health problems associated with the metropolis. But it turns out that urbanites are often in better shape and live longer than their rural counterparts. Most of our data on the health … Continued
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Tech News
4 Ways to Make Better Roads and Parking Lots From the Ground Up
As a surface for wheels, pavement does its job well enough. Asphalt concrete is flat, smooth, and solid (usually). But there is a price we pay for the convenience of paved roads and parking lots everywhere—a price paid in heat, noise, and polluted runoff. We went in search of better pavement and found these potential … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Being on a Smartphone Makes You More Likely to Use Public Spaces—Kinda
In the 1960s, a sociologist named William H. Whyte revealed something interesting about the behavior of people in parks and plazas across the U.S.: people liked being with people. But has that changed now that everyone carries a tiny computer in their hands? According to a new study: no. Throughout the 60s and 70s, Whyte’s … Continued
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Tech News
22 Images From NYC’s Golden Age of Bridge Building
These days, we tend to think of New York’s bridges as traffic obstacles. But at the turn of the last century, the bridges that sprang up in thickets around Manhattan’s shores were objects of wonder and civic pride—near magical pieces of infrastructure that took many years (and lives) to build. A New York Times article … Continued
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Tech News
How Do We De-Suburbanize the Suburbs?
Phoenix, Arizona, is a famously fast-growing city. But, instead of growing up, the city has almost uniformly grown out, with terracotta-tiled subdivisions consuming the adjacent desert at a frightening rate: some estimates claim its suburbs grew an acre per hour during the early 2000s housing boom. A story on Marketplace discusses how Phoenix has been … Continued
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Tech News
A Smart (and Totally Unsolicited) Design For Obama’s Official Library
Last week, we asked you where you thought Obama’s forthcoming presidential library should be built: Chicago, Hawaii, or (psh) New York? Chicago was the popular winner, and now the first speculative design for a Chicago library has been published online. Michael Sorkin, a New York architect who has designed masterplans everywhere from Chicago to China, … Continued
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Tech News
China Could Wash Away Smog With Artificial Rain Storms From Skyscrapers
Airborne pollution is a major issue in China, with local hospitals opening up “smog clinics” and waves of city-dwellers migrating to more rural areas to escape. While Chinese officials are pursuing “cloud seeding” as a way to control pollution, a Zhejiang University professor thinks he has a better idea: Sprinklers. Big ones. Yu Shaocai is … Continued
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Tech News
Evangelical Urbanism: A Review of the Downtown Project’s Vegas Revival
As the story goes, Las Vegas was built by Mormons and mobsters. This unlikely team worked together to bring gambling to a place almost exclusively populated by men constructing the Hoover Dam. Their work turned a tiny sun-baked town into a global phenomenon. As the other story goes, downtown Vegas is not a once-glorious place … Continued
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Tech News
How a Giant Replica of the Vatican Ended Up In a Small African City
Construction on the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro, the largest church on earth, started 28 years ago in the small Ivory Coast city of Yamoussoukro. Planned by then-president Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who led the country through two decades of economic boomtime known as the “Ivorian miracle,” the church would be a monument—to God, … Continued
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Tech News
Meeting Tony Hsieh, the Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas
I’m not gonna lie: It’s a lot like meeting Oz in his Emerald City. Mostly because no one associated with him would set up a formal time for me to meet with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and the financial and philosophical force behind the Downtown Project, the $350 million urban revitalization program transforming downtown … Continued
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Tech News
Portland celebrates another safe year for cyclists, Hamburg goes car-free, San Francisco rents its curbs to tech buses, Houston’s got some wacky architecture, and L.A. is the city of the future—or a city in decline? It’s all in this week’s Urban Reads. In 2013, the city of Portland, Oregon, reported zero bike fatalities—again. They also … Continued
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Tech News
Build For Locals and Tourists Will Come: Vegas’s Plan for Its Downtown
Between the Downtown Project’s area and the Arts District is the new Las Vegas City Hall, a gleaming mirage of a building surrounded by a forest of photovoltaics. This is where the city leadership moved after it leased its old City Hall to Tony Hsieh’s company Zappos—a move that you can’t help but imbue with … Continued
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Tech News
China Is Turning Abandoned Steel Mills Back Into Farmland
For nearly a decade, China’s burgeoning steel industry has spit out more than ten times the steel of Japan, the world’s second largest producer. But that’s quickly changing: As demand slows and China attempts to curb pollution, a massive recession is hitting its steel country. Mill closures are hitting the province of Hebei—which produces roughly … Continued
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Tech News
Another Vegas Neighborhood In Transition: Looking at the Arts District
About 1.5 miles southwest of the Downtown Project’s cluster of development in Las Vegas is another creative neighborhood going through changes. It’s named 18b. Depending on who you talk to, that stands for the size of the area (“18 blocks”) or the number of the land parcel. But pretty much everyone just calls it the … Continued
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io9Movies
A Map of the Futuristic Los Angeles Subway From Spike Jonze’s Her
One of the best moments in the new movie Her is watching Joaquin Phoenix ride an elevated train through a Los Angeles of the near-future, dance through a bustling subway station, and emerge at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The scene got a surprised laugh from everyone at the screening I attended. After years … Continued
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Tech News
Are Other Vegas Businesses Benefiting from the Downtown Project?
The oldest freestanding bar in Vegas is Atomic Liquors, built in 1952, back when you could climb onto the roof and watch atomic bombs explode at desert test sites 60 miles away. If you sit long enough at its expansive bar, chances are Kent Johns will pull up a stool next to you and tell … Continued