Midweek reading: Christchurch, record shops, and decaying infrastructure
I’m doing a smaller roundup of articles midweek due to a lack of time to write proper blog posts. Regular service will – hopefully – resume before much longer.
Let’s start with Christchurch. Rebecca Macfie writes (in the Listener) about what has been learnt in the five years since the Canterbury earthquakes.…
30 Comments Sunday reading 27 March 2016
Size, size, size. Many people are concerned about it. But Australian urban policy commentator Alan Davies observes that we shouldn’t fear it (in Crikey):
There’s a popular doomsday scenario where Sydney and Melbourne collapse from the intolerable burden of their populations doubling to 8 million by circa 2050.…
Sunday reading 20 March 2016
To kick off Sunday reading here’s an interesting article by transport professor Rachel Aldred. In “Getting people cycling on residential streets needs more than 20mph limits” she argues that enabling neighbourhood streets to support cycling takes much more than dropping the speed limits, it requires removing traffic.…
Midweek reading: Road pricing and safety, urban-rural, the history of California, and trees
Starting this week I’m trying out a new feature: a midweek post rounding up some new articles on transport and urbanism. (Time for writing more substantive posts has been a bit tight lately.) The themes will be familiar to regular readers.…
Sunday reading 13 March 2016
And now for something completely different.
One of the best things I’ve read recently was Australian economist John Quiggin’s discussion of “peak paper”, which the world apparently reached in 2013. It’s an optimistic story: showing how the slow accumulation of efficiencies can result in a more sustainable economy.…
Sunday reading 6 March 2016
Here’s a light start to Sunday Reading from Alissa Walker at Gizmodo who has compiled a neat before and after series of images from Amsterdam,”Look How Much Better a City Can Be When It Designs for People Not Cars”. The images are from the Sustainable Amsterdam project.…
Sunday reading 28 February 2016
Welcome back to Sunday reading. This week, let’s start with a new research paper on complexity. Oxford University researchers ask, “are big-city transportation systems too complex for human minds?”
Many of us know the feeling of standing in front of a subway map in a strange city, baffled by the multi-coloured web staring back at us and seemingly unable to plot a route from point A to point B.…
Sunday reading 21 February 2016
Chris and Melissa Bruntlett provide a thoughtful, jargon-free list of the barriers they see to designing better streets and places: The 6 biggest roadblocks to building complete streets in our communities, VanCity Buzz.
1. An unintended, but counterproductive focus on the commute to work
We agree that getting more people out of their cars and riding a bike to work is great.…
Sunday reading 14 February 2016
Welcome back to Country Calendar Sunday Reading. Today I thought it would be nice to lead off with a mesmerising video of sheep herding in New Zealand. It’s not very urban, but it does nicely illustrate bottleneck queuing, which is a common phenomenon on urban roads and busy pedestrian streets.…
Sunday reading 7 February 2016
Here’s a great collection of aerial European landscapes by Alex MacLean, “Energy Landscapes: An Aerial View Of Europe’s Carbon Footprint“, Yale Environment 360.
The summer calendar is jam packed with city-friendly events that have been helpfully compiled by Bike Auckland. Summer of bike love – Go By Bike Day and other upcoming events.…
Processing...