Wider view of affordability needed
The housing affordability dimension to the urban sprawl versus intensification argument is a messy debate. While limiting land supply through measures such as urban limits is likely to have a significant impact on land prices around the limit itself, it’s hard to know for sure what the impact of opening up land on the urban edge would have on prices throughout the majority of the city – particularly in the inner areas where it seems people most want to live.…
18 Comments Edge City: not the future after all?
My Amazon book purchases with Christmas money have all arrived in the past few days, leaving me with an exciting – but somewhat daunting – reading list over the next few weeks: When Oil Peaked by Kenneth S. Deffeyes
Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson
Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil by Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl
Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives by Jarrett Walker
Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities by Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph
Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau Typically, I’ve started somewhat madly by reading through the first few pages of each book.…
Peak traffic?
Another article has highlighted that Auckland’s traffic volumes aren’t growing anymore – rather stagnating and even falling slightly:
More Aucklanders are leaving their cars at home for the commute to work as high petrol prices bite.
New figures show almost 900 fewer cars a week travelled over the Auckland Harbour Bridge this year compared with last year.…
Is the end of sprawl nigh?
A fascinating article in the New York Times looks at how changing demographics and the housing crash the USA has experienced over the past five years is changing the future form of their cities – away from car dependent urban sprawl and towards higher-density walkable urban areas.…
Traffic falling in the USA too
One of the most interesting things to note when it comes to transport trends over the past few years is the complete lack in growth of state highway traffic volumes since around 2005, with a little bumping around we actually find ourselves with the same level of traffic on our state highways in 2010 as we had in 2005: It’s perhaps a bit early to comprehensively know whether this is a short-term “bucking” of the long-term trend of inexorable growth – or something more permanent.…
A dense city is a green city
I’m reading the fascinating book “Triumph of the City” by Edward Glaeser, at the moment. While I don’t find myself necessarily agreeing with everything in the book, its arguments are really well made – in a way that makes you take full consideration of them.…
Economic impacts of auto-dependency
I’m reading a really interesting book at the moment, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger. It’s a good book because it takes a historical look at the shift in the mid 20th century away from what’s termed “Walkable Urbanism” and towards a “Drivable Suburbanism” as the main form of building cities and transportation systems and then starts considering more recent urban trends – suggesting a shift back towards walkable urbanism as the economics and environmental effects of drivable suburbanism start to no longer make sense.…
The ultimate outcome of ignoring pedestrians
This is a pretty shocking video showing how pedestrians are treated along a major highway in auto-focused Atlanta. What is very interesting to note is how the USA is starting to see a shift in poverty from the inner city to the outer-suburbs – reversing the trend that occurred through most of the 20th century when the rich migrated to the suburbs, leaving the poor downtown: Watch the full episode.…
PT investment creates more jobs
At a time when unemployment in NZ is stubbornly high (at least compared to levels in recent years) and investment in infrastructure has been touted as a major way of keeping people in work, it might be a useful idea to consider the relative effectiveness of different types of infrastructure investment in generating jobs.…
Urban sprawl – not the way of the future?
I have long argued against urban sprawl as a pattern of development, because of its inevitable car dependency, its poor sustainability and its general soullessness. With the government undertaking a serious overhaul of planning regulations that relate to urban areas – potentially making it easier for our cities to sprawl – I read with interest an article from the USA which argues that our changing demographics and cultural preferences mean that the demand for sprawl is simply unlikely to be there in the future.…
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