Privatizing Public Infrastructure

Leveraging public need with private financing...

KFC fills potholes
Neo Nazi's clean the highways
Strip club adopts highway

Egyptian Public Space

Penned-In Egyptians Find Peace in City's Din

"...Cairo is a city with a lot of people, a lot of tightly packed houses and buildings, a lot of traffic — and very little open space. There are some parks, but they tend to be fenced off and charge admission. So Egyptians grab what public space there is and make it their own. Bridges are a favorite, but nearly any open space will do. Even a patch of grass in the middle of a traffic circle..."

Building a Process

Related Article

Basically: Non-profit invests in foreclosed real estate, employs own clients to renovate and live, while profiting and empowering more clients in new process of housing those in need.

"Pikes Peak Behavioral Health ...

The nonprofit group, a mental health counseling center with a growing number of military veteran clients and patients, wants to buy a half-built foreclosed apartment project near the Fort Carson Army base. Using military veterans to complete the construction project, the group would sell the buildings and use the proceeds to buy another property, and repeat the process.

The group also wants to hire veterans as “peer navigators” in a buddy system to guide wounded and troubled veterans into civilian life, helping them with things like job applications and the fine print at the department of motor vehicles..."

Design Corps

Design Corps:

Design Corps' mission is to create positive change in communities by providing architecture and planning services. Our vision is realized when people are involved in the decisions that shape their lives, including the built environment.

Design Corps was founded in 1991 and became a 501-c-3 in1996.

Design Corps' community service program that is ten years old and has a proven record of success. It brings the skills of recent architecture and planning graduates who provide technical assistance to communities in need. We primarily serve small rural communities composed of low-income families who do not have access to the technical services needed to shape their physical needs. The design and planning expertise provided by these interns allows communities to shape their physical environment and create positive change. Design Corps' community service program offers technical assistance in planning, design, and grant writing. Known as Community Design Fellows, they bring their technical educations and experiences to bear at each local site where they are placed and are supported by trained professionals. Once at the site, Fellows work to identify challenges and pool needed resources through community involvement and participation to ensure that the community shares in identifying challenges, creating a vision, and implementing design responses.

Design Corps

Mapping the Buzz

Mapping the Cultural Buzz, by Melena Ryzik

"The research, presented in late March at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, locates hot spots based on the frequency and draw of cultural happenings: film and television screenings, concerts, fashion shows, gallery and theater openings. The buzziest areas in New York, it finds, are around Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers, and down Broadway from Times Square into SoHo. In Los Angeles the cool stuff happens in Beverly Hills and Hollywood, along the Sunset Strip, not in trendy Silver Lake or Echo Park.

The aim of the study, called “The Geography of Buzz,” said Elizabeth Currid, one of its authors, was “to be able to quantify and understand, visually and spatially, how this creative cultural scene really worked.”"

Mini-Gulf Courses for a City in Recession

Queens:

Miniaturized Entertainment? Whats going on with all the putt-putt courses?
Downsized Golf...manageable landscapes?
















Governors Island:














Brooklyn:

Malls Evolve

related article and image

Changing Economy = Changing mall programming

- store closings
- discount stores move to more prominent places
- lower priced rents provide opportunities for the more resistant businesses
- community infrastructure enter malls
- schools, medical and youth activities
- new "lifestyle" attractions to lure customers (gimmicky attractions, grocery)

articles/sites:
Repurpose-Driven Life
Rethinking the Mall
Fall of the Mall
Malls Test Experimental Water to Fill Vacancies
Dead Malls

City of Information

The City of Information

"Wikipedia may be the closest thing to a metropolis yet seen online."

taken from: Wikipedia - Exploring Fact City, by Noam Cohen for the NYTimes

"...Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting. Ultimately the journey ends and you are not sure how you got there..."

Vendor Power!

Vendor Power!
Center for Urban Pedagogy
Urban Omnibus

Re-Visioning the City

image and related article

Not since the the middle of the 20th century have architects, planners and visionaries embarked into old territories of imagining new cities. The Post WW II effects along with the following Energy Crisis sparked a number of new templates for how we structure living... I think that time as returned, with the renewed understanding of the planets fragile state and the simple fact that more than half of us on the planet now live in cities.

What are those visions and why? Can one find themes from the array of plans, that might make aware emerging fields of urban theory? Its worth a try.

Paris, France:
urban regeneration
Remaking Paris

-in process of researching...

Food Traceability

Farm 776: Linking object with landscape...connecting food with its source.

Forging a Hot Link

"Beginning this month, customers who buy its all-purpose whole wheat flour ... can go to findthefarmer .com, enter the lot code printed on the side of the bag, and visit with the company’s farmers and even ask them questions."

other sources:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/do_you_know_whe.php

Toy... - Land

http://www.toyotawhynot.com/#/home

(Built) Environment and Landscape used as representation of values, image and business strategy.

I love how they say it all begins with you.

wow, adjust, compromise

Battle Between Budget and Beauty, Which Budget Won

By Nicolai Ouroussoff

Published: June 8, 2009

"...Typically, a developer comes to the city with big plans. Promises are made. Serious architects are brought in. The needs of the community, like ample parkland and affordable housing, are taken into account. Editorial boards and critics, like me, praise the design for its ambition.

Eventually, the project takes on a momentum of its own. The city and state, afraid of an embarrassing public failure, feel pressured to get the project done at any cost, and begin to make concessions. Given the time such developments take to build, sometimes a decade or more, we then hit the inevitable economic downturn. The developer pleads poverty. Desperate to avoid more economic bad news, government officials cut a deal.

It’s a familiar ending, made more nauseating because we have seen it so many times before. And it can’t be solved by simply crunching numbers. It demands a profound shift in mentality. What we have now is a system in which decent architecture and the economic needs of developers are in fundamental opposition. Until that changes, there will be more Atlantic Yards in our future."