Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
My vision for transit is not a reinterpretation of the automobile highway – corridors for commuters – but a return to traditional transit systems: investments in financially productive places. A successful transit trip begins in a financially-productive place and ends in a financially-productive place, connecting the two in a way that is scaled to
... See moreCharles Marohn • A World Class Transportation System: Transportation Finance for a New Economy
Oscar Newman’s 1972 book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design is widely credited for illustrating how the design of public housing influenced criminal opportunity.18 Newman focused his case studies on NYC public housing complexes, where, he pointed out, robbery rates were much greater in high-rise buildings, even when the actual
... See moreJohn MacDonald • Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning
The first step to understanding how parking works is to get a grasp of how much it costs and who pays for it. Because it is so plentiful and often free to use, it is easy to imagine that it costs very little. But this is not the case. The cheapest urban parking space in America, an 8½-by-18-foot piece of asphalt on relatively worthless land, costs
... See moreJeff Speck • Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
No neighborhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled, and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity. Furthermore, a neighborhood or district perfectly calculated, it seems, to fill o
... See moreJane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities
He subsequently conducted similar studies in New York and Los Angeles, and found the data tracking along almost identical curves. In each case, increasing density from two units per acre to twenty units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from twenty to two hundred.22 To students of urban form, these outcomes are not that su
... See moreJeff Speck • Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
Some key ideas from CPTED include modeling the design of the built environment to maximize surveillance, limit access, and enhance signs of territoriality (i.e., communicate ownership of the area). Surveillance can be maximized in countless ways. Streets can be designed to increase pedestrian and bicycle use. This will mean there are more “eyes upo
... See moreJohn MacDonald • Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning
The second potential tool for hampering unbridled duplication of uses is what I call staunchness of public buildings. By this I mean that public and quasi-public bodies should adopt, for their properties, a policy somewhat like Charles Abrams’ private policy for his property on Eighth Street. Abrams combats the excessive duplication of restaurants
... See moreJane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Landscape architects are increasingly embracing desire lines from the outset, allowing desire lines to emerge in parks and campuses over a period of many months, and then paving the lines to make permanent walkways. The approach is certainly preferable to the more common alternative: Attempt to predict how people will navigate a landscape, render t
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