This Planetizen article (2014) by Brent Toderian surfaced over the weekend. It is about tall buildings and why we should be focused more on how they are designed, as opposed to just how tall they are. Brent talks about this in terms of “density done… Read More
The New York Times has a recent article up talking about the disappearing “urban advantage” for low-skilled workers. It is based on the work of MIT economist David Autor. Here is a chart from the article plotting wages against population density from 1950 to 2015: The… Read More
This is an interesting working paper by a team of researchers at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. The paper examines the relationship between urban density and organized violence, first in Colombia and then within a sample of 200 global cities. The finding is that… Read More
I just spent the last 7 minutes listening to this brief historical overview of Seoul by The Urbanist, while I bounced around the city on Google Street View, admiring the coverage of their transit network and the density of their low-rise neighborhoods. I love Street View and… Read More
A draft version of the new London Plan was released today for public consultation. It is “the spatial development strategy for Greater London”. And you can download all 524 pages of it, here. A final copy of the Plan is expected to be published by fall 2019. Here… Read More
Earlier today, Nithya Vijayakumar, of The Pembina Institute, pointed out the above housing project to me on Twitter through this 2013 Dwell article (worth a read). The project is called MONAD and it’s a 4-unit, 12,600 square foot prefabricated multi-storey building in Vancouver on West 4th Avenue. … Read More
My friends at the architecture practice Valente Rodgers told me something fascinating about the Hong Kong real estate market last night. Both partners worked as architects in Hong Kong for a number of years. In Hong Kong, you’re allowed to deduct certain projecting windows from… Read More
Today I came across this Reddit talking about how few census tracts there are in the United States with a population density greater than 150,000 people per square mile. Basically, there’s a bunch in New York, one in San Francisco (Tenderloin), and one in Chicago… Read More
Keeping with yesterday’s theme of urban density, here is a photo by Andy Yeung that I am embedding via his 500px page: https://500px.com/embed.js The photo is of Hong Kong and it was taken using a drone. Click here for other photos from his “Urban Jungle” drone… Read More
The following diagrams were taken from LSE’s Urban Age website. I’ve sorted them from lowest to highest peak residential population density. In each case I’ve also included the year of the dataset. It’s amazing how much these simple extrusion diagrams can tell you about the… Read More
