Garrett Dash Nelson recently published a study looking at urban density on a cell-by-cell basis for a number of US cities. Each “cell” is a 30 arc-second grid cell, but you can think of them as being approximately one square kilometer. The goal of the… Read More
Photographer Michael Wolf died at his home in Hong Kong this week. He was 64. Even if you don’t recognize the name, I am sure that many of you have seen his work. Perhaps his most famous project was “Architecture of Density”, which had him… Read More
This morning I took the mid-level escalators down to Hong Kong station so that I could catch the express train to the airport. At over 800m, it is supposedly the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world. If you’ve ever walked the streets of… 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
“Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition – hyper-density – without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan’s architecture is a paradigm for the… 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
When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I never played in the backyard. I played in the streets. That’s where all the kids came together. We would play baseball in somebody’s driveway, using one of the garage door “squares” as… Read More
Earlier this month The Washington Post published an article called, There’s no such thing as a city that has run out of room. And what it was really about was that when we say there’s no more room (I guess people are saying this), we… Read More
https://500px.com/embed.js Ed Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto, and Yimei Zou recently published a new academic paper called, Urban Networks: Spreading the Flow of Goods, People and Ideas. The paper looks at whether it’s more advantageous to build huge and consolidated mega-cities or build connected networks of smaller… Read More
Yesterday I wrote about urban-suburban divides within cities. And I argued that built form will largely dictate the kinds of transportation choices that people will ultimately make. As a follow-up to that, here is a chart based on the findings of a research report completed… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 