Red Hook Bicycle Master Design Competition Finalists!

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Urban Design Review Fall/Winter 2008

A few of the books reviewed in this issue:

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt

The Endless City by Ricky Burdett

The Concrete Dragon by Thomas Campanella

Who's Your City by Richard Florida

Forum VP Bob Yaro on Infrastructure

 President of the Regional Plan Association and Forum VP Bob Yaro has a commentary about the need for New York City to make investments in its infrastructure, particularly if the city will continue to compete globally.

Shenzhen is often criticized as a product of unregulated development, better suited to the speculators that first spurred its growth than to the workers housed in huge complexes of factory-run barracks. Yet for architects these cities have also become vast fields of urban experimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, who first envisioned the city as a field of gleaming towers, could have dreamed of.

Read a blog post about the commentary on The New York Times website here, or download the entire commentary (pdf) from the Center for an Urban Future.

New York's Creative Economy Event at the New Museum

The Forum for Urban Design hosted an event at the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery, and invited experts to discuss the importance and future of New York's creative economy. Elizabeth Currid, asst. professor at USC and author of The Warhol Economy, argues that the social life and density of New York City are critical to the vibrancy of New York and its creative economy, but as it gets too expensive to live here, the next generation of artists are struggling more than ever to make New York their home. What affect might this have on the city? As Jane Jacobs once said, when a place gets boring, even the rich people leave. James Surowiecki, Financial Page writer for The New Yorker, favorably reviewed Currid's book but took issue with some of her conclusions. And Paul Owens, co-founder of BOP, a London-based creative economy consulting firm, brought an outsider's perspective. Interviews with the panelists conducted at the New Museum flesh out this debate.