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.

NewGeography dot com

A new website has been launched, seemingly fashioned to counterbalance many of the urbanism sites that have a decidedly big-city focus. New Geography tips the balance towards suburban and small-town reporting. For instance, a recently posted piece about high energy costs, written by executive editor Joel Kotkin and managing editor Mark Schill, seeks to puncture the idea that big cities will benefit from high energy costs:

But these advantages are somewhat mitigated by the fact that these same cities often pay far more for energy than their rivals. Electricity in New York, notes an upcoming study by the New York-based Center for an Urban Future, costs twice the national average. California cities also suffer much higher prices -- almost 50 percent higher than their counterparts in the Midwest. So even if you use considerably less energy, you might end up paying more. Being a big, dense city clearly has advantages, but they too often are squandered by aging infrastructure, lack of new plants and high business costs.

You won't see a lot of trumpeting of the arts and culture as economic development engines or the "rise of the creative class," but counterintuitive articles about manufacturing and why Obama should trade liberal Chicago for libertarian Phoenix.

The site is well organized and very attractive. Check it out here.

NewGeography dot com

A new website has been launched, seemingly fashioned to counterbalance many of the urbanism sites that have a decidedly big-city focus. New Geography tips the balance towards suburban and small-town reporting. For instance, a recently posted piece about high energy costs, written by executive editor Joel Kotkin and managing editor Mark Schill, seeks to puncture the idea that big cities will benefit from high energy costs:

But these advantages are somewhat mitigated by the fact that these same cities often pay far more for energy than their rivals. Electricity in New York, notes an upcoming study by the New York-based Center for an Urban Future, costs twice the national average. California cities also suffer much higher prices -- almost 50 percent higher than their counterparts in the Midwest. So even if you use considerably less energy, you might end up paying more. Being a big, dense city clearly has advantages, but they too often are squandered by aging infrastructure, lack of new plants and high business costs.

You won't see a lot of trumpeting of the arts and culture as economic development engines or the "rise of the creative class," but counterintuitive articles about manufacturing and why Obama should trade liberal Chicago for libertarian Phoenix.

The site is well organized and very attractive. Check it out here.

21st Century Street

Transportation Alternatives (one of the Forum's partners in our recently concluded and very successful Bikeshare 2008 Demonstration Project) has an open call to architects, designers and urban planners to redesign the intersection of 9th Steet and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn. This just so happens to be very close to the Smith/9th Street F train stop, the epicenter of the Forum's design competition to reimagine Red Hook as the most bicycle friendly neighborhood in NYC. While this is just a coincidence, the momentum around urban design and bicycles is already strong and still picking up steam!

TA is looking for new conceptual and physical approaches to the planning of public streets by asking participants to redesign the intersection of 9th Street and 4th Avenue. The street will be re-imagined as a healthy, safe, and sustainable 21st Century street. To learn more about TA's design competition, go to the website http://21stcenturystreet.org/

Architect Magazine Cover

Gracing the February, 2008 cover of Architect magazine are Forum member Amale Andraos of WORK Architecture and Forum Board member Alex Garvin (as does Dan Wood, also of WORK). The trio were asked, along with a dozen or so other people, how they would invest $1.6 trillion, the estimated amount needed to repair and maintain America’s infrastructure over the next five years, according to a report published by Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young. Some of the answers were somewhat counterintuitive.

“We would spend less time fixing and more time dismantling America’s infrastructure,” said the WORK principals. “The 50-year suburban experiment in car culture is untenable in the face of climate change and projections of peak oil.”

Alex Garvin noted that the failure to invest in infrastructure isn’t just resulting in collapsed bridges, but causing opposition to additional real estate development. His solution? “I would use that money to create a public-realm endowment and offer the income from the endowment to communities to cover the cost of planning, design, and engineering …”

For other inspired ideas, click here.