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Posted 20 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
Photos I took last summer of Victoria, Nanaimo and
Kamloops, British Columbia, are up in the Miscellaenous
section. Be sure to check them out, they're three interesting (and overlooked) cities,
especially Nanaimo and Kamloops. By the way, Dylan Leblanc's Skyscraper Page was mentioned in Cecil Adams'
nationally syndicated column The Straight Dope.
Congrats, Dylan!
New news; photos
tonight
Posted 20 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
Hopefully, I'll be uploading some Nanaimo, BC,
Kamloops, BC and Victoria, BC photos from July 1999 to the Miscellaneous section tonight,
as soon as Geocities, where they're being stored, stops having difficulties. For the
meantime you can take a look at a couple articles that Michael Binetti and Dylan Leblanc
sent me today. The former city of North York in Toronto will be home to a new urban
village with over 2000 homes on 25 acres. The development will be centred around a
two-acre English garden with many transplanted mature trees. Also included will be half a
million square feet of streetside retail. (Read the article here).
On the quirky front, Victoria, capital of British Columbia, will be acquiring ten new
moden double-decker buses for regular transit use. Check it out.
The dish on Detroit
Posted 19 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
Mike Binetti sent me an article on Detroit's
beleagured transit system, and that piqued my curiosity of the city (you can read that
article here). Currently, Detroit
proper has fallen from nearly two million inhabitants to a mere 900,000 today; however, it
is the hub of a vastly sprawling metropolitan area of about four million people. Some
citizens and business
owners of the Detroit area are banding together to salvage the city from the
consequences of suburban exodus; one such effort is a group aiming to revitalise the East
Jefferson neighbourhood (read the news article).
Covering a broader base are the historic
preservation groups of Detroit, who aim to save and rehabilitate some of Detroit's
magnificent historic structures, memories of the city's diverse history. In the meantime, The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit celebrate the
perverse beauty of its decaying building; in fact, there has even been a controversial proposal
to create an "American Acropolis" of skysraper ruins.
Palliser Square
Posted 18 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
Yesterday I had the pleasure of viewing some artist's
renderings of the former Palliser Square shopping mall in dowtown Calgary. Built in 1968
along with the Calgary Tower, it faces the street with lots of cast concrete and ugly
orange windows. Today, there are about two retail outlets left with most of the space
converted to office use; soon, it'll be revamped as a fancy shopping arcade with big
stores and lots of natural light. The best part? Virtually all of the anchor stores -
mostly chains, from HMV to Old Navy to Chapters - open up to the street with good-looking
and inviting facades. All in all, a downtown mall is never the best option, but if you're
going to build one it works best this way. On a side note, Calgary's downtown retail
market is one of the few actually growing by a large amount each year.
Urban Renewal Lab
Posted 16 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
The Urban Renewal Laboratory was an exhibition held
in San Francisco back during the spring of 1998. Its site has all sorts of goodies about San
Francisco and various aspects of urban redevelopment; if you're interesting in Daniel
Burham's plans for great beaux-arts style metropolis, URL has a full copy of his plan for the city by the
bay; it's really quite interesting. / The Environmental News
Network has a cool three-part series on the rebirth of urban parks around the United
States. Be sure to check it out.
/ A great site covering sprawl is FEED's Sprawl of America. Essentially
anti-sprawl, it contains some good information and photos of greenfield sprawl. By the
way, I'll be revamping the UPP Shop sometime soon to include more books and cheaper prices
for Canadian and UK residents (thanks to chapters.ca
and amazon.co.uk, respectively).
You can be a transit
fiend
Posted 15 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
Pissed off at your local transit commisioner? Think
that you could run a better public transportation system? Well, now's your
chance! German software maker JoWood has released the
game Der Verkehrsegigant; an English version titled "Traffic Giant" is on its
way. You can build and run a transit system composed to buses, subways, trams and heavy
rail, with a huge variety of flexibility. Should you save money and mark your bus stops
with a simple sign, or should you splurge for the heated shelter, which costs a fortune
but will increase your customers' satisfaction? A demo is available for download
here, and I must say, it's quite a fun game. Can't wait for the full version.
I scream(ed for a
new design)
Posted 14 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
First things first: the best ice cream in Alberta can
be found at Phillip's Forbidden Flavours on 17th Avenue and 9th Street SW in Calgary.
Everything is hand-made and family-run, and the owner is a charm and a half. Should you
ever find yourself in Cowtown, check this place out. You won't regret it. / You might have
noticed UPP looks a wee bit different, at least on the main page. I thought a new design
would be nice, so I whipped up a new front page. It's still in the test stage and may take
awhile to get used to, but give me a holler and
tell me how much you love it or hate it (no death threats, please).
NYC subway gets new
shoes
Posted 11 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
The New York City subway system, one of the most
comprehensive in the world, will finally be getting new railcars. They started their
final, 30-day test run yesterday, featuring wide doors, big windows, large seats and
helpful computerised maps and announcements. Montréal-based Bombardier could be one of
the manufacturers. You can read the article here.
Speaking of transit systems, check out the great Light Rail
Transit Association site for all your light-rail needs!
CNU and a denser
Toronto
Posted 11 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
Sorry about the length of time between posts! It's so
beautiful out it's been hard to get the energy to update the site. Just to keep you in
touch with what's happening, a new Feature of the Month will be up around late July
featuring the New Urbanist town of Seaside, Florida, complete with about 70 photos.
Previous Urbanite contributor Payton Chung was lucky enough to visit the 2000
Congress for the New Urbanism in Portland, OR, and will be kindly supplying us with photos
and an article. / Faithful informant Mike Binetti has sent me a link to the new Toronto
megacity's first official plan. The plan, which encompasses the former City of Toronto and
five of its former suburbs, calls for high-density mixed-use development along major roads
and transit corridors, and denser residential development in the suburbs' downtowns. Some
concerns include what will happen to exisiting long-established residential areas along
major roads. Take
a look at the plan to judge for yourself.
Phoenix photos added
Posted 05 July, 2000 by Chris DeWolf - Back to the top
I've added some photos of downtown and midtown
Phoenix to the Miscellaneous page, courtesy of Sean Breazeal.
Sean runs the World City Photo Archive;
thanks! / Hope all of our American visitors had a good Independence Day, and a belated
happy Canada Day to our loyal Canadian visitors. / The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has
expanded its neighbourhood section
to cover even more of Washington's biggest city. Be sure to check it out, there are some
interesting articles. / The new Acela high-speed train
made its Boston-to-Washington debut a couple weeks ago. New Jersey Senator Frank
Lautenberg wants this kind of fast rail to traverse the United States; read more about the
US's high-speed rail plans at his site, High
Speed Rail: Corridors to the Future.
