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StreetFilms: San Francisco: Reclaiming Streets With Innovative Solutions

Tom Radulovich, the executive director of the local non-profit Livable City, describes the recent livable streets achievements in San Francisco as “tactical urbanism” — using low-cost materials like paint and bollards to reclaim street space.

That willingness to experiment was a big reason that the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) gave its 2012 Sustainable Transport Award to San Francisco (an honor shared with Medellín, Colombia). In this Streetfilm we profile the innovations that earned SF recognition from ITDP.


ArtInfo: Pop-Up Populism: How the Temporary Architecture Craze is Changing Our Relationship to the Built Environment

America is fast becoming a pop-up nation. From sea to shining sea, her cities have been swept up in the frenzy for temporary architecture: Brooklyn vendors sell their wares in artfully arranged shipping containers; Dallas’s Build a Better Block group champions DIY painted bicycle routes and pop-up small businesses; architects in San Francisco are repurposing metered parking spaces into miniature parks; residents in Oakland, California rallied to create an entire pop-up neighborhood. The phenomenon has even climbed its way from grassroots origins to the agendas of local authorities: D.C.’s office of planning sprouted a Temporary Urbanism Initiative, while New York’s transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is implementing what she calls “Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses” with her fast-acting interventions favoring pedestrians and cyclists. The temporary, so it seems, is overtaking the permanent. But how permanent is our current fascination for the temporary?


The TransportPolitic: The Economic Crisis Rolls on in Cities like Pittsburgh

The U.S. economy may be improving in some ways, but transit services across the country continue to reel, thanks to lower-than-expected tax revenues.

The board of the Port Authority of Allegheny County, serving the Pittsburgh metropolitan region, announced last week that it would have to cut services by 35% by September 2 | the largest cut ever for the agency | if it is not provided an increase in state aid. The agency expects that it will have to increase fares and lay off 500 workers. This comes a year after the agency reduced services by 15%.


Designing Healthy Communities: Vancouver Plans a Farm Atop a Parking Garage

Generally speaking, there’s not much on top of parking garages except cars. But in downtown Vancouver, B.C., a parking garage will host a high-density “VertiCrop” farming structure, the first in North America.

Valcent Products has signed an agreement with the garage owners to build the 6,000-square-foot vertical farm, which will feature 12-foot-high stacks of growing trays on motorized conveyors that will ferry plants around to be watered, to catch the sun and, finally, to be harvested.

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