Pfizer said it would pull 1,400 jobs out of New London within two years and move most of them a few miles away to a campus it owns in Groton, Conn., as a cost-cutting measure. It would leave behind the city’s biggest office complex and an adjacent swath of barren land that was cleared of dozens of homes to make room for a hotel, stores and condominiums that were never built.

This decision by Pfizer to Leave New London, Connecticut is going to profoundly impact future eminent domain cases and gives a major boost to libertarians. The landmark SC ruling was unique in the sense that it acquired private land that included a built home to hand over to another private party for the “public good”. Without conditions to ensure that Pfizer would indeed add 1,400 jobs to the New London as promised, its decision to leave after just eight years is not surprising. Pfizer’s decision to move away puts paid to New London’s hopes of revitalizing the area around Kelo’s home by building an “urban village” to attract shoppers and tourists. So in effect, is Pfizer really responsible for making the city assume that they would stay forever? But Susette Kelo’s pink house still stands after it was moved across town by preservationist Avner Gregory who bought it for $1.

Dare you to sit. The World’s 13 Most Uncomfortable Chair Designs.

The nation’s sprawling suburbs may have been a good place to grow up, but they’re a tough place to grow old. Here’s how towns are beginning to ‘retrofit’ their neighborhoods—and what your community might look like in the future [source].

Interesting on how changing demographics are making retrofitting suburbia almost necessary. However, this could also mean increased focus on developing communities in alternative locations with different characteristics. Housing coming a full circle?

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution

Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com is hosting the first ever Reburbia competition: a design competition dedicated to re-envisioning the suburbs and have just announced the finalists.

…the company boasts of illuminating its stores with low-wattage lightbulbs but positions outlets far from city centers, where taxes are low and commuting costs high—the average IKEA customer drives 50 miles round-trip. Cleverly, IKEA transfers transport and energy costs onto consumers, who are then handed the additional burden of assembling their purchases [source].

I’m a self-professed fan of Ikea but everything cited in this article is true. Consumers often fail to judge the true cost of their purchases; just because it is cheap doesn’t mean it costs less. Even to the consumer (assembling time is an opportunity cost).

Researchers discovered homeowners, on average, outweighed renters by 12 pounds. In addition to excess weight, female homeowners were also carrying around more aggravation, making less time for leisure, and were less likely to spend time with friends.

via
Journal of Urban Economics (under review)
.

“Neighbors can hear the alarm so they call us, but when we get up to the home, it's vacant, locked up and we're unable to access them,”

Such calls are distracting firefighters from other more important calls in inhabited homes and putting a strain on the public emergency system.

via ABC15 News.

Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic “shrink to survive” proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

It is not as ominous as it sounds but is based on a experiment radical nevertheless that focuses on concentrating the dwindling population of dying cities into a smaller more viable area.

via Telegraph.

If you took out a mortgage in 2007, there's an over 20 percent chance you'll default on it.

via NPR: Your Odds Of Defaulting.

Urban Studies Conference Alerts provides a useful list of opportunities to present your research. But the list is dominated by international events. Can we create (crowdsourcing?) a similar list focused only on the conferences in the United States? Does such a list already exist? By being focused on the U.S., the list can feature even student symposiums and smaller events.

Point: The idea that descendants of African slaves are the only people in the history of our species to be done in by the configuration of architectural blueprints is mistaken.

It was much, much more complicated than that: the culprit was aspects of social history in America starting in the late sixties, not merely how housing projects were constructed and how far their doors happened to be from the street.

John McWhorter at the New Republic argues against the commonly held perception that crimes and social conditions are worse off in taller public housing than low-rises. I don’t understand the Sonia Sotomayor connection though and it seems forced in order to attract eyeballs.

As the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most-populous state, Lucknow has attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural areas, swelling the city’s population. Yet the city hasn’t completed any major new sewage infrastructure since before the country won independence in 1947. As much as 70% of residents don’t have sewage service, leaving much of the waste to flow directly into the main river, the Gomti, which has become a stinking cesspool.

Wall Street Journal has an article on India’s megacities with the tagline that they are choking India. But is that really what is happening in India? There is an inherent understanding that there is a conflicting dichotomy between urban and rural regions. But even if it does exist, quotes in the WSJ article itself contradict its byline:

Shami Shafi, a 35-year-old laborer in Lucknow, has seen his daily income drop by half in recent months to 50 rupees, or about $1, for carrying bags of potatoes and other goods in a local market. But “I’m not going back to my village,” he says. If work gets harder to find, “I’ll just go to another city.”

Atanu Dey, noted economist and widely-respected proponent of urban India points at the real culprits of urban problems.

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community.

An innovative experiment is current in progress in Vauban, Germany where residents of an upscale community, no less, are learning to live without cars in a suburb.

This first-of-its-kind learning conference will help you identify policies that have been successful in other communities and could work in yours.

National Housing Conference (NHC) and its research affiliate, the Center for Housing Policy is hosting the “Solutions for Working Families” Learning Conference from June 28th to 30th.

This blog will follow U.S. local governments that are curbing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing energy consumption, utilizing renewable energy sources, adapting to the impacts of climate change, and developing more sustainably. It will showcase their challenges, accomplishments, innovations, strategies, and lessons learned.

ICLEI’s Local Action Blog launches to make available information on cities and counties on the front lines of climate, sustainability, and energy action.

I’ll be reviewing one of Kovacs-designed lamps soon. So some background on him before I do:

One of the most recognizable names in the lighting industry, George Kovacs wore many hats throughout his forty-plus year career. Part lighting designer, part lighting manufacturer, part lighting importer – Kovacs’ design aesthetic stood out above the rest and helped to define modern lighting as we know it today.

Born in Vienna, Kovacs moved to the United States after the Second World War, finding work at a lamp store in Manhattan. It was most likely here that Kovacs was bitten by the lighting bug, soon after which he started his own business selling Kalmar lamps. The perfect blend of both form and function, his vast collection included everything from table and floor lamps to hanging pendants and wall sconces. His creativity and skill attracted other prominent modern designers including the likes of Karim Rashid and Ingo Maurer, amongst others.

As much an innovator as he was a creative genius, Kovacs introduced the first American-made halogen torchiere to market in the early 1970s. Popular in Europe since the 1960s, Halogen lamps were far longer-lasting and able to illuminate an entire room with one bulb. Soon after Kovacs started manufacturing Halogen lamps, other manufactures began to follow suit.

For many years, Kovacs designed and manufactured his products from his own Brooklyn-based facility but in 2000 he sold his studio, designs and naming rights to lighting manufacturer the Minka Group. Kovacs passed away in 2007 at the age of 80. A true design visionary, Kovacs left a lasting impression on the lighting industry and the design community as a whole.

In Camden, N.J., perhaps the poorest American city I regularly visit, I photograph what I call paired houses: two dwellings, side by side, one occupied, the other empty. Those living in the occupied home often have their lives made more difficult by what happens on the other side of a shared wall.

The effect of your neighbors homes on your property is a given in real estate. We tend to control what our neighbors do just because what they do affects us as well even though it doesn’t happen on your property. But what can we do when there are no neighbors to speak of (or to)? Camilo Jose Vergara photographs dwellings where one is occupied and other is not. He talks to the owners of the occupied homes about the dangers of vacancy next door.

Can we relate this to the justification of bailing out owners of foreclosed homes because the state of their foreclosed homes affects us all?

Ants never overtake. Not ever. Instead they form into platoons in which all the ants move at the same speed. Increase the density of ant traffic and the platoons simply join together to form larger groups. This is how the velocity remains the same while the density increases.

Alexander John and colleagues at the University of Cologne in Germany have discovered lessons from ant traffic that can be incorporated in traffic planning. This is just one of the applications gleaned from biomimicry.

Flickr is a smorgasbord of amazing and brilliant photo collections from around the world. The Graduate Degree Blog collects 100 sets for architecture buffs.

Model cities aren’t just for show; they can have real utility. In 1957 the US Army Corps of Engineers created the Bay Model, a replica of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta meant to simulate the impact of public works projects and disasters—natural and man-made—on currents and tides.

Terence Russell at Wired Magazine tells us how scale models of cities are increasingly used for urban planning and design applications.