Nashville’s Star Rises as Midsize Cities Break Into Winners and Losers – The New York Times

Forty years ago, Nashville and Birmingham, Ala., were peers. Two hundred miles apart, the cities anchored metropolitan areas of just under one million people each and had a similar number of jobs paying similar wages. Not anymore. The population of the Nashville area has roughly doubled, and young people have flocked there, drawn by high-paying jobs as much as its hip “Music City” reputation. Last month, the city won an important consolation prize in the competition for Amazon’s second headquarters: an operations center that will eventually employ 5,000 people at salaries averaging $150,000 a year.

Birmingham, by comparison, has steadily lost population, and while its suburbs have expanded, their growth has lagged the Nashville area’s. Once-narrow gaps in education and income have widened, and important employers like SouthTrust and Saks have moved their headquarters. Birmingham tried to lure Amazon, too, but all it is getting from the online retail giant is a warehouse and a distribution center where many jobs will pay about $15 an hour.

Amazon’s announcement has been widely described as a rich-get-richer victory of coastal “superstar cities” like New York and Washington, regions where the company plans to employ a total of at least 50,000 workers. But the company’s decisions also reflect another trend: growing inequality among midsize cities.

Nashville and the other Amazon also-rans, like Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis, are thriving because of a combination of luck, astute political choices and well-timed investments. At the same time, Birmingham and cities like it, including Providence, R.I., and Rochester, are falling further behind.

Source: Nashville’s Star Rises as Midsize Cities Break Into Winners and Losers – The New York Times

Piece by Piece, a Factory-Made Answer for a Housing Squeeze – The New York Times

 The future is coming and it’s modular:

The United States needs new housing, but its building industry isn’t big enough to provide it. The number of residential construction workers is 23 percent lower than in 2006, while higher-skill trades like plumbers, carpenters and electricians are down close to 17 percent. With demand for housing high and the supply of workers short, builders are bidding up prices for the limited number of contractors. Advertisement Construction prices nationwide have risen about 5 percent a year for the past three years……

 

 

The global construction industry is a $10 trillion behemoth whose structures determine where people live, how they get to work and what cities look like. It is also one of the world’s least efficient businesses. The construction productivity rate — how much building workers do for each hour of labor they put in — has been flat since 1945, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. Over that period, sectors like agriculture, manufacturing and retail saw their productivity rates surge by as much as 1,500 percent. In other words, while the rest of the economy has been supercharged by machines, computers and robots, construction companies are about as efficient as they were in World War II.

Source: Piece by Piece, a Factory-Made Answer for a Housing Squeeze – The New York Times

Blowing down the Saddledome and building a new Victoria Park – Calgary – CBC News

Imagine you were given a serious chunk of Calgary’s core, a blank sheet of paper and a pencil, and told you could turn it into whatever you wanted.That’s pretty much what the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC) is doing with Victoria Park.Planners and a couple of architectural firms are hammering away at a vision for the future of one of Calgary’s oldest neighbourhoods.It’ll be a 20-year plan to turn what’s currently a seriously bizarre jumble of skyscrapers, empty lots, an aging Saddledome, a bus barn and several rail lines, into Calgary’s entertainment district of the future. And a cool new place to live.

Source: Blowing down the Saddledome and building a new Victoria Park – Calgary – CBC News

Retrofitting suburbia: Old shopping malls can be saved by their parking lots – Business – CBC News

 

In what some call “retrofitting suburbia,” fading food and department stores are reinventing their huge urban properties by filling them up with residential, office and retail space.And with Sears Canada closing dozens of department stores, new opportunities in these “mixed-use” developments now abound.”Just about every shopping centre — if they’re smart — is looking at this,” said Brent Toderian, an international consultant on urbanism and city planning based in Vancouver.Brent Toderian”Just about every shopping centre — if they’re smart — is looking at this,” said Brent Toderian, an international consultant on urbanism and city planning based in Vancouver. (CBC)”The recognition is that you can bring more customers, you can get more value out of the land and, particularly when you’re around transit, you can provide a lot more transit ridership rather than car dependency.”Such revelations aren’t new in the United States but the idea has caught fire more recently in Canada.

Source: Retrofitting suburbia: Old shopping malls can be saved by their parking lots – Business – CBC News

Opening day for Detroit’s QLINE M-1 rail – National Resources & Technical Assistance For Transit-Oriented Development

 

The QLINE M-1 light rail line is scheduled to finally open in Detroit this weekend, with a full weekend of festivities to celebrate. The line will permanently connect several major destinations in greater downtown Detroit, and improve access to jobs and services for thousands of residents along the corridor. The project has already catalyzed more than $1 billion in real estate investment along the corridor. All told, the economic impact of transit-oriented development is expected to top $3.5 billion with

Source: Opening day for Detroit’s QLINE M-1 rail – National Resources & Technical Assistance For Transit-Oriented Development

In Shadow of Manhattan, a Long-Neglected City Is Having a Moment

Newark has been “coming back” since I went shopping there with my grandmother. This time it looks like it might actually succeed. Great transportation (PATH, AMTRAK, and NJ Transit train station), some great parks and neighborhoods, a great museum, corporate anchors, legal center, Rutgers University and an administration that wants to learn from Hoboken and Jersey City’s mistakes.

 

 

For years, downtown Newark’s Military Park, barren and surrounded by vacant buildings, was a symbol of the despair that set in after the 1967 riots. Now it’s at the center of hope that a long-sought recovery for New Jersey’s biggest city may finally be taking hold.

Source: In Shadow of Manhattan, a Long-Neglected City Is Having a Moment

WAN:: Timber tower by Team V Architecture

 

With construction due to start in the second half of 2017 HAUT is on track to become the world’s tallest timber tower The municipality of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has selected Team V Architecture with Lingotto, Nicole Maarsen, ARUP and brand partner NLE to develop a building that is a serious contender to become the tallest timber tower in the world.HAUT, will be a 21-storey wooden residential building by the Dutch River Amstel with construction work expected to start in the second half of 2017. HAUT promises to be a prototype of building in an innovative, sustainable and environmentally-friendly manner.

Source: WAN:: Timber tower by Team V Architecture

Pakistan’s Moenjodaro is crumbling away | Pakistan | Al Jazeera

“If our estimates are proven correct, Moenjodaro was probably a cosmopolitan city of its times. I have said it time and again that, 5,000 years ago, when people in Europe and other places lived in caves and jungles, people in Moenjodaro lived in brick houses in a civilised and planned city,” Qasim says.

 

http://https://youtu.be/RLqUuCB6qu8

Source: Pakistan’s Moenjodaro is crumbling away | Pakistan | Al Jazeera

Submit Your Ideas to The Architectural Review to Stop the Spread of #Notopia | ArchDaily

In its recent issues, The Architectural Review has been on a mission, highlighting a phenomenon that they have named “Notopia.” Characterized by a “loss of identity and cultural vibrancy” and “a global pandemic of generic buildings,” Notopia is – in overly simplistic terms – a consequence of the cold logic of market forces combined with a disinterested populace. The AR’s campaign therefore aims to analyze this “thing of terror” and push back by raising public awareness and by proposing alternatives. And they need your help.

 

Source: Submit Your Ideas to The Architectural Review to Stop the Spread of #Notopia | ArchDaily

Cleveland’s Revamped Public Square Mixes Downtown’s Future With Preservation – Next City

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The physical heart of Cleveland is a 10-acre civic space called Public Square, but until recently it wasn’t exactly pulsing with life. Two of downtown’s busiest roadways, Ontario Street and Superior Avenue, bisected the square, and its four quadrants felt neglected and forgotten. Instead of being a destination, it was a place people avoided.

Yet now, following a 15-month, $50 million renovation, Public Square is reopening as a dramatically re-envisioned centerpiece of the city’s ongoing redevelopment efforts. Designed by James Corner Field Operations, the architects behind New York’s High Line, it now has a lush green lawn, unobstructed city views, a full-service cafe with outdoor seating and a mirror pool that reflects the landmark buildings lining the square.

Perhaps most significantly, traffic has been eliminated through the park except for buses.

Source: Cleveland’s Revamped Public Square Mixes Downtown’s Future With Preservation – Next City

The Push to Revitalize Urban Alleys Across the United States Is Fostering Community and Sustainability – CityLab

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For places that were meant to be unseen, alleys take up a not-insubstantial amount of space. A 2011 report by Mary Fialko and Jennifer Hampton, graduate students at the University of Washington*, found that in Seattle, there are 217,000 square feet of public alley space downtown, 85 percent of which are underused. The report estimated that reinvigorating alleyways could increase the number of total public space in the city by 50 percent.Alleys, too, are vital players in a city’s overall ecosystem. As the need for cities to rely on more sustainable approaches has become more pressing, the proliferation of trash and flooding in alleyways has come to be seen not only an aesthetic blight, but an environmental one.And as Daniel Freedman of the Los Angeles Sustainability Collaborative says, there’s a lot of crossover between sound environmental practices and livability. Revitalizing an alleyway creates an opportunity to introduce green infrastructure, but also, Freedman says, it invites the surrounding community to collaborate on improvements and make use of the space.

Source: The Push to Revitalize Urban Alleys Across the United States Is Fostering Community and Sustainability – CityLab