ideas for cities

This Big City is an award winning online publication sharing ideas for sustainable cities.

Our Tumblr is all about the short form and is curated from London and Taipei.

“The biggest factor in building protected bike lanes is political will and vision. Engineers are figuring out the designs, and cities are finding the money to build them. If the leadership of a city makes these facilities a priority, they get built.”

Martha Roskowski on urban cycling facilities. 

In mid-April, a warehouse filled with fertilizer in West, Texas exploded, destroying homes, schools, and other surrounding buildings, killing 14 people. But this tragedy was dwarfed by another one on the other side of the world an order of magnitude larger: a massive factory collapse in Bangladesh on April 22, the worst factory disaster in history. These accidents show that there’s an underlying problem with the economics of how we think about land use that affects all countries, no matter how rich they may be. Read our full article here.   High-res

In mid-April, a warehouse filled with fertilizer in West, Texas exploded, destroying homes, schools, and other surrounding buildings, killing 14 people. But this tragedy was dwarfed by another one on the other side of the world an order of magnitude larger: a massive factory collapse in Bangladesh on April 22, the worst factory disaster in history. These accidents show that there’s an underlying problem with the economics of how we think about land use that affects all countries, no matter how rich they may be.

Read our full article here.

thenewurbanist:

Bullitt Center, Seattle

The Bullitt Center — the first urban building of its kind and commonly regarded as ‘the greenest office building in the world’— not only represents the level of sustainability possible in a city setting, it signifies a shift in the actual process of how buildings are designed and demonstrates the range of opportunities for inventiveness and creativity that are possible when integrated design teams target aggressive efficiency goals.

Very cool. After publishing an article when this was under construction, it’s awesome to see it come to life. And seemingly as innovative and sustainable as it promised to be. More please!

“What is really interesting is being able to create a dialogue around retrofit and sustainability between teachers, pupils and the local authorities. It can create a real paradigm shift in terms of local authority buy in and action on the ground.”

Sandrine Dixson-Declève on the educational value of retrofitting. 

What are the best urbanism blogs on Tumblr?

I can hardly believe it’s been over a year since I published this post featuring ten of the best urbanism tumblogs. I think it’s time for a follow-up!

I’m keen to highlight ten more awesome urbanism tumblogs and share them with our 170,000 Tumblr followers as well as the readers of thisbigcity.net. I’ve got a few ideas in mind, but I would love your input!

Please let me know which urbanism tumblogs you love (and heck, if you feel like a bit of self-promotion then stick your own name in there!) and I’ll check out your suggestions before putting together my shortlist. 

Thanks!

- Joe

marissamayr: I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!  We promise not to screw it up.  Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going.  We will operate Tumblr independently.  David Karp will remain CEO.  The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve.  Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster. Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs.  With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world.  Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month.  On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day.  Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network.  The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%. In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love.  In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences.  The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience. As I’ve said before, companies are all about people.  Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing.  I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them.  That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met.  He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with.  His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.    Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day. http://yahoo.tumblr.com/ I hope they live up to that promise in the second paragraph. 

marissamayr:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr! 

We promise not to screw it up.  Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going.  We will operate Tumblr independently.  David Karp will remain CEO.  The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve.  Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs.  With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world.  Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month.  On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day.  Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network.  The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.

In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love.  In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences.  The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.

As I’ve said before, companies are all about people.  Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing.  I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them.  That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met.  He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with.  His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.   

Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/

I hope they live up to that promise in the second paragraph. 

“It’s interesting to see that in places like Copenhagen, biking is so ubiquitous, people see bikes as a handy tool, like a lawn-mower or a vacuum cleaner, and don’t really identify themselves as bicyclists. In a way, they’ve transcended the cultural question on an individual level, though bicycling is certainly part of the larger identity of the city.”

Martha Roskowski on urban cycling culture.