Environment

Mexico City, poor air quality, bad noses

In Environment, Mexico City on 5 June 2008 with no comments

Mexico City’s air quality–which is substandard about 300 days of the year–has rendered residents’ noses unable to detect the smell of rotten food. [via]

Infra Alia

In Art, Chicago, Environment, Housing, Manhattan, Rorty, Surveillance, Twitter, Visualization on 4 June 2008 with no comments

Two days out of the year Manhattan seems like it was built to accommodate the sun; they call it Manhattanhenge.
The Financial Times reports that housing prices and mortgage difficulties in London and the southwest of England have prevented 40 percent of young households (aged 21-40) from purchasing homes.
Clever art from Harmen de Hoop (1, 2, [...]

All hail our Turkey overlords

In Animals, Ecology, Ecotone, Environment on 22 November 2007 with no comments

Turkeys are invading our suburbs and cities. And they’re wild. The seven million wild turkeys in the United States, once thought to be suited only to wide expanses of unbroken forest, are adapting to urban environments better than biologists predicted. While the wild turkeys I’ve seen seemed pretty spooked around people, Chris Leahy, of the [...]

Anti-pigeon movement takes flight, wants bread

In Ecology, Environment, Health, Planning on 8 November 2007 with no comments

Cities in Europe are discussing methods for reducing their pigeon populations.
Scientists, city officials and animal welfare activists met in the western German city of Essen on Tuesday for Germany’s first Town Pigeon Conference to discuss how to deal with the growing pigeon population which is expected to rise by around 50 million to up [...]

Paris is greener than you think.

In Environment, Landscaping, Livability, Mapping, Paris on 6 November 2007 with no comments

What’s in the middle of those oddly-shaped Parisian blocks? Peter Levine uses Google Earth to find Paris is much greener than a stroll down its boulevards might reveal.

The greening of Toronto’s parking lots

In Atlanta, Design, Environment, Infrastructure, Sustainability, Toronto on 6 November 2007 with no comments

Atlanta could learn something from a pilot project for creating more efficient and appealing parking lots within Toronto. Spacing Toronto writes:
the City of Toronto is piloting new design guidelines for “greening” surface parking lots. The proposals include measures to address many of the major environmental problems, and in the process, they address some of the [...]

Tensions between mass transit and mixed-use

In Atlanta, Development, Environment, Planning, Transportation on 5 November 2007 with no comments

Carbon Copy, on a tension within some municipalities between public transportation and mixed-use development:
…there is a contradiction in the planning approaches of many jurisdictions that are developing mass transit, in that promotion of mixed-use urban areas actually weakens the strong nodes that are the lifeblood of mass transit.
To be fair, the concept of mixed-use areas [...]