Shaping Silicon Valley

Roosevelt Island Tram – CC image from The Eyes of New York

A couple of items that came across the internet about technology, innovation, the economy, and urban form:

Tech & the City

Nancy Scola pens a long piece in Next American City about the future of the technology industry in the city.  The piece looks at

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What do we mean by 'density'?

Greenwich Village – CC image from lumierefl

A few more thoughts on recent discussions of density.  Better Cities and Towns offers a summary of Richard Florida’s recent speech (video is corrupted, unfortunately – it gets very choppy 1/3 the way through) at CNU. The twitter summary: quality of place trumps density.

Like previous discussions on the topic,

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Institutional hurdles to dense infill development

dc cranescape – CC image from yawper

A common theme is emerging among those thinking and writing about cities, from Ryan Avent to Ed Glaeser to Paul Krugman – our land use controls have stunted growth in our developed and productive areas – our cities. So, a simple fix would be to just allow more

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On density and design tradeoffs

Bethesda Row – note that you don't even see how tall the buildings are – CC image from faceless b

Kaid Benfield’s excellent blog had a post last week on the need for better urban design and management of the public realm in our new, dense infill development. And while I certainly agree with the

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Scale, urban design, and architecture

CC image from MV Jantzen

Last week’s City Paper cover story, a profile of DC architect Eric Colbert by Lydia DePillis, contains several jabs at Colbert’s not-so-daring designs:

You may not remember precisely what they look like, though. They form a background blur in neighborhoods where much of Colbert’s work is clustered, blending together quietly in

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Some for you, some for Mies - a defense of DC's MLK Library

(Mies’ Chicago Federal Plaza, with Alexander Calder’s Flamingo sculpture.  A note about the lack of people in the plaza – this photo was taken with a temperature of about -5 degrees and a wind chill well below that.  Author’s photo)

Today, Lydia DePillis has a guest post from Kriston Capps offering a well-put defense of DC’s

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