Urbanism
Design
22 rabbit holes · 13 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Does adding lanes reduce traffic?
- How are Japanese railways profitable?
- Did removing the pump handle actually stop the outbreak?
- Why is the Netherlands so good for cycling?
- Where does the word 'liminal' come from?
Rabbit holes
- Induced demand: why adding lanes doesn't fix traffic
Rosa Delacroix · 4 sources
- hostile architecture is everywhere once you notice it
Benches with armrests in the middle, spikes in doorways, sprinklers that go off at night, high-pitched tones only teenagers can hear. Cities quietly designing against people.
Matteo Rossi · 4 sources
- desire paths
Every dirt shortcut across a lawn is people telling planners where the path should have gone. Some campuses wait a year and then pave whatever people walked on.
Samuel Okafor · 4 sources
- Chandigarh, Le Corbusier's city in India
Ingrid Solberg · 5 sources
- how American cities ran highways through their downtowns
Started with why a freeway cuts my city in half. Ended up at Robert Moses vs Jane Jacobs, which is basically the origin story of modern urbanism fights.
Jun Hayashi · 6 sources
- Kowloon Walled City: 33,000 people on 2.6 hectares
Densest place on earth, no planning, buildings fused together, dentists and noodle factories and schools inside. Demolished in 1994. The photos are unreal.
Ingrid Solberg · 5 sources
- parking minimums are why everything is so far apart
Zoning in a lot of US cities requires a fixed number of parking spaces per building, often based on guesswork. Shoup spent a career showing what that costs. More cities are scrapping them now.
Daniela Ruiz · 5 sources
- Venice's flood barriers
78 hollow gates lying on the seabed that fill with air and rise to close the lagoon during high tides. Decades late and billions over budget, but it has worked since 2020.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- the Pruitt–Igoe myth
Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources
- Tokyo's trains make money because the railways own the neighborhoods
Kate Lindqvist · 6 sources
- barcelona's grid has chamfered corners on purpose
Cerdà designed the octagonal blocks in the 1850s for light, airflow and turning trams. Now the city is turning groups of blocks into 'superblocks' with the cars mostly kept out.
Jae-won Park · 4 sources
- Did car companies really kill the streetcar?
Kate Lindqvist · 4 sources
- why Paris looks like Paris
Same height, same cream limestone, same balcony lines on the 2nd and 5th floors, grey zinc roofs. Mostly one guy in the 1850s-60s bulldozing the medieval city.
Kate Lindqvist · 4 sources
- dead malls
The guy who invented the American mall wanted them to be walkable town centers, and ended up calling them 'bastard developments'. I watch dead mall videos to fall asleep.
Fern Achterberg · 4 sources
- why are new subway lines so expensive in the US?
Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway cost roughly $1.5+ billion per km. Similar projects in Paris or Madrid cost a fraction. Overstaffing, oversized stations, consultants, and lack of in-house expertise come up again and again.
Kate Lindqvist · 4 sources
- how airports tell you where to go
Schiphol's yellow signs are the reference everyone copies. The rule I learned: never make someone decide between more than a couple of options at once.
Maya Rivers · 4 sources
- Brasília was designed from scratch in under 4 years
Shaped like an airplane (or a bird, depending on who you ask), built in about 41 months, inaugurated 1960. Gorgeous buildings. Famously hard to walk around.
Ola Brekke · 6 sources
- John Snow, the Broad Street pump, and the map
Snow mapped the deaths around Soho and they clustered on one pump. My favorite detail: workers at a nearby brewery mostly stayed healthy, apparently because they drank beer and the brewery had its own well.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- Dutch cities weren't always bike cities
Ingrid Solberg · 5 sources
- Kai Tak's checkerboard approach
747s doing a 47 degree turn at low altitude right over apartment buildings, aiming at a literal checkerboard painted on a hill. Old videos are unreal.
Kate Lindqvist · 4 sources
- 'liminal' comes from a 1909 book about rites of passage
Jun Hayashi · 6 sources
- Hong Kong has an 800 m outdoor escalator as public transit
Runs downhill in the morning and uphill the rest of the day. Commute direction as a setting.
Kate Lindqvist · 3 sources