According to data collected by NeighborhoodScout.com and Dr. Andrew Schiller the most dangerous neighborhood in the United States is in Cincinnati, Ohio. It is important to remember this list is not a list of the most dangerous cities in the country, this top 25 list breaks it down to a much more specific geographical area: neighborhoods. Why does the focus lie on neighbourhoods? Even the cities with the highest crime rates can have relatively safe neighborhoods, and thus it is less useful to generalize about an entire city.

The cities with the top 25 dangerous neighborhoods in the United States are:

1. Cincinnati, Ohio (Central Pky./Liberty St.)
2. Chicago, Ill. (State St./Garfield Blvd.)
3. Miami, Fla. (7th Ave./North River Dr.)
4. Jacksonville, Fla. (Beaver St./Broad St.)
5. Baltimore, Md.(North Ave./Belair Rd.)
6. Kansas City, Mo. (Bales Ave./30th St.)
7. Memphis, Tenn. (Warford St./Mount Olive Rd.)
8. Kansas City, Mo. (Forest Ave./41st St.)
9. Dallas, Texas (Route 352/Scyene Rd.)
10. Richmond, Va. (Church Hill)
11. Memphis, Tenn. (Bellevue Blvd./Lamar Ave.)
12. Dallas, Texas (2nd Ave./Hatcher St.)
13. Springfield, Ill. (Cook St./11th St.)
14. St. Louis, Mo. (14th St./Dr. Martin Luther King Dr.)
15. Little Rock, Ark. (Roosevelt Rd./Bond St.)
16. Philadelphia, Pa. (Broad St./Dauphin St.)
17. Tampa, Fla. (Amelia Ave./Tampa St.)
18. New York, N.Y. (St. Nicholas Ave./125th St.)
19. Chicago, Ill. (66th St./Yale Ave.)
20. Baltimore, Md. (Orleans St./Front St.)
21. Cleveland, Ohio (Cedar Ave./55th St.)
22. Orlando, Fla. (East-West Expy/Orange Blossom Trl.)
23. Detroit, Mich. (Mount Elliott St./Palmer Ave.)
24. Chicago, Ill. (Wallace St./58th St.)
25. Chicago, Ill. (Winchester, Ave./60th St.)

[read more...]

The Telegraph has released an article on the “shrink to survive” approach by Dan Kildee, founder and chairman of the Genesee County Land Bank in Flint.

It’s a new idea for urban development, aimed at saving cities by making them smaller: Cordoning off the sections that are abandoned and marred by blight, urging the few people left to move, and letting the land return to nature. It’s an idea borne of desperation in places like Flint, Mich. which have been hit hard both by job losses and by foreclosures.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

Source: Telegraph

You can find a few other details on how this all is going to work in the Telegraph article. It’s also not clear how aggressively the US administration will embrace the idea. It’s true that in many ways, the shrinking cities movement is a “radical experiment,” as The Telegraph puts it.

But the shrinking cities movement could quickly gain traction, despite its controversial nature. For all the towns and communities like Flint that have been smacked hard by the foreclosure crisis and are facing a deluge of abandoned and vacant properties, shrinking to survive soon may seem more like a smart move than a radical proposal.

What do you think about the shrinking city movement?  

In their annual Fast Cities ranking, Fast Company magazine nominated Seattle as the winner. In addition, they listed twelve other cities that need to be recognized for their individual innovations.

These cities are the following (found on CoolTown Studios):

• Chicago – Last year’s winner, it’s I-Go Car Sharing program ties public car sharing to its transit system with one ‘Smart Card’.
• Cleveland, Ohio – Their Reimagining a More Sustainable Cleveland initiative seeks to reclaim abandoned suburban lots back to nature.
• Tucson, Arizona – It’s Healthy Tucson Initiative will invest $80 million to expand its 700 miles of bikeways and 72 miles of shared-use paths.
• Taipei, Taiwan (pictured) – The city launched an ambitious program to achieve “zero landfill, total recycling” by 2010.
• New Orleans – The neighborhood of Broadmoor is singled out as a model for post-Katrina revitalization, and happens to have its own crowdsourcing initiative, Destination Broadmoor.
• Houston, TX -  The new 12-acre, $122 million Discovery Green park has become a favorite social, recreational destination.
• Malmo, Sweden – The city plans to reduce its CO2 emissions by 25% from 2008 to 2012, well above the Kyoto Protocol 5% target.
• Vancouver, Canada – All 18 buildings in Vancouver’s Olympic Village will be LEED Gold in time for the 2010 Winter Games.
• Philadelphia, San Francisco, Denver and New York are also noted, though not for achievements related to culture and placemaking as the cities above are.

Philadelphia, San Francisco, Denver and New York are also noted, though not for achievements related to culture and placemaking as the cities above are.

Finally, the analysis of the factors of the PerfectCity Charter issue “Identification” is finished and online. The dossier is to find in the “PerfectCity Charter” section in the sidebar.

We are looking forward to your comments and thoughts about this dossier.

In our current PerfectCity User Interview you have the chance to represent your city to the world on PerfectCity. We would like to invite all readers to take the interview!

Which city do you represent and what department do you work for?

Novi Sad, North of Serbia, University of Novi Sad – PhD on Concept of Creative City.

What makes your city worth living in? What are the highlights in terms of culture, architecture or otherwise?

Friendly, hospitable, open minded, warm people. Culture – many events, musical festivals, sitting in the cafes, pubs – always full of people, 26 nations, many churches, Synagogue, Danube river, big fortress on Danube.

You want investors to invest in your city? Why is your city outstandingly attractive for investors?

Yes, because Serbia can be potential market after all troubles here and people who live here are more calm, less criminal then in Belgrade, town is second big in Serbia, it is nice place for business and family since it is 300.000 citizens. We are opening right know and we are yet to be ‘invested’.

You want investors to invest in your city? Why is your city outstandingly attractive for investors?

Agricultural region with natural food, to be clean and unique cultural centre in Europe with 26 nations and intercultural life.

How do you imagine your city in 2020? What should change until then?

Lots of green places and gardens, I see it is cultural as unique centre of this region. Nick name of the town is North Athens and I hope it will become again that.

On TreeHugger.com there was an article on the difference of these two terms.

According to an article by The New York Times a passive house “isn’t a designation you can slap on like LEED certification. It’s a design philosophy.” But it is a designation, like LEED, as well as a philosophy, and some houses, for instance the Cascade House by Paul Raff Studio, has many passive design features, but is not a passive house.

The house has a lot of features that take advantage of passive solar design and look spectacular at the same time, like this variation on a trombe wall that absorbs heat through the south facing windows. This and other features led Greensource to consider it one of the Best Green Houses…

Read the entire article in TreeHugger.com.

Picture found here.

The Wall Street Journal asked architects to draw up plans for the most energy-efficient houses they could imagine. 

It could have gardens on its walls or a pond stocked with fish for dinner. It might mimic a tree, turning sunlight into energy and carbon dioxide into oxygen. Or perhaps it will be more like a lizard, changing its color to suit the weather and healing itself when it gets damaged.

Those are just a handful of the possibilities that emerged from an exercise in futurism. The Wall Street Journal asked four architects to design an energy-efficient, environmentally sustainable house without regard to cost, technology, aesthetics or the way we are used to living.

The idea was not to dream up anything impossible or unlikely — in other words, no antigravity living rooms. Instead, we asked the architects to think of what technology might make possible in the next few decades. They in turn asked us to rethink the way we live.

Find different ideas of what the energy-efficient house of the future will like look like on Wall Street Journal. Architects like William McDonough + Partners, Cook + Fox and more share their interesting ideas.

Read more here.

Traditionally the city is mapped as a network of streets and large numbers of buildings and blocks. This given space is generally taken as universal and true. The aspect of change, movement and time are often ignored, because they have not one state, but many. The UrbanTick research aims to address this problem by looking at ways to observe and map these processes. By tracking activities and actions it starts to evolve a new perspective on how to define and interpret the city as a collective product of pattern in time.

In this context the UrbanDiary project collects data on the spatial extend of individual’s routines in the wider London region. The project records the movement of participants with the help of GPS devices and aims to capture the beat of the city. The output is a collection of personal statements on how individuals “use” and experience the city.

Urban Diary Map by UrbanTick for UrbanDiary

The pattern represents the occurring repetition in the participant’s behavior. Thick lines start to accumulate on the daily routes and draw out the very personal arteries of the city. To the surprise of most participants the individual activities are rather confined.

The London trajectory map produces a star shape. Compared to records of other cities this characteristic is individual to each city and is determined by the morphology, transport network and citizen behavior.

Depending on the preferences of transport by the participant the emerging patter of activity draws a continuous track or starts to build up isolated and spatially disconnected areas of activity reassembling Guy Deboard’s Naked City (1957). [read more...]

The editors from Triple Canopy invited us to visit the new issue of Triple Canopy, an online art and culture magazine. There is a new issue "Urbanism: Model Cities". It is the first of two issues devoted to examining various forms of and approaches to urbanism, considered in relation to the current economic crisis, from the perspectives of a number of writers, researchers, artist, and architects.

Some selected projects:

• In “The City that Built Itself,” Joshua Bauchner writes about and photographs a Caracas slum where residents have turned utopian modernism on its head, transforming a fifty-year-old superblock housing project into the locus of sprawling improvised developments.

• Joseph Clarke’s “Infrastructure for Souls” traces the parallel histories of the American megachurch and the corporate-organizational complex over the last century, from the Crystal Palace to the General Motors Technical Center to Googleplex, from Charles Spurgeon to Richard Neutra to Rick Warren. Illustrated with a striking series of images juxtaposing ecclesiastical and office buildings.

The second "Urbanism" issue will be published in June and will feature more interesting projects.

Read the first issue here.