Category: design
The Geography of Manufacturing’s Digital Revolution: Are the Jobs Coming Back?
We’ve been following the rise of 3-D printing and how it will revolutionize manufacturing. The Economist has some more thoughts on the subject, particularly how it will affect the location of manufacturing jobs: The revolution will affect not only how things are made, but where. Factories used to move to low-wage countries to curb labour [...]
Local Land-Use Policies Hurt US Innovation
That seems to be the implication of 3 books on the role of cities in economic development in the 21st Century reviewed by Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog, Ezra Klein reviews . In “Triumph of the City,”’ Harvard economist Ed Glaeser details how cities all over the world have supercharged human development [...]
Seen any really great parking lots lately?
That’s the question that led Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of landscape architecture and urban design at MIT to write his new book Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking, a badly needed reconsideration of the parking lot: “We all use parking lots, and we all kind of hate them,” Ben-Joseph says. “Yet they’re [...]
Higher Education: Will MOOCs Change Everything?
Over at Inside Higher Ed, University of Prince Edward Island graduate student Bonnie Stewart weighs in on the affect that massive online open courses (MOOCs) like MITx will have on higher education: Too often, MOOCs – particularly the emergent big-name university offerings that have essentially harnessed the capacity of open online learning and scaled it [...]
Planning as Art; Art as Planning
With increasing recognition of the economic importance of their arts sector, some communities have created community plans for the arts. Over at Engaging Cities, the Orton Foundation’s Rebecca Sanborn Stone has a post describing efforts at community planning through the arts. Her post summarizes efforts in three communities: Starksboro, VT, Yellow Springs, OH and Mendocino [...]
Symptoms of Urban Land Use Problems
Over at the Global Urbanist (via Planetizen), Ann Deslandes has a post on informal users of urban space that can range from so-called (and widely celebrated) “pop-up shops” of “do-it-yourself” (DIY) urbanists to the homeless population. She makes the interesting argument that they are positive and negative symptoms of the same urban land use problem: [...]
