• New WTO Rules Could Threaten City Planning & commentary from Overhead Wire
• Nationwide Universal Metrocard?
• The 1925 “Hollywood Subway”
• Purple Line Foes Offer No Ideas, And No Names – country club creates fake “grass roots” organization in order to sink transit
• Hoefler & Frere-Jones: Type in Three Dimensions
• On the World Trade Stuntman: Man on Wire, Petit in NYC
• Floor-by-Floor Demolition Blows Minds, Saves Environment

Pump Jack, originally uploaded by Jim Frazier

Left without voice or energy, I am still at home recuperating, but I can’t help but comment on what is on television right now. It is no secret that we are in the golden age of reality television, tapping into stranger and stranger areas of reality (Greatest American Dog – really?).
The newest theme which sticks out can be described as, Real Men, Real Jobs reality series, which, to date, consist of:

• Dirty Jobs – the Ur-show – Discovery Channel
• Deadliest Catch – Discovery Channel
• Ice Road Truckers – History Channel
• Ax Men – History Channel
• Black Gold – TruTV

All are interesting to watch, even if the “competitions” between different companies are contrived. What makes them interesting is that these activities are hidden from our daily, modern, lives. It is a bit unsettling that all focus on material extraction, but it does make for good television.
The greater question: when will there be an architect show? (can’t you just see how interesting redlines would be??)

Beverage Manifesto, originally uploaded by frank-c

• Broadway get 2 new lanes of sidewalk (horrible, car-friendly headline from NY Times)
• Train in Vain
• A busy day for NCPC – see the revised plan
• Renzo Piano Supports Changes to Times Tower
• Rapid Bus – on upgrading both the bus itself and the path the bus rides on
• Gehry’s Serpentine Pavilion
• Herzog & de Meuron’s new NYC Tower

• This isn’t England – on graphics designer’s changing the size of England on published maps
• Steve amp; Barry’s to File for Chapter 11 and US retail property 2nd-qtr worst in 30 yrs
• The Option of Urbanism
• Class 02: Ubiquitous Computing
• Roads do not pay for themselves
• For Transit Map Nerds only: Washington Metro System Schematic
• Transparently slanted Post article pits suburbanites against the city. OK: so the Mayor enacts regulations for his tax-paying constituents to the detriment of non-taxpaying non-constituents. Where’s the beef?

Snijpunt_Huis_Didden_L1010944, originally uploaded by JagerJanssen architecten BNA

Winy Maas’ of MVRDV new project, Didden Village is in this weekend’s NY Times Magazine, Sky Lark:

MVRDV’s signature “obsession” — the word Maas uses for it — is density: the idea of using urban space intensely to create a sustainable future. Worldwide, MVRDV has implemented this in massive social housing developments like Silodam in Amsterdam and Mirador in Madrid. Why, then, would he want to take on their little project? But for Maas it was the kind of thought experiment he loved. “Before we even finished our sentence, he had started drawing,” van de Kamp recalls.
The result, Didden Village, is literally a blue-sky solution to the Didden family’s problem. It is an architectural palimpsest, a new structure added to an old one, in line with MVRDV’s mission to make existing spaces work harder. The “village” consists of three bedrooms built on the roof: a big room for the parents and two smaller, semi-detached ones for the two boys, each a distinct houselike shape and separated symbolically by what Maas describes as “a main street.” The whole represents both the connections between the family members and their need to go their own ways.

• Sky Lark
• Didden Village Flickr Tag
• See also Silodam by MVRDV

Photographer Joe McNally attempts to photograph changing of the Empire State Building’s aircraft beacon for National Geographic’s special, Power of Light.

• What you notice about Shanghai if you’ve been in Beijing for a while
• Density in Unlikely Spots
• On Economic Costs
• Opposition to rail-based transit
• Must watch PBS special: Public Art of NYC
• Two from BLDGBLOG: Chinese Air Bars & Agent of Change
• Beijing – Forbidden Cities

Colors in a Row, originally uploaded by Ronnie R

People tend to think gentrification goes like this: rich, educated white people move into a low-income minority neighborhood and drive out its original residents, who can no longer afford to live there. As it turns out, that’s not typically true.
A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Pittsburgh and Duke University, examined Census data from more than 15,000 neighborhoods across the U.S. in 1990 and 2000, and found that low-income non-white households did not disproportionately leave gentrifying areas. In fact, researchers found that at least one group of residents, high school–educated blacks, were actually more likely to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods than in similar neighborhoods that didn’t gentrify — even increasing as a fraction of the neighborhood population, and seeing larger-than-expected gains in income.

Read Time’s article, Gentrification: Not Ousting the Poor? or read the paper by Terra McKinnish, Randall Walsh, & T. Kirk White: Who Gentrifies Low Income Neighborhoods?, with the abstract:

This paper uses confidential Census data, specifically the 1990 and 2000 Census Long- Form data, to study the demographic processes underlying the gentrification of low income urban neighborhoods during the 1990’s. In contrast to previous studies, the analysis is conducted at the more refined census-tract level with a narrower definition of gentrification and more narrowly defined comparison neighborhoods. The analysis is also richly disaggregated by demographic characteristic, uncovering differential patterns by race, education, age and family structure that would not have emerged in the more aggregate analysis in previous studies. The results provide little evidence of displacement of low-income non-white households in gentrifying neighborhoods. The bulk of the income gains in gentrifying neighborhoods are attributed to white college graduates and black high school graduates. It is the disproportionate in-migration of the former and the disproportionate retention and income gains of the latter that appear to be the main engines of gentrification.

Photographer Rachel Barrett is featured in today’s New York Times City Section regarding her NYC Newsstand Project, The City Visible: Yesterday’s News:

IN 2006, the photographer Rachel Barrett began documenting Manhattan’s newsstands, the makeshift sidewalk stores that sell candy, soda and lottery tickets, as well as newspapers and magazines. To date, she has photographed all 236 that she could find.
Ms. Barrett was drawn to the newsstands because they are ubiquitous and largely taken for granted, and because they forcefully demonstrate that New York, unlike cities whose streets have lost their vitality to car culture, still teems with on-the-run pedestrians.

Check out the Newsstands Slideshow and Flickr Newsstand Tag.