Forum Member Jonathan Rose in Crain's

Click here to see the entire piece.

Urban Omnibus Feature

The Forum for Urban Design held a design competition, which was recently featured on Urban Omnibus, a project of the Architecture League and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Urban Omnibus

Three members of the Forum's Board of Directors are interviewed in this Urban Omnibus feature: Deborah Berke, Marilyn Taylor and Hugh Hardy. Click here for their interviews about current and future developments in New York City. 

Forum VP Bob Yaro on Infrastructure

 President of the Regional Plan Association and Forum VP Bob Yaro has a commentary about the need for New York City to make investments in its infrastructure, particularly if the city will continue to compete globally.

Shenzhen is often criticized as a product of unregulated development, better suited to the speculators that first spurred its growth than to the workers housed in huge complexes of factory-run barracks. Yet for architects these cities have also become vast fields of urban experimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, who first envisioned the city as a field of gleaming towers, could have dreamed of.

Read a blog post about the commentary on The New York Times website here, or download the entire commentary (pdf) from the Center for an Urban Future.

NewGeography dot com

A new website has been launched, seemingly fashioned to counterbalance many of the urbanism sites that have a decidedly big-city focus. New Geography tips the balance towards suburban and small-town reporting. For instance, a recently posted piece about high energy costs, written by executive editor Joel Kotkin and managing editor Mark Schill, seeks to puncture the idea that big cities will benefit from high energy costs:

But these advantages are somewhat mitigated by the fact that these same cities often pay far more for energy than their rivals. Electricity in New York, notes an upcoming study by the New York-based Center for an Urban Future, costs twice the national average. California cities also suffer much higher prices -- almost 50 percent higher than their counterparts in the Midwest. So even if you use considerably less energy, you might end up paying more. Being a big, dense city clearly has advantages, but they too often are squandered by aging infrastructure, lack of new plants and high business costs.

You won't see a lot of trumpeting of the arts and culture as economic development engines or the "rise of the creative class," but counterintuitive articles about manufacturing and why Obama should trade liberal Chicago for libertarian Phoenix.

The site is well organized and very attractive. Check it out here.