When the directors of the Queensboro Corp. -- the developer responsible for much of present-day Jackson Heights, Queens -- traveled to Europe in 1914, they were not afraid that borrowing from foreign models would produce a theme park. They were searching for better ways to build out Queens. Manhattan offered a cautionary example. Its residential buildings were often narrow and deep, with excessive lot coverage, inadequate light, and little meaningful open space. In Berlin and other European cities, the Queensboro directors found new innovations on the old perimeter block model: wide, shallow buildings aligned to the street, no side setbacks, and organized around large interior courtyards. They adapted that model in Jackson Heights, creating some of the finest residential areas in the country, combining extraordinary population density with abundant light, air, greenery, and shared open space. Then, rather than allowing the model to evolve and spread, American cities largely outlawed it through zoning and building codes. Setback requirements, lot-coverage limits, height restrictions, parking mandates, and increasingly rigid egress rules made it difficult or impossible to build new neighborhoods like Jackson Heights. We imported one of Europe’s most successful urban innovations, proved that it could work beautifully in an American context, and then effectively prohibited ourselves from building more of it.

Another day, another FT piece. We plan to sell high-spec 4-bed homes for £350k. The only way to solve Britain’s fertility crisis is to make it affordable to have children in a vibrant place that people want to live.

Excited to support this legislation that allows even more homes to be built near Market-Frankford Line stations in West Philly! The 3rd Council District is the only one in the city where most residents do not drive to work. This common-sense step means even more of our neighbors will enjoy the advantages of living near public transportation. inquirer.com/real-estate/com…

📍 AutoSur con av. Bosa Hoy izamos la viga 29 de las 32 que se necesitan para los nuevos puentes de la AutoSur con av. Bosa. 2,8 millones de personas se beneficiarán con esta nueva infraestructura que mejora la movilidad en este corredor de entrada y salida de la ciudad.

Fed-up Downtown Brooklyn residents want the city to remove a nearby local truck route that encourages big-rigs to use their street as an illegal cut-through, as officials prep for the city’s first citywide truck route redesign since the 1970s. buff.ly/0eHW4NP

CA YIMBY's Eduardo Mendoza argues ugly buildings turn housing-neutral voters into opponents, & the fix isn't more review. Objective standards targeting coherent style, real materials, and street trees can make beautiful housing the by-right default. cayimby.org/blog/building-be…

LA deliberately cut its housing capacity from ~10M to ~4M homes through single-family zoning. It hit that cap in the 1990s, then added 5x more jobs than homes 2010–2015. The result is one of the world's least affordable cities.

Same is generally true for regional rail. Rents are skyrocketing in the same core neighborhoods or so because the areas with access to *frequent* rapid transit have not significantly expanded in the last 30 years. This is why unlocking through running at Penn is so important.

Three underground Shenzhen Metro Lines that meet at this station were all built for less than 300 million INT$ per km. Each Shenzhen Metro Line here is capable of moving over 50,000 people per hour per direction in massive 8 car Type A trains. Meanwhile below is what spending over 450 million INT$ per km gets you in Toronto, an unventilated half underground tramway.

Know how big your truck rig is, too big a rig too small a bridge equals a big bang. Worse still for Truck operators your insurance will skyrocket, whats the consequential loss liability of closing a main line for two days (answer big, very big)

NYC to install traffic sensors to track how pedestrians, bikers and drivers behave - Gothamist gothamist.com/news/nyc-to-in…

Laurie Baker was a British architect who moved to India, fell in love with brick, and spent his entire career being told he was wrong. When he completed a cost-effective brick building in 1986, a government engineer publicly declared it would not last a year. His buildings from the 1970s are still standing.  This is the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Built in the early 1970s. Open courtyards, large windows and jali walls, intricate brickwork that enhances natural ventilation and lighting while maintaining privacy.  No plaster. No paint. Just brick laid with enough precision and variation that every wall has its own character. Baker said it himself: “Bricks to me are like faces. All of them are made of burnt mud, but they vary slightly in shape and colour. I think these small variations give tremendous character to a wall made of thousands of bricks, so I never dream of covering such a unique and characterful creation with plaster, which is mainly dull and characterless.” He became known as the Brick Master of Kerala.  His philosophy was simple. A stone should look like a stone. Brick should look like brick. We cover ours in plaster and call it finished. Laurie Baker | Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala 🇮🇳 | 11,000 m² | 1970s

The Victorians built the swimming pools. The postwar generation built the youth clubs. Nobody built the endowment. We’ve spent 150 years spending down the inheritance. Here’s how we never do that ever again. Local Government For Growth: The Civic Trust Fund Model 📖⬇️

Dublin's 1941 Sheriff Street Lifting Bridge is rusting at Spencer Dock. Surely it's worth a lick of paint? 👨‍🎨​🎨 #Dublin #Ireland #Heritage #HeritageAtRisk Below is a webpage I built to highlight dereliction in Ireland, propose solutions, and showcase heritage buildings and structures at risk. 📍 Survey Research Details: derelictsites.com/Not-on-RPS…

A Parisian blogger living in the US noticed that American urban neighborhoods often sort into very rich and very poor areas, while Paris appears to have smoother income gradients. His map raises the larger question of how much does housing typology shape the income distribution of a city?

From drained dock to dream pitch. George’s Dock has sat empty for years in the heart of Dublin 1, beside the richest square mile in Ireland and one of its most deprived communities. Give kids a place to play. George’s Dock is an early-19th-century stone wet dock in Dublin’s Docklands, designed by engineer John Rennie and opened in 1821 as part of the Custom House Docks complex. It is a protected structure, valued for its Georgian maritime engineering and masonry. Today, the dock is drained, partly infilled, and largely disused, serving mainly as an occasional outdoor events space Below is a webpage I built to highlight dereliction in Ireland, propose solutions, and showcase heritage buildings and structures at risk. 📍 Survey Research Details: derelictsites.com/3173-Georg… #Dublin #Ireland #Heritage #HeritageAtRisk #BuiltHeritage

Today the Forest City project is taking another step to repair Britain’s broken social contract by kicking-off our 4-bed housing challenge. Is it possible to build a beautiful, stone-faced, generously proportioned, 4-bedroom terraced house at a cost of no more than £250k? Right now, a similarly sized new house on the outskirts of Cambridge will cost a prospective couple at least £600k. Buying a similar sized old home in the centre of the city costs well over £1m. It’s no different in many places in the South. That’s a disgusting joke; completely out of reach without massive help from parents or mortgaging yourself to the hilt. We refuse to be enslaved to debt any longer. That’s why we’re using technology and talent to show everyone that you can indeed create something amazing that doesn’t cost a king’s ransom. Working with two time Sterling Prize-nominated architect, Amin Taha, and architect turned robotics entrepreneur, @GillesRetsin, we are creating the home for the 22nd century using robots that can build the shell of a house in 12hrs. We will change the economic prospects for hundreds of thousands of young working Brits and hope to display the home in Cambridge very soon. You can read more about it in the House & Home section of this weekend’s @FT.

The Dutch mobility system isn't just built around cycling. It's built around bike-train intermodality: the bike solves the train's convenience problem and the train solves the bike's range problem. Together they offer an attractive alternative to driving: youtu.be/jq93DgLvmFc

“The British government is set to unveil a new Cycling & Walking Investment Strategy directing £4.5 billion toward active transportation over the next 5 years. The plan includes the construction of 5k new walking, cycling & wheeling routes & 10k safer crossings by 2030.” Via @MomentumMag momentummag.com/uk-commits-8…

I had a lot of Fable tokens to use up before my weekly reset, so I made this live 3D map of London with Three.js Every train, bus, boat and plane is real and live right now! - Tube, bus and riverboat data from TfL - National Rail trains from Darwin live departure boards - ADS-B for planes and helicopters - AIS feed for boats and ships - Map data from Overture and OpenStreetMap Trains and buses have no GPS feed, so their positions are inferred from arrival countdowns and departure boards, then animated along the track/route geometry