Chicago planners push boldest bus-rapid-transit option (WBEZ)

"The design favored by the Chicago planners resembles the boldest of four BRT alternatives the city presented last fall for the corridor. Each direction of Ashland would have one regular traffic lane and a bus-only lane near the middle of the avenue."

Cook County Establishes a Landbank (Chris Bently, Architect's Newspaper)

Cook County is home to the nation’s third largest city, as well as some of the deepest economic craters left by the ongoing housing crisis. Some 40,000 vacant units, many of them underwater, restrain economic development in the second-most populous county in the U.S.

Now, following similar efforts underway in Kansas City, northeast Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, Atlanta, and Michigan, Cook County will establish a redevelopment authority aimed at stabilizing the region’s housing market.

U of I Unveils Big Chicago Tech Institute (Crain's)

"Hoping to jolt Chicago's expanding technology sector into high gear, City Hall, the state of Illinois and the University of Illinois are going public Thursday with plans to open a privately funded research lab in the city in the next year and a half or so that would draw major public-sector and federal financing."

Ruin Porn or Realism? Why Chicago's Artists Are Obsessed with Detroit (Chicago Mag)

"In the last half-decade, no less than five “exchange exhibitions,” several fact-finding missions and study trips, and a graduate seminar that positioned the entire city of “Detroit as material,” have contributed to a mushrooming local interest—let’s call it our Motor City crush—among artists, curators, and arts educators."

What is Middle Class in Manhattan? (Amy O'Leary, NYTimes via CNBC)

"The average Manhattan apartment, at $3,973 a month, costs almost $2,800 more than the average rental nationwide. The average sale price of a home in Manhattan last year was $1.46 million, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report, while the average sale price for a new home in the United States was just under $230,000."

Chicago's Year Without Snow (Whet Moser, Chicago Mag)

"What the winter gives us is awe. Not toughness or bragging rights, given how often so many of us fail at living heartily through it, especially as it plods slowly through February and March. "In Chicago I learned that the weather made me who I was," writes Staples. "The mood was impenetrable. I didn't know it was a mood until the sun came shining to the rescue. The lesson was new each time."

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A New Humanism Part 1 - 6 (Robert Lamb Hart, Metropolis Mag)

"My basic idea has been to step back, look at the unfinished cultural revolutions of Modernism, and continue to build on their defining enterprise—the rapid advance of reliable sciences. The impact they have had on construction-related technologies has been enormous. But the insights of the maturing sciences of nature and human nature—of evolution and ecology and how human biology interacts with an environment—are only beginning to be applied systematically in design education and day-to-day practice."

Cook County Ordinance to cut Construction Waste (Architect's Newspaper)

This law, which took effect November 21, affects some 2.5 million residents across 30 townships in suburban Cook County. While the City of Chicago mandates that 50 percent of debris be recycled—a 2007 ordinance, which, government officials note, contractors now easily exceed—building debris makes up a staggering 40 percent of landfill material nationwide.

Brooklyn's Affordability Crisis Is No Accident (Stephen Smith, Atlantic Cities)
"Its poor and middle-class residents, who 20 years ago might have been able to afford apartments just a stop or two from Manhattan in Williamsburg, are now being displaced to neighborhoods like Canarsie, East New York and Jamaica, where they struggle with long commutes. It won't be too long until they're pushed so far from job centers in Manhattan that they leave the city entirely, contributing to the growing sense that New York is too expensive for ordinary people."

Washington's Economic Boom, Financed By You (Annie Lowrey, NYTimes)

"How Washington managed this transformation, however, is not a story that the rest of the country might want to hear, because we largely financed it. As the size of the federal budget has ballooned over the past decade, more and more of that money has remained in the District. “We get about 15 cents of every procurement dollar spent by the federal government,” says Stephen Fuller, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an expert on the region. “There’s great dependence there.” And with dependence comes fragility. About 40 percent of the regional economy, Fuller says, relies on federal spending."

"Pocket Neighborhoods" (Kaid Benfield, nrdc.org)

“Pocket neighborhoods, best defined as clusters of homes gathered around a landscaped common area, are springing up all over the country. The people who live in these most sought-after communities know they share something extraordinarily valuable: a model of community that provides a missing link. They have their cherished privacy, but with something more: they get to know each other in a meaningful way, and are able to offer one another the kind of support system that family members across town, across state or across country cannot.”

Architecture Is More Than Just Buildings: In Remembrance Of Ada Louise Huxtable (The New Republic)

"Huxtable never let her readers, or anyone else who would listen, forget that architecture is not like the other arts. Paintings or dance performances you choose to see or not see, but architecture envelops us all. Everyone sees and experiences it. Huxtable insisted both that architecture is an art and that it is an art that everybody deserves to enjoy precisely because it constitutes the life of our inhabited places."

Entrepreneur-in-Chief: The New Model City (Gapers Block)

"What we're feeling viscerally, but seeing from too close to appreciate, is the logical end of decades of neoliberalization of government, which has transformed a managerial state into an entrepreneurial one. Our mayors are now "entrepreneurs-in-chief," and the result is that governance has been transformed from a participatory process of pooling resources and regulating behavior for the public good into one of government by private negotiation and enticement of capital through competition between states, cities and even neighborhoods."

Food Oasis: Chicago (Chris Bently, The Architect's Newspaper)

The “Recipe for Healthy Places” plan would establish an informal urban agriculture district to help tackle food insecurity and obesity in the vicinity of Englewood, West Englewood, Washington Park, and Woodlawn. A 2.5-mile abandoned rail line could be the district’s spine, with open lots and parks around its periphery serving as a marketplace for local produce and artisanal products. Locals have taken to calling it the “New Era Trail.”

Photos of Mississippi River Drought (Chicago Mag)

Crime Migrates to Suburbs (Wall Street Journal)

"The decline in homicides nationally has overshadowed a countertrend: rising murders in the suburbs, the communities that ring cities and have long been promoted as havens from violent crime. U.S. homicides fell sharply from 2001 to 2010, including a 16.7% drop in big cities, according to a federal Bureau of Justice Statistics study of the most recent, reported data. That is because of a host of factors, including better medical treatment for victims of violent injury and aggressive police measures in megacities like New York and Los Angeles."

Black Gentrifiers & Chicago's Changing Neighborhoods (Emily Badger, Atlantic Cities)

"In most U.S. cities the word has generally come to imply the gradual taking of a place from one group (usually poor people, usually minorities) by another (usually middle- or upper-class whites). But in Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood – once Chicago’s version of Harlem, the city’s “Black Metropolis” – the gentrifiers are black, too."

Goodby New York, Hello Minneapolis (The Economist)

"Will parts of Manhattan be left by people seeking higher, dryer ground? In the aftermath of another UN climate conference, our correspondents discuss migration and adaptation."