Tag: urban planning

  • Bus Transit in Philadelphia

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    Brendan Barry
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    I have lived in Philadelphia for almost ten months now and that time can be split into two different residences. For the first, I took the El to and from Centre City. For the second, I walk to and from work. I look for living spaces near transit lines. In Chicago I took the El…

  • High-rise Living

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    Brendan Barry
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    I was reading my print edition of the Economist last night and found this graphic—screenshot from the online version—about the rising importance of skyscrapers in the urban landscape. The article was written after the Grenfell Tower inferno and looks at things that could be done to improve safety in high-rises. Naturally, I was reading this on…

  • Philadelphia’s Growth Since the 1940s

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    Brendan Barry
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    I stumbled upon this article last night on philly.curbed.com that takes a look at the growth and slowdown in said growth in Philadelphia. For the purposes of this blog, that included an animated .gif that showed the expansion in the metro area since the 1940s. My quibble with the piece is that the lighter blue…

  • Where is Normal America?

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    Brendan Barry
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    Not every graphic information graphic is a sexy chart or map. Sometimes tables communicate the story just as well. Maybe even better. Today’s post comes from FiveThirtyEight, which examined a claim about what places represent “Normal America”. Turns out that when one looks at the data, here age, race, ethnicity, and education, Normal America is…

  • Mapping a New America

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    The United States of America consists of 50 states and hundreds of cities. In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times Parag Khanna argued for the switch of priority away from the state-level and to effectively the city-level. We have clusters of cities that dominate and drive the national economy. The classic case-in-point is Bowash,…

  • Parking in LA

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today’s piece comes via a colleague with the original article appearing in Wired. The article looks at new parking signs that the city of Los Angeles has proposed. The reason? Parking on streets with multiple signs for parking sometimes make no sense. These signs aim to simplify the communication of those parking regulations. Credit for…

  • The Growth of Urban Walmarts

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today’s piece comes via my co-worker and is about the growth of urban Walmart stores. The article is from NPR and includes a nice series of small multiples of store locations in three select cities: Washington, Chicago, and Atlanta. In full disclosure, I live about two blocks from one of the urban Walmarts in Chicago. So…

  • The Urban Future

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today’s selection is a little old—dating from July of last year—but is still a nice example of an inline graphic supporting the premise of its accompanying article. The New York Times looks at what was then data published by the United Nations on urban growth out to 2030. The article talks about the growth of…

  • The City Liveability Index

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Several months ago the Economist looked at city liveability, which in their words looks at safety, healthcare, educational resources, infrastructure, and environment. And, well, it turns out that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand do really well. The only two cities not in those countries within the top-ten: Vienna, Austria (no. 2) and Helsinki, Finland (no.…

  • Growth of Inland Cities

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Some of the nation’s fastest growing cities are inland, away from the coast where housing prices are high. To support an article about the demographic shift, the New York Times created this map. Circle size represents growth over a six-year period while the colour of the bubble represents housing prices. Credit for the piece goes…