Congratulations to Laura Neely (one half of a team opening The Post in Germantown) and Hannah Asprey for correctly identifying last week’s News Roundup Sidewalk Challenge on the Broken Sidewalk Facebook page. The location is Highland Avenue between Schiller and Swan streets. It seems the classic car parked on the street is a sort of neighborhood landmark. Here’s another sidewalk ready to be identified in the comments below.
And on with the top ten picks in urbanism news.
- Does Urbanization Always Drive Economic Growth? Not Exactly… Alex Thog asks some difficult questions about our global economic strategy, urbanization. PLOS
- What Your Zip Code Says About You. Esri, a geographic information firm, takes a stab at using zip code data to tell you something about where you live. The result? Well, lets just say marketers will be more interested in the data than you will be. Fast Company
- Massive Detroit Foreclosures Push Out Black Homeowners. In what might be the single largest, citywide example of racially based accumulation by dispossession, Detroit prepares to remove 142,000 residents (one fifth of the population) from their homes. The Atlantic
- ReSurfaced Could be Prototype for Other Cities. If you made it down to ReSurfaced recently then you already know that creative reuse of abandoned or vacant spaces in downtown areas can lead to the creation of temporary festivales that could be of interest to other cities as small scale economic opportunities. Louisville Business First
- Mapping the Skill Sets Unique to Cities. The skills and location data of over 175 million LinkedIn members were mined to produce a map displaying the industries most common in major cities throughout the United States and Europe. Planetizen
- Graffiti Artists ‘Creepytings’ is Defacing National Parks. In a creative display of what Neil Brenner would likely describe as actual real world urbanization, Casey Nocket has become a sort of national parks ‘Banksy’. While mostly villainized, Nocket’s graffiti has begun a conversation around the lack of funding for national park upkeep, austerity, and budget cuts. CITYLAB
- A Mystery Bidder Offers $3 Million for 6,000 of Detroit’s Worst Homes. Just to close the loop on the accumulation by dispossession argument around Detroit’s city wide gentrification project. Bloomberg Business Week
- New Zealand Seeks to Avoid “Gentrification Rent”. As local governments look to control land development through smart growth, they’re experiencing some pricing pains. Wendell Cox reports about how New Zealand is beginning to address these issues. New Geography
- Brighton’s Pioneer Shipping Container Development Houses the Homeless. The Brighton Housing Trust is using shipping containers to address some of the issues around building affordable shelter for the homeless. inhabitat
- Study: Solar Energy Will Be as Cheap as Fossil Fuel Energy by 2016. A new report by Deutsche Bank identifies the forces that are bringing solar power in line with other common energy sources in 36 states: a little bit of subsidy and a lot of innovation. The not-so-good news? Kentucky isn’t one of them. Bloomberg via Gizmodo
Douglass Blvd, east of Bardstown Rd.