Word: urbanism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Townspeople elsewhere merely carp about glass boxes and pine for the architectural past. San Franciscans have taken action. Earlier this month the board of supervisors passed an elaborate set of rules governing development in the 470-acre urban heart. The new code, sponsored by Mayor Dianne Feinstein, is more prescriptive and restrictive than any other ever adopted by an American city. At once radical and conservative, the Downtown Plan will permit only a couple of new towers to be built in the dense center of downtown. It will limit large-scale building citywide to an annual aggregate...
...ideology the Downtown Plan is sensibly deferential to the existing warp and woof of the city. In ambition, however, it is reminiscent of the Olympian urban-renewal texts of a generation ago, when planners presumed to know how to recast cities from scratch. It puts the city on record against unnecessary shadow and wind and disapproves of mirrored windows (visually off-putting), big street-level airline ticket offices (too boring for pedestrians) and the profusion of newspaper-vending machines (inconvenient for pedestrians). No San Franciscan, the plan continues, should have to walk more than 900 feet to find a sunny...
...imitation of late 20th century city life--all junk, improvisations and random brutality--is your idea of civilization. Thunderdome brilliantly clarifies that irony. Its high-bounding excesses of action simultaneously satisfy and satirize the passion for heedless viciousness that so profoundly moves the action film's prime audience, urban adolescent males. They can be relied on not to notice or care about the sequence's central irony: that the decisive weapon in the struggle between Max and Blaster is, of all innocent objects, a simple silver whistle...
...Violent urban legend has always swirled around Mexican drug traffickers, but few of them have ever set out to build a reputation as vicious as that of Heriberto Lazcano, 28. As leader of the Zetas, a new and ruthless drug gang situated along the U.S. border, Lazcano has perpetrated crimes that range from the brutal to the bizarre. In one instance last summer, Mexican officials say, Lazcano murdered a prominent Tijuana publisher in his car in broad daylight as his two young children watched horrified from the backseat. In January the Zetas attempted a raid on a federal prison...
...program like that might have saved a lot of trouble for the Darien, Ill., public-school system. Last October an eighth-grader who was allegedly harassing Joey Urban, now 14, wound up rupturing Joey's eardrum with a poke from a lollipop stick. The Urbans are suing, complaining that the attacker received only a three-day suspension. The school district says that the boys were friends and that the injury was an accident that occurred while they were roughhousing...