Tag Archives: London

National Links: Recycling a Building; Self-Driving’s Eternal Adolescence

The Overhead Wire’s weekly collection of national links compiles news about urban issues around the country and the world. This week: parking spots versus useful space in Toronto, the glacial progression of self-driving car tech, and more on Texas’ highway battles.

National Links: Housing from California to Berlin

Every day at The Overhead Wire, we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the D.C. region. […]

Streets Without Trees are Dangerous

With more cities developing Vision Zero initiatives to eliminate road traffic fatalities, more people are seeing the way streets that are designed as a life-and-death issue. That entails seeing things that used to look fairly benign – a 13′ lane width, for example – as hazardous. We should start seeing the absence of mature street […]

Walk-Up Windows and Great Urban Places

If you can order a coffee from a window while standing on a sidewalk, you just might be in a great urban place. On a recent trip to Santiago, Chile, I walked out of our AirBnB and just up the sidewalk was a coffee shop with a window facing the sidewalk. The street happened to […]

Pseudo-Public Spaces

Recently, The Guardian made waves with a story on the spread of “pseudo-public spaces” in London. Pseudo-public spaces appear to be typical public spaces such as parks and plazas, but are privately owned and subject to (often secret) rules that are enforced by private security. Some of London’s most prominent landmarks are surrounded by corporate-owned plazas […]

Drinking My Way Around England

English pubs are among the premier “third places” in the world. Despite rumors of their death, they remain vital to the community and I’m impressed by how well they fit in to the urban (and rural) fabric. The English pub is a great place to gather with friends or strangers. They are also quite amenable […]

Walking in Hackney

Every once in a while I discover a truly wonderful, utterly walkable neighborhood. Sometimes it requires traveling 4,000 miles to find it. On my recent trip to London I stayed in a neighborhood in the borough of Hackney, just north and east of the City. I checked in to my Air B&B and set off […]