February 2015

USP514: Re-thinking Zoning Codes

Hello Urban Design team! I want you to think about what sorts of regulations we want to recommend for this new North Bayshore community. Mountain View’s General Plan 2030 and North Bayshore Precise Plan are great models of clear thinking and writing. But these are general policy documents. They stand in sharp contrast to the […]

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Refining the task for USP514

Dear students, I have been mulling over how to clarify the tasks for the rest of the semester. The fact the Mountain View is seriously considering a sustainably-based transformation is very exciting. But for the remaining ten weeks, I need to set you some realistic parameters and then check with you about which parts to

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USP514: Basic GIS

Last week I briefly showed you what a first session in Quantum GIS looks like. Now I have revised the data to make it a little easier to start with. To begin, get to a place with a fast internet connection. Then download this 53-megabyte MV_GIS zipped archive. This time, I bundled all the shapefiles

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USP514: Thinking about density

In our studio we will study how to add more housing to Silicon Valley communities by evaluating the Shoreline West neighborhood in Mountain View. This will mean an overall increase in density. On the ground it will also mean more variation in density, including more open-space in some areas, as well as mixed land-uses. Here

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USP514: Relevant issues

Throughout the semester we will find a slew of articles related to sustainable urban development. Here are a few. 1. The Food Justice discussion on Philosophy Talk, Feb 3, 2015. 2. “America’s Infrastructure Is Slowly Falling Apart.” Feb 2, 2015, Vice. We have enjoyed two generations as a “developed” country. But most of our hard

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USP514: Mountain View links

Hey class! I’m still debating about whether to post this information as blog postings or as fixed web-pages. In any case, with the USP514 class number in the title, you should be able to find pages like this again easily. On this page: links to some of the relevant parts of Mountain View’s own city

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