All articles by barbara speed
barbara speed
Some engineers simulated an earthquake by blowing up a New Zealand suburb
Last October, Martin Howman, a 70-year-old resident of Avondale, New Zealand, pressed a button, and detonated 400kg of gelignite under…
Five more things we learnt from the infrastructure plan for London
A couple of weeks back, the Greater London Authority released the excitingly-named London Infrastructure Plan 2050: a suite of documents…
São Paulo plans women-only metro carriages
It hasn’t been a great year for women on Brazil’s public transport networks. Since the beginning of 2014, 33 men…
Central London properties, minus the sky-high rents. But what’s the catch?
“Not many people can afford to live in a 10,000 square foot property in the heart of London like Robin…
The London development without a poor door
Apartment blocks which use “poor doors” to segregate tenants based on their wealth have been hitting the headlines recently on…
London is the least happy major city in the UK
Everyone knows Londoners are grumpy. They file in and out of their fancy underground network with faces of thunder, avoiding…
New York apartment blocks are using “poor doors”
The website for One Riverside Park, a new high-rise in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, calls it “New York’s most distinguished…
A new site lets you help pay Detroit residents’ water bills
It’s now almost a year since Detroit became the largest US city ever to file for bankruptcy. One stubbornly persistent…
“Urban physicists” are claiming that cities are like molecules
Franz-Josef Ulm, an engineering professor at MIT, was looking at an aerial photo of a city with a colleague, trying…
Should mapping apps take us the scenic route?
Walking in cities can be a grim experience. Pavements along what are, essentially, motorways; grey concrete buildings looming over ominous…