Shopping Malls as Climate Bunkers?

Shopping Mall. Photo by Dmitriy Zarivniy on Unsplash

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. Each week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

States advance single stair legislation: Lawmakers in states across the country are looking for ways to tackle the affordability crisis and housing shortage. One reform is to allow small and medium sized buildings to have a single stairway rather than two. Two stairway requirements are common across the country and required by many fire codes but recent research has found that modern single stair buildings are just as safe as others and much more cost effective to build. (Chase Hatchett | Pew Research Center)

Tram-trains: In cities around the world, train tracks go to the peripheral places that many people live but when they get to the city center they abruptly end. One solution that’s been used in smaller cities in Europe, like Karlsruhe Germany, is building a through running line that doesn’t require a lot of space for turnarounds. Running like commuter rail on the edges and trams in the center has benefitted smaller cities that don’t have legacy networks or big budgets to build a metro. (Benedict Springbett | Works in Progress)

Rainbow fights in Texas: As Texas officials’ imposed deadline for pulling up rainbow crosswalks looms, some cities such as San Antonio are gearing up for a legal fight to keep them that they believe they will win. In Houston, artists are using the torn up sidewalks as motivation to decorate the areas surrounding the intersections with rainbows, showing that the spirit of the missing crosswalks still exist. (Ayden Runnels | Texas Tribune | Gwen Howerton | Chron.com)

Mall as a climate bunker: Malls, long derided as symbols of suburban decline, are emerging as overlooked climate infrastructure, offering cooled, accessible, self-contained shelter during extreme weather such as heat waves and wildfire smoke. They provide a unique space for interaction that is uniquely human and promote trying new things while also equipped with state of the art ventilation equipment. (Elizabeth B. Dyer | NextCity)

A Halloween transit miracle: On Halloween, the Illinois legislature sent a transportation reform and funding bill to Governor Pritzker‘s desk that looks likely to be signed. The bill included funding for transit through a quarter cent sales tax in Northern Illinois that would need a vote as well as a transfer of two types of fuel taxes. A new transit authority and board was also created, the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA) that would support fare and service integration efforts across all agencies. (Austin Busch | Streetsblog Chicago)

Quote of the Week

You cannot criticize the behavior of people who died while trying to save their car from a garage without understanding that those people saw their car as a crucial element in their daily life. If we build back with the same territorial model and the same mobility model, which is a car-centric one, we can find ourselves again in similarly dangerous situations.

–Josep Vicent Boira Maiques, a human geography professor at the University of Valencia, discussing in Climate Home News the connections between flood safety and transportation issues in Valencia

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re back live for another show from Manny’s in the Mission featuring Streetsblog SF editor Roger Rudick interviewing California High Speed Rail Authority CEO Ian Choudri.

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