Pelican Harbor Seabird Station: This non-profit in Miami cares for injured brown pelicans. They work to rehabilitate brown pelicans and return them to their natural wildlife habitat. They offer both guided and self-guided tours of the rehabilitation facility.
Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex: This Florida complex offers visitors the opportunity to stand beside actual rockets, hear presentations from former astronauts, and take in an exhibit of robot space probes, among many other attractions. The Center hosts twice yearly homeschool days featuring special programming and even more hands-on exploration. The visitor complex housing the retired shuttle Atlantis is expected to open at the end of June 2013.
The integration of public art with daily activities at the campus has already commenced and is promoting a stimulating and creative place. Workshops and student assignments have moved out of the classroom and into the public space, making it more activated, engaging, and safe . New buildings have been planned, ensuring the preservation of the existing pine plantation and other trees. The retention of local flora will preserve the genius loci. A living stream connected to the nearby Canning River is proposed as an urban amenity and a stormwater treatment facility.
The Greater Curtin Master Plan incorporates various features appreciated by current campus users and demonstrates effective place making. Being a university of technology, Curtin needs to ensure that the digital tools of communication, information delivery, maintenance, and systems efficiency are developed in an integrated manner for the development of a connected environment at all levels of transport, place, and people.
Florida Map Photo Gallery
Promoted by the Garden City movement and a hike in consumerism, the dense, socially heterogeneous consumption space of city centers has been replaced by the suburbs’ clean, sprawling, socially and visually homogeneous shopping centers, known as galleria or malls. The malls-or big boxes-generated myriad problems. How can these big boxes be broken?
The Urban Land Institute at Washington, D.C. reconceptualizes these areas around changes that have happened in shopping preferences, family work patterns, traffic congestion, and so on. Currently, there is a process of reversal towards dense, mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented street retail. Examples such as the Washington Center in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Bella Terra in Huntington Beach, California, create hybrid indoor-outdoor spaces, engendering a deeper sense of connection between customers, their community, culture, climate, and daily lives.
The neighborhood of Crossings around San Antonio transit station in Mountain View, California, has replaced a failed strip mall occupying 18 acres of land with residential and commercial projects concentrated along the commuter rail line. To address diminishing business, the development policy for the neighborhood included improved accessibility, expansion of community space, and enhanced livability with a mix of uses.
Figure 4.14 Location of the Crossings neighborhood in San Antonio Transit Center change area-a station node on the Bus Transit and Caltrain corridors
