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over the next half-century these coastal megacities may grow “too big to flood.” But flood they will unless they dramatically revise their growth strategies and undertake major infrastructure projects — Yale Environment 360
Bruce Stutz explores how as economic activity and populations continue to expand in coastal urban areas, particularly in Asia, hundreds of trillions of dollars of infrastructure, industrial and office buildings, and homes are increasingly at risk from intensifying storms and rising sea... View full entry
D’Hooghe, a Belgian-born architect and director of the Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, cares deeply about urban form and the large-scale issues cities face in achieving more efficient energy use, better transportation and less congestion. One of his main concerns is better integrating suburbs with the larger metropolitan areas in which they exist. — web.mit.edu
Technology being used in urban communities around the world hints at how we may live in the cities of the future — BBC News
Jane Wakefield reviews recent efforts by large technology firms such as IBM and Cisco, as well as more grass root projects, to harness the power of technology to build the "cities of the future now". The list of projects includes Songdo in South Korea, Masdar in Abu... View full entry
Musician, DJ, photographer and architecture blogger Moby riffs on LA architecture in this video about the Getty-led initiative Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. — pacificstandardtimepresents.org
"As the city becomes more technological, architecture will become more essential. Technologies are growing as part of the functioning of cities, and as a result, the design of the urban environment will take on central importance. But this shift won’t occur as we might think.&rdquo... View full entry
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) today issued a report: Local Leaders: Healthier Communities Through Design that provides a roadmap for towns and cities looking to help their populations stay healthy by employing design techniques that encourage residents to increase their physical activity. — aia.org
The report, which was released today at Governing Magazine’s “Summit on Healthy Living,” demonstrates how active lifestyles aided by positive design choices lead to a healthier population. Individuals who live in livable, mixed use communities, with options for transit - weigh... View full entry
To survive, a city or a region has to make money; it has to export more than it imports, in dollar terms. Cities that decline are on the losing side of this equation. So if you care about cities, which I do, it leads you to think about how they function as economic entities. It leads you to think about economics. I think this is what happened to Jane Jacobs, and why she ended up writing several books about economics after her seminal 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. — theatlanticcities.com
Grab a helmet and check out these 15 cities where drivers use all five fingers when they wave at you. — cnn.com
Top cities include Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Boulder, Chicago, Davis, Ottawa, Portland, San Francisco, Beijing, Cape Town, Bogota and Perth. View full entry
The Future of Architecture, an overnight exhibition led by the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA), looks into the city’s future and explores different architectural visions as to how Toronto may evolve and transform in the coming years. — designbuildsource.ca
A science project of unprecedented scale begins this month in the New Mexico desert, as a technology firm breaks ground for a model metropolis. Washington-based Pegasus Global Holdings will build a town replete with schools, parks and an airport.
But the intended residents are not people, but robots.
— forumforthefuture.org
Take Korea's Incheon International, for example. Built on top of a landfill 40 miles outside of Seoul, it features its own skating rink, cultural museum, and an assortment of other lavish amenities — all worthy investments for an airport that transported 34 million passengers and 2.5 million tons of cargo last year. — artinfo.com
You'll also notice a bit of color coding on the maps. Apparently, Fischer was able to guess that the picture taker's mode of transportation--presumably using the time stamps and distance traveled between a user's pictures. He then created a color code: Black is walking (less than 7mph), Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph), Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph); Green is freeways or rapid transit. — fastcompany.com
we want to experiment in making better public spaces. Cities are built in a very formal and classist fashion, which is at odds with the good that rapid production and public participation can do for urban development. — Huffington Post
Tidda Tippapart recently talked to Aurash Khawarzad ( founder of Change Administration + co-founder of the Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary collective DoTank) about the challenge of creating the post-Hipster city, gentrification, and what it means to (re)build New York City... View full entry
Urban planning has focused on identifying many important questions about the formation and functioning of our cities. However, there is a lack of understanding about the spatial patterns related to material and energy use in cities. This work attempts to address this knowledge gap. — urbmet.org
urbmet.org is a web-map that illustrates data on material and energy use in cities. The goal is to provide an intuitive way of understanding this complex problem using an interactive interface. We have analyzed 42 cities and estimated material and energy intensities. To make this work as useful... View full entry
Economist Paul Romer believes he can create and launch a new city in much the same way tech companies create and launch startups. Looking to Hong Kong and China’s Shenzen for inspiration, Romer’s theory is that the rules and organizational structures of prosperous nations can be grafted onto poorer nations, or areas within those nations, to become highly functioning states-within-a-state. Though so far untested, the theory has gotten the attention of multinational companies... — americancity.org