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In a world where we are increasingly given the chance to customise our output, how do you orchestrate a planet where a Gangnam ringtone collides with the sound of a 1970s camera shutter from a smartphone, in a tube station resonating with Vivaldi to deter loitering, while the guy next to you shout-announces to some remotely interested party that he is "About to get on the tube! I said The! Tube! ... "? What is the future sound of cities? — theguardian.com
This is not how most people think of Mr. Bloomberg, who recently stepped down after 12 years as mayor and who is the city’s richest resident. Under his leadership, New York became a land of wealth and plenty, at least for some – in Midtown Manhattan, glassy new high-rises contain the third homes of Russian billionaires; downtown, tourists order $38 steak frites at Balthazar and walk the High Line, an innovative park built with donations from the rich. — theglobeandmail.com
The lean urbanism concept, he says, is like a software patch, or a workaround – ultimately a guide or a tip sheet to navigate the complicated, and often very expensive, maze of working in the built environment in the U.S. “It’s about knowing that with certain building types, under a certain threshold, you don’t need an elevator. Or a sprinkler system. A lot of developers know that, and we want to daylight that. We want to present that thematically.” — theatlanticcities.com
Hope for Detroit would seem far-fetched if you had been on the "pornography of ruins" tour I have been going on for years, led by various residents over the years. But, it turns out that those tours were provided by folk who had lost their beloved city. I recently began to hang around with a younger crowd: Mark Nickita, for example, an architect and a maniacal optimist, and a serial small-scale entrepreneur who runs Archive DS, an architecture and urban design firm in downtown Detroit... — features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com
Atterwasch is tiny, its single street lined with sturdy brick and stone houses. The village has a single church whose bells peal out at noon each day, a small volunteer fire department, and a cemetery with a special section devoted to German soldiers who died nearby in the closing months of WWII.
Atterwasch may soon be gone.
Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, hopes to relocate the village and its residents in order to strip-mine the ground underneath for lignite, or "brown coal."
— news.nationalgeographic.com
The low hipster homeownership rate of the past five years translates into a market of potentially millions of first-time homebuyers looking to find a home that matches their budget and fits into their hipster lifestyle. Real estate investors who want to tap into that trend should start with location: finding homes in communities with a heavy hipster demographic, and that are affordable for that demographic. — RealtyTrac
Daren Blomquist, RealtyTrac Vice President examines the top 20 zipcodes for flipping homes to hipsters.h/t AlJavieera Sueños View full entry
The Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning received a $1.3m grant Monday from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The gift will fund architecture and humanities research on metropolitan issues in cities like Detroit, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro for the next four-and-half years. The Mellon Foundation delivered the “Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities” grant to the University, which supports scholarship and higher education at the intersection of architecture and the humanities. — record.umich.edu
New York - and San Francisco, London, Paris and other cities where cost of living has skyrocketed - are no longer places where you go to be someone. They are places you live when you are born having arrived. They are, as journalist Simon Kuper puts it, "the vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself". — aljazeera.com
“What hides behind the literary aspect of this report are deep reflections on the lessons, errors, approaches and paths of China’s previous urbanizations efforts,” concluded an editorial in the newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily. The state-controlled People’s Daily gushed: “If we want high rises, we even more need the fresh mountain waters. Only by seeing the past can we grasp the future.” — qz.com
Called Lumiere, it's a four-day festival expected to attract tens of thousands of spectators to see the city's historic cathedrals, walls, bridges and squares illuminated by splashes of light. Projects range from LED and neon sculptures to large-scale projections by leading artists and lighting designers from Ireland and beyond. — cnn.com
As part of our quest to find out what makes cities smart, we throw a spotlight on infrastructure: How can information technology and urban planning help to make us more flexible and mobile? At the same time, mobility is just one aspect of a wide spectrum of complex networks that govern life in an urban context. In view of limited resources and changing climate, another factor seems even more pressing: energy consumption and conservation. — betterymagazine.com
To its critics—and even many of its fans—“culture” and “Dubai” barely belong in the same sentence. The city is perhaps the world’s most extreme example of a business-first, built-from-the-sand boomtown. But Shoufani and her fellow Poeticians have become a prime exhibit in a debate that has broken out with renewed vigor in the Arab world and among urban theorists worldwide... — bostonglobe.com
Indeed, one of the main criticisms of such design is that it aims to exclude already marginalised populations such as youths or the homeless...Preventing rough sleeping is a recurring theme. — BBC Future
Frank Swain discovers the "unpleasant designs", of modern cities. He talks with Selena Savic, a PhD student at the Ecole Polytechnique Federerale de Lausanne in Switzerland, who co-authored a book on the subject this year. h/t Bruce Sterling View full entry
The Freedom Ship would be home to 50,000 people and have its own airport, casinos and shopping centers. The Florida-based company behind the city of the sea says it is hopeful it can raise the $1 billion needed to begin construction on the massive vessel. — nydailynews.com
For other cities, order comes easily. Washington, D.C. was built all at once on the Potomac River to the specifications of the 1791 L’Enfant Plan; a half-century later, Paris was gutted and remade, top to bottom, per Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s instructions. Things in Toronto have always been a little less tidy—instead, we’ve got “messy urbanism,” as American urban planner James Rojas has called in. — thegridto.com
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