Archinect - News

The Death of a Once Great City: The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence

2018-07-03T13:50:00-04:00

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring.

The story keeps going. "This is not some new phenomenon but a cancer that’s been metastasizing on the city for decades now. And what’s happening to New York now—what’s already happened to most of Manhattan, its core—is happening in every affluent American city. San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its remarkable diversity; they swarm in and out of the metropolis in specially chartered buses to work in Silicon Valley, using the city itself as a gigantic bed-and-breakfast. Boston, which used to be a city of a thousand nooks and crannies, back-alley restaurants and shops, dive bars and ice cream parlors hidden under its elevated, is now one long, monotonous wall of modern skyscraper. In Washington, an army of cranes has transformed the city in recent years, smoothing out all that was real and organic into a town of mausoleums for the Trump crowd to revel in."

Spirit of apartheid still alive in the architecture of South Africa's gated communities

2018-01-15T15:35:00-05:00

The prevalence of gated communities may also reveal what South Africans think constitutes middle class life. As it did under apartheid, it often means avoiding the poor unless they are servants, nannies or gardeners. Instead of creating racial segregation, gated communities often broaden the economic gap in South Africa and restricts development to privatized progress.

"As state institutions flounder, estate living has gone on to offer attached private schools and clinics," Lynsey Chutel writes for Quartz Africa. "Privatized amenities in gated communities mean citizens don’t have to hold the city accountable, which is a shame because these are the citizens who often have the power to pressure the city to do better."

Enclosed Paradise: Istanbul’s Microcities as Megaprojects

2016-06-06T17:41:00-04:00

The Turkish word for Gated Community is site, from the French cité, and they generally resemble the French highrises of the same name, rather than American tract housing. Towers and slabs stand shoulder to shoulder, dancing in a circle around the gardens they surround.

How to Make an Enclosed Paradise:

Raze a blighted industrial site or neighborhood close to the city center, preferably along a new highway or metro line.
Build an access road around the perimeter. Like a castle moat, this isolates your project from context and gives distance for height setbacks.
Fill the offset parcel with a base. This plinth elevates the garden while providing parking underneath.
Arrange towers and blocks along the borders of the site, maximizing the area of the captured central garden.
Stand out from your neighbors with shiny materials.
Market the project with a name that sounds like a car, i.e. ‘Innovia’, or ‘Quasar’.

CNU 20 leader Buzz Anxiety and Isolation: How Gated Communities Enable Vigilantes

2012-03-23T11:43:00-04:00

Though the setting of the [Trayvon Martin] tragedy may not have much bearing on the criminal investigation, the issue of place is something that should not evade public scrutiny. Martin was deemed “suspicious” while walking in a gated community.