Archinect - News

Is "Burning Man urbanization" a useful planning model?

2019-09-09T20:00:00-04:00

Most of the structure that has been added since [Burning Man's 1996 revival] feels invisible to the people who come: the streets that are surveyed to be exactly 40 feet wide, the plazas that steer people together without crowding them, the 430 fire extinguishers around town, each tracked by its own QR code. The goal now, one planner explained to Mr. Romer, is to make Black Rock City just safe enough that people can joke about dying without actually dying.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer and The New York Times writer Emily Badger explore the urban economics of Burning Man's Black Rock City while envisioning the potential relevance of the instant-city planning model amid massive, worldwide urbanization.

A cardboard and carbon-emission economy: the long-term effects of our desire for instant gratification

2016-02-16T14:00:00-05:00

A handful of scientists and policy makers are...grappling with the long-term environmental effect of an economy that runs increasingly on gotta-have-it-now gratification [...] The environmental cost can include the additional cardboard — 35.4 million tons of containerboard were produced in 2014 in the United States, with e-commerce companies among the fastest-growing users — and the emissions from increasingly personalized freight services.

As internet retailers compete to provide as-close-to-instant services to satiate our increasing desire for rapid gratification, our collective ecological footprint grows. The problem isn't just the cardboard boxes piling up on your doorstep, but also the carbon emissions required to get that Postmates or Amazon Prime delivery into your hands.

And according to experts (or at least those profiled by the Times), the responsibility lies equally with consumers as it does with the companies providing the services. In short, we need to "slow down consumption," states Robert Reed, spokesman for Recology, the main recycling processor in San Francisco.

For more on the ecological impact of our consumptive patterns, take a look at these links:

Lazika, from swamp to "Instant City"!

2012-04-22T22:27:00-04:00

The breakthrough, he said, would be a brand-new city and maritime port on the coast, 18 miles away — an idea now common in China...“This idea came to us — why can’t we do that in Georgia?” he said. “We looked out and we saw there is free space on the Black Sea coast.”

Ellen Barry covers Georgian plans for a new city of half a million people, on a stretch of marshy land near the Black Sea. The first building, a futuristic Public Service Hall for the new city has already begun construction. However, a host of practical considerations from financing, to foundation requirements and future population are yet to be ironed out.