Archinect - News

Harvard GSD "Future of the American City" initiative begins in Miami with $1 million support from Knight Foundation

2018-03-20T15:20:00-04:00

The "Future of the American City" initiative led by Harvard Graduate University School of Design will begin in Miami with $1 million in support from the Knight Foundation. The project will engage Miami residents in creating new approaches to address pressing urban issues including affordable housing, transportation, and sea level rise.

With this funding Harvard GSD will send urban researchers to Miami and Miami Beach to understand the city's strengths and challenges as part of a 3-year study towards building solutions. The initiative aims to help cities tackle sustainability and resiliency challenges beginning this spring.

Building on the school’s multi-disciplinary model, the effort will use architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design to come up with efficient solutions that take into account community needs. This research can also be shared with cities across the nation facing similar challenges.

Harvard GSD’s upcoming Miami research will be phase one in...

UVA School of Architecture envisions the NEXT CITIES INSTITUTE

2017-10-04T09:00:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by University of Virginia's School of Architecture

For students and faculty at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture the future of cities is now. The School’s Dean Ila Berman recently announced her intention to launch the NEXT CITIES INSTITUTE, an interdisciplinary design and research platform focused on the rapidly changing dynamics of global urban futures. With an aim to forecast and shape the vital urbanism of this century, the NEXT CITIES INSTITUTE will be a university-wide initiative, led by the School of Architecture and coalescing expertise throughout the University of Virginia, with partners in its Schools of Law, Leadership and Public Policy, Engineering, and Arts and Sciences. Berman states, “The NEXT CITIES INSTITUTE is predicated on our commitment to how design operates as a tool to effectively reshape the world. It recognizes that cities are our largest collective cultural artifacts, and their strategic re-conception is crucial...

Revisiting Sharon Zukin's "Loft Living" and NYC gentrification

2015-04-08T13:14:00-04:00

When Loft Living was first published, artists’ laments about real estate in New York City mirrored the concerns that have plagued residents for much of the last century. Namely, it’s tough to find a suitable and affordable place to live. Since the late ’80s, the tenor of that complaint has shifted from one of anxiety to one of fear...

Guernica magazine interviewed sociologist Sharon Zukin following the 25th-anniversary release of her 1989 landmark book "Loft Living" last year. Revisiting her timely book -- which focuses on NYC's SoHo neighborhood when upscale real estate properties took over industrial lofts and artists' studios -- Zukin discusses urban theorist Jane Jacobs, perpetually soaring rent rates, NYC's changing demographics and affordability, and the influential yet seemingly overlooked role that arts communities play in the complex American "pastime" that is gentrification.

Designing for the Night

2015-03-13T15:10:00-04:00

When I speak with a student about nightlife they have something different in mind than a 65-year old town planning manager. In the municipalities, finding contacts is difficult - often nobody feels responsible or capable of speaking. That should change.

There are sleepy cities and cities that never sleep. There are cities famed for their raucous nightlife, and others whose adolescent residents dream of leaving. According to the German urban scientist Jakob F. Schmid, interviewed for DW.DE, "Nightlife often defines the character of entire streets or districts." Schmid runs the "City After Eight - Management of the Urban Night Economy" project with Thomas Krüger, which is funded by the German government.

Looking at a variety of German cities including Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, the researchers mapped nightlife "with online recommendation platforms as the basis for the data." The hazy blue results indicate that various forms a city's nightlife may take. In the famed-party city Berlin, for example, hotspots are diffused throughout the expansive metropolis. In a traditional German city, on the other hand, the nightlife tends to be concentrated "on the city center, usually on the streets directly surrounding the center proper."

In the...