Archinect - News

London launches commission to review diversity of public realm landmarks, statues, and monuments

2020-06-09T13:02:00-04:00

London Mayor Sadiq Kahn has announced a new commission that will "review and improve diversity across London’s public realm to ensure the capital’s landmarks suitably reflect London’s achievements and diversity."

A press release announcing the creation of the commission states: "The Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm will focus on increasing representation among Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities, women, the LGBTQ+ community and disability groups."

NEW: Today we've unveiled a new commission to review and improve the diversity of London’s public landmarks.

We must commemorate the achievements and diversity of all in our city - and that includes questioning which legacies are being celebrated. pic.twitter.com/dro06UQB7Y
— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) June 9, 2020

The creation of the commission comes as protest movements around the world take aim at monuments celebrating the sordid legacies of slavery and colonialism. In the United States, protesters have taken down prom...

Watch an urban planner play SimCity with real world commentary

2018-08-17T14:45:00-04:00

In this extended short, City Beautiful takes on the old school classic SimCity from the perspective of a professional planner 20 years later. Along the way, City Beautiful provides pertinent observations of game play versus reality.

Urban Design Ph.D student Dave Amos circles back around to the game that sparked his passion as a kid playing computer games. An advocate for sustainable living and diverse cities, Amos plays through the old school SimCity game providing relevant insights learned over the years in his career.

Watch Daniel Libeskind speak of his love for NYC's diversity

2016-12-14T14:42:00-05:00

Daniel Libeskind loves the multi-faceted nature of New York City's inhabitants; the rich, the poor, the successful, and perhaps most amusingly, the failures who think they're successful. Although the architect doesn't really break any new conceptual ground in this short video from the Louisiana Channel, one can enjoy Libeskind's merry musings intercut with scenes of the metropolis and its diverse denizens, who form "a very complicated microcosm" of the world:

Nonscandinavia: an open-source, image collection for the rest of the world

2015-10-27T19:22:00-04:00

We believe that renderings reflect our aspirations as architects, and that our decisions about representation matter. Renderings should reflect the people in and around the site, and should project a future that values diversity and acceptance of all people. The goal of NONSCANDINAVIA is to give young architects and students access to a database of free, high-res, PNG images that reflect diversity in all its forms.

The world of architectural renders is a strange place. Here, the air is hazy yet skies are blue. Trees grow translucent and lawns are always green. Buildings are illuminated by perhaps two or three suns. Little girls roam cultural centers alone, clutching red balloons.

And just about everyone is a young, white, hipster from Northern Europe.

Thankfully, life in most cities isn't like this. And, while there's much to be said about the problematic overuse of architectural renders in general, it seems like they're here to stay (at least for the time being). A render can help sell a project, conveying a space much more eloquently to a lay person than a plan or axo – if not more factually. But that doesn't mean that these imaginary worlds have to be so homogenous.

Nonscandinavia, a project from the student group A-Frame at Columbia University GSAPP, comprises a open-source collection of hi-res PNG images, "dedicated to increasing diversity in architectural representation." As the name sugges...

How can diversity be quantified?

2015-08-12T13:40:00-04:00

At a macro level, Chicago is quite diverse. At a neighborhood level, it isn’t.

How can a city be both diverse and segregated? In Chicago's case, the city is home to every major racial/ethnic group, but these groups rarely tend to live together in the same neighborhoods. In fact, on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level, Chicago has one of the higher residential segregation rates of major metropolitan cities in the U.S. Even Los Angeles, long derided for being an archipelago of neighborhoods with no identifiable urban connective tissue or center, has a higher rate of residential integration than Chicago. Nate Silver's article asks us to question the metrics of diversity and segregation, especially in terms of urban planning: should those metrics be defined by where people live, where they work, or simply by the overarching boundaries of the city limits? Good question(s).

For more on this topic, do check out:

Surprise! Architecture is still among the whitest professions in America

Denver's Union Station is lacking diversity and local critic places the blame on the ...