Archinect - News

Mass lockdowns seal off Chinese megacities as authorities attempt to guard against coronavirus

2020-02-17T10:00:00-05:00

Residential lockdowns of varying strictness — from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities. Many of these people live far from the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first reported and which the government sealed off last month.

The New York Times presents an eye-opening report detailing the varying degrees to which hundreds of millions of people in China are currently under some form of residential lockdown as the country attempts to stop the spread of the deadly SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

Chinese authorities have deployed a mix of high and low tech approaches for instituting this population-level quasi-quarantine state, a mix that includes forcing people to share geolocation data from their cellphones as they travel, having people scan QR codes at businesses they visit, and using hundreds of thousands of local inspectors to create a “supercharged version of a neighborhood watch.”

Trees can help megacities save $505 million per year, according to new research

2017-08-28T14:37:00-04:00

Megacities—those urban centers crammed with more than 10 million people—would be well served to double down on their arboreal assets, according to a new paper in the upcoming issue of the journal Ecological Modeling. A team of researchers led by Theodore Endreny of SUNY’s College of Environmental Studies and Forestry sought to quantify how leafy infrastructure pays dividends in 10 chock-full cities—and the extent to which those benefits could compound if those urban areas planted more trees.

You can check out the research paper here, as well as this 2015 report about the health benefits of more greenspace in urban centers.

Megacities and the Future of Warfare

2017-05-15T00:14:00-04:00

The conclusions of the SSG research are clear: megacities are unavoidable, they are potentially the most challenging environment the Army has ever faced, and the Army is unprepared to operate in them...by 2030 there will be 662 cities around the world with at least one million inhabitants (compared to 512 today) and 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. The potential for operations in dense urban areas will rise correspondingly, presenting a challenge the Army cannot ignore.

Back in February, Maj. John Spencer made the case for why It's Time to Create a Megacities Combat Unit. A few days ago, he fleshed out the concept, by detailing "What would such a unit look like?"

Interesting to note, that rather than the more au courant image of a generic middle eastern/Arab city, the Major used a photo of Ho Chi Minh/Saigon for the essay published in Feb. Though the more recent essay, did use a photo of the rooftops in Cairo. Future mil-tech referenced includes; hover bikes, enhanced counter–unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS) and soldiers skilled at Cyber Electromagnetic Activities (CEMA).

If you are interested in further U.S. Army Futures Ideation, check out SciTech Futures, where past exercises have explored everything from; Defending – and hacking – “Intelligent” buildings and Autonomous Infrastructure Destruction/Maintenance bots, to the simpler Crowd sourcing (of) innovation.

A vast urban pathology

2016-10-23T22:52:00-04:00

But it is traffic that has sealed Dhaka’s reputation among academics and development specialists as the great symbol of 21st-century urban dysfunction, the world’s most broken city. It has made Dhaka a surreal place, a town that is both frenetic and paralyzed, and has altered the rhythms of daily life for its 17.5 million-plus residents.

Jody Rosen writes about Dhaka's legendary traffic congestion.

For more check out; more incredible photos by Nicolas Chorier and get LIVE: Traffic updates for Dhaka city via The Daily Star. Or read about how the UNDP-designed Bus Finder Feature and Transport Pioneers program is trying to solve the problem.

The city must become adaptable

2016-05-30T06:39:00-04:00

For the moment, we remain largely wedded to superficial visual futures. The likelihood is that the prevailing chrome and chlorophyll vision of architects and urbanists will become as much an enticing, but outdated, fashion as the Raygun Gothic of The Jetsons or the cyberpunk of Blade Runner

Darran Anderson peers into the near future, at the intersection of climate change, technology, megacities and "survivability".

Bruce Sterling remarked "It's pretty good" and #ArchitectureFiction #BigCities #AfraidofSky #OldPeople