Archinect - News

Mexico City’s fraught water crisis could prove decisive in the upcoming national elections

2024-05-13T17:36:00-04:00

It’s a crisis a decade in the making and, without dramatic fixes, experts say the city could be approaching “Day Zero” — when a city simply runs out of water — around June. That would leave up to 20 million people in and around the capital facing a summer without running water. June also happens to be the month when Mexico will choose its next president.

'Day Zero' (or the day water taps run dry) could be looming for June in the Mexican capital and home of over 9 million people just within the city proper. Its known air quality issues have improved under Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum’s green policy agenda, helping her meet some claims produced by rival Xochitl Galvez and her head environmental policy advisor Rodolfo Lacy Tamayo, a former UN special climate envoy who promises a "civil rebellion" should the looming threshold be crossed.

"Even if officials pumped desalinated water from the Gulf of Mexico at great expense and environmental detriment," News Lines tells us, "it wouldn’t be enough if 40% continues to go missing. And it is true that the water which would have been saved by Sheinbaum’s promise to find and fix the city’s leaks would soothe the current crisis. Whether that would ever have been possible is another question, but it would not future-proof a system that is gradually drying."

PAO creates Beijing public restroom from single meandering wall

2023-06-30T11:19:00-04:00

People’s Architecture Office (PAO) has completed a public restroom in Beijing shaped by a single meandering wall. Named Amoeba Public Restroom, the project is located in Manshan Park, a popular destination in Mentougou, Beijing known for its markets, exhibitions, and music performances.

Image credit: People's Architecture Office

“Amoeba Public Restroom is an all-gender facility that is designed to [be] welcoming for all people,” the team explains. “The design features a single meandering wall, which creates distinct individual stalls while maintaining an open and interconnected interior. Conical spaces form light wells that draw natural light into each stall. The resulting spaces bring a sacred beauty to the most profane of activities.”

Image credit: People's Architecture Office

Each stall within the scheme has a unique shape and size. Stall doors do not seal above or below to create a continuity of sp...

New York City begins test pilot for parkbound modular public restrooms

2023-03-01T17:56:00-05:00

Nearly four years after floating the possibility, the city Department of Parks and Recreation is preparing for a trial run of prefabricated, kiosk-like bathrooms that cost a fraction of the multimillion-dollar price tag for building traditional restrooms. The modular bathrooms resemble curved newspaper kiosks, with slatted sides that are intended to provide needed privacy, but also enough sightlines to dissuade illicit behavior.

The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation says there will be one test toilet for each borough at a cost of $185,000 each. Five other “comfort stations” are also currently in the department’s construction pipeline. According to them, the new pilot is meant to “determine the feasibility of using this model in the future as an economical solution to building bathrooms in parks.”

The modular Portland Loo designs are a bit cheaper than the twenty JC Decaux-made facilities the city struggled to implement after signing a more expensive deal under the Bloomberg administration in 2006. Their presence, at a time when new chief public realm officer Ya-Ting Liu says she will move to make open streets and outdoor dining more permanent fixtures, is important also to the nearly 45,000 homeless people who live in the city.

If installed en masse, they'll join the new inventory of 5G towers cropping up around the city as the latest hallmarks of a changing streetscape remade by progressive d...

New Yorkers can’t wait any longer for the installation of long-promised public toilets

2022-03-31T16:42:00-04:00

As public bathrooms continue to be one of the rarest commodities in the city, the Adams administration has not provided a timeline or any details for the installation of 15 automatic sidewalk toilets unused for more than a decade. But only five of the toilets have been installed and the city has struggled to find suitable new spots. For years, the others remained mothballed in a Queens warehouse but city officials declined to detail where they are currently located.

The toilets are a holdover of the Bloomberg administration, which signed a franchising agreement with Cemusa (later JC Decaux) in 2006 that was supposed to provide 20 such facilities at a cost of around $500,000 apiece. Recently, the city declared it will not force dining establishments to offer their restrooms to the public after an update to pertaining sections of its building code.

The issue has as much to do with providing what many recognize to be vital pieces of public infrastructure as it does with serving the city’s roughly 45,000-strong homeless population, which has been the target of recent Adams administration efforts to restore a sense of safety in the wake of an alarming two-year spike in crime. Critics, for their part, see it as part of a larger effort to “criminalize” homelessness, charging that the lack of facilities denies everyone a “basic human need.”

“It is not only a sanitation issue but also a public safety and civil rights issue,” Councilmember Sandy Nurse ...

Should New York's subway rails be paved over for driverless cars?

2018-07-24T19:03:00-04:00

Visions of the future [autonomous vehicles] will bring have already crept into City Council meetings, political campaigns, state legislation and decisions about what cities should build today. That unnerves some transportation planners and transit advocates, who fear unrealistic hopes for driverless cars — and how soon they’ll get here — could lead cities to mortgage the present for something better they haven’t seen.

With new technologies emerging, cities are debating the most effective transportation systems to fund. Caught in the midst of this struggle is the proposition of paving over the New York subway in order to create an underground highway for autonomous vehicles. Those championing the idea believe this system would move the most people using the least amount of space, when theoretically services like Lyft and Uber no longer have to pay drivers.

Many, however, believe this is an unrealistic faith in new technology to solve all of our cities transportation problems. If everyone uses their own private, self-driving car this could create enormous amounts of traffic. Not to mention the belief that there is something inherently better about everyone traveling together on public transit rather than in their own isolated vehicles. Should cities invest in these new transit models replacing public infrastructure with private systems? Or hold out for unknown future technologies?

Dear Elon Musk: keep your hands off our public infrastructure!

2017-12-28T16:18:00-05:00

Recently, Elon Musk shared his perceptions during a tech industry conference that public transit is both inconvenient and dangerous. “It’s a pain in the ass,” he said. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”

Elon Musk has had his sights set on various ways of 'disrupting' America's public transportation system for some time now. Most notably, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has been experimenting with the idea of creating underground tunnels for a Hyperloop system that he swears cities are giving the go ahead on despite some public skepticism.

However, after recent comments were made, many of those who have spent years working on public transport are criticizing Musk for stepping out of his lane. As an extremely wealthy person who keeps expressing a strong distaste for the public, Musk may not be the best person to tackle public infrastructure projects that millions of those less fortunate depend on.

Advisory Panel issues report on improving JFK

2017-01-04T18:21:00-05:00

“Despite its importance to the region, JFK is not the airport passengers expect when arriving in one of the greatest cities in the world,” states the Airport Advisory Panel in their new report to the Governor. That’s a bit of an understatement. As many a traveller knows, JFK isn’t in the best shape. Hence the need for the report, which notes the costs of failing to act. By the mid-2020s, three million more passengers will head into JFK than its facilities can handle. In monetary terms, that amounts to about $140 million in annual wages, $400 million in annual sales, and 2,500 jobs—per each million not accommodated.

So the Panel put together a set of recommendations including:

Modernizing the airport’s terminals, starting with the oldest, and planning all future redevelopment around connections between terminals. The Panel recommends working together with private operators to fund the renovations.
Improving the airport’s roadways and expanding parking.
Expanding taxiways to improve air...