Ridescout, the “Kayak of ground transportation” that aggregates over 300 rideshare services, announced today that it will integrate carpooling into its app. This move comes on the heels of recent announcements from Uber and Lyft, which on the same day earlier this month revealed they would gradually begin to allow their users to carpool. While ridesharing has up to this point been a mostly single-user service, Ridescout’s announcement reinforces a general trend toward multi-user integration. — urbanful.org
City of Darkness Revisited is a photo book and cultural history of Kowloon Walled City, a largely ungoverned, densely populated enclave within Hong Kong.[...]
It was like nothing else in Hong Kong: a mass of interconnected 12- and 14-story buildings forming a single huge structure, its facade glowing from the light of hundreds of apartments and shops. Clearly there was no administrative oversight. It was too dense, too ad-hoc, too unrestrained. All this was clear before even entering the place.
— Kickstarter
A recent Kickstarter campaign helped photographers Greg Girard and Ian Lambot fund and complete the new edition of their book, City of Darkness Revisited, about life in Hong Kong's legendary Kowloon Walled City. View full entry
Andraos, an associate professor of architecture, planning and preservation at GSAPP since 2011 and a principal at WORKac., will succeed Mark Wigley, who announced he would retire at the end of the 2013-2014 academic year [...]
“Columbia is already a leader in addressing the challenges of high-speed urbanization around the globe and I believe it can lead in recasting architecture in dialogue with our urban societies and the natural environment,” Andraos said in the release.
— columbiaspectator.com
Just shy of the new academic year, Columbia's GSAPP has appointed Amale Andraos to succeed Mark Wigley as Dean, effective this fall. Andraos is a firm presence in New York architecture and beyond, as principal of WORKac alongside her husband, Dan Wood (both previously profiled in our UpStarts... View full entry
"Amale Andraos, principal of New York–based architecture firm WORKac, has been named dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), succeeding Mark Wigley. Currently on faculty at GSAPP, she has also taught at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the American University in Beirut." — Architect's Newspaper
Oakland has earthquakes, droughts and a host of other resilience problems to tackle. Now it has a Chief Resilience Officer to lead the charge.
Today, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and Michael Berkowitz, president of The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, will jointly announce that Victoria Salinas has been tapped as the city’s first Chief Resilience Officer, a position being created in other cities across the world, as well.
— nextcity.org
Related: Resilience on the fly: Christchurch’s SCIRT offers a model for rebuilding after a disaster View full entry
Friday, August 8:Guggenheim Bullies Journalist: Molly Crabapple reports for Vice on inhumane immigrant labor conditions on Saadiyat island in the UAE, where a new arm of the Guggenheim (and Louvre, and NYU) is being built. The Guggenheim holds its cards close and skirts responsibility when... View full entry
That calamity hit Christchurch, New Zealand, in a series of earthquakes that devastated the city in 2010 and 2011.
Most people here don’t see the extent of repair work going on underground. [...]Yet the organization created to manage Christchurch’s infrastructure rebuild has a vital role, and it’s become something of a global model for how to put the guts of a city back together again quickly and efficiently after a disaster.
— citiscope.org
Hanoi has faced the same population pressures as other Asian cities. But thanks to vague and informal conventions, the state has been able to avoid extreme levels of disservice, even to the most impoverished new urban areas. And the construction of homes themselves has remained at least loosely connected to the regulations of the more formal suburbs. Together these factors have prevented the formation of slums as they are typically defined. But how has this come about? — theguardian.com
Readers respond to a letter by Peggy Deamer, an architect, calling for less arrogance and more collaboration in architecture. [...]
It is not only the public that is fed up with this idea of The Architect, but also the profession itself. Having watched ourselves increasingly backed into the corner of aesthetic elitism, we are now more interested in models of practice that do away with the egos and the glamorous buildings they are associated with.
— nytimes.com
Previously:NY Times Enters the "Starchitect" DebateInvitation to a Dialogue: Less Ego in Architects View full entry
While most attention falls on the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, the city itself hosts an uncertain number of simultaneous, satellite events, operating somewhat under the public's radar but still orbiting around the Biennale's curatorial center. There are the Biennale-recognized roster... View full entry
“People are more comfortable...with something that feels authentic." - Toby Moskovits, president of Heritage Equity Partners — NYT
Earlier this summer, C. J. Hughes took note of a trend in NYC real-estate, the conversion of unusual buildings into apartments and condos. But, it isn't only your typical post-industrial loft, the conversions include; phone company buildings (like 140 West Street designed by Ralph Walker, a... View full entry
When somebody comes to make your city smart, he never comes by himself...billions in growth doesn't come without standards and industry alliances. I have never seen so many standards and industry alliances as I am seeing in 'Smart Cities' and 'Internet of Things', and foundations too. — YouTube
Bruce Sterling recently spoke at FAB10Barcelona.Also check out his Flickr set View full entry
SketchFactor ... is a Manhattan-based navigation app that crowdsources user experiences along with publicly available data to rate the relative "sketchiness" of certain areas in major cities. [...]
The founders are also bracing for potential complications from an app that asks anonymous users to judge a neighborhood's sketchiness. After all, fear can be subjective. And the site could be vulnerable to criticisms regarding the degree to which race is used to profile a neighborhood.
— crainsnewyork.com
Downey needed something tactile to work with, and he found it in a kids' toy. Spread out before him on the table are stacks of embossed plans ... marked up with brightly colored wax sticks. [...]
The sticks warm to the touch and bend easily; they can make precise angles, and—crucially for Downey—their tackiness makes them stick to paper. "Once I realized that, I thought, 'Oh, I could use that to draw on top of an embossed drawing.'" Suddenly, he had a way not just to read, but to make.
— sf.curbed.com
Previously, the LA Times profiled Downey and his firm: Blind architect sports an upbeat vision View full entry
But the intricate fantasy environments imagined for games like GTA V may well prove more useful than they seem. Now the technologies and tools developed by this multibillion dollar entertainment industry are making changes in the real world.
John Isaacs, a lecturer in computing at the University of Abertay, is one of those exploring the possibilities of game engines. In 2011, he developed an urban mapping application for his PhD project.
— theguardian.com
