Researchers have known for years that hosting large sporting events like the Olympics always costs more than expected and always yields less revenue and useful long-term infrastructure than estimated. Now voters and politicians in democratically elected countries are starting to realize the same thing.

Potential host cities are dropping out of the bidding process for the 2022 Winter Olympics like crazy. — Business Insider

I saw him a week ago [Tuesday], and he was sitting at his desk going through some of the thousands of letters and notes that people have sent to him wishing him well. He just had this incredible spirit about him, this attitude that everything was going to be all right. He was amazing.” — Artinfo

How exactly did the faceless tower block become the inspiration for contemporary Russian visual culture?[...]

Large estates are like fractals, or a space created by facing mirrors. Building 8 is exactly the same as building 14, and its young inhabitants must perhaps have the same preoccupation: to someday acquire a similar cell in one of these purpose-built units around town. Can creativity come from places like that? In contemporary Russia, somehow, it does. — theguardian.com

Brash, baroque and steeped in native Andean symbols, the mini-mansions are a striking sight on the caked-dirt streets of El Alto, the inexorably expanding sister city of Bolivia's capital.

They attest to a new class of indigenous nouveau riche, many of them merchants who converted street stalls into fortunes. [...]

The mini-mansions mesh modern and traditional architecture and flaunt, above all, two things: their owners' wealth and their Aymara heritage. — usnews.com

At a larger scale, the metropolitan regions of Paris and New York City both show significant pedestrian mode shares. New York City has a pedestrian mode share of 34% for all trips citywide ahead of car (33%) and transit (30%)[4] when the Ile-de-France region has a weekday pedestrian mode share of 32%, a car mode share of 43%, and a public transport one up to 21%[5].

[...] How do they support this large pedestrian population and decrease auto-dominance in public space? — pps.org

Architects, designers and scientists have joined forces to explore the technologies needed to build a spacecraft that could be launched within the next 100 years and sustain human life for generations.

Early designs for the ship envisage a giant 15km-wide ball filled with soil that will support complex ecosystems of microbes, plants and animal life. Rather than building homes on top of the soil, humans will live within, carving out rooms in a network of connected burrows. — theguardian.com

Berlin voters on Sunday decided leisure comes first and blocked plans to develop a big part of the former Tempelhof airport, the hub of the historic 1948-49 Berlin Airlift. [...]

Official results based on more than four-fifths of ballots cast showed that over half of voters backed a referendum to preserve the airport as a leisure space. City officials had wanted to use about a third of the land for housing because of Berlin's growing population. — therepublic.com

A major insurance company is suing Chicago-area municipal governments saying they knew of the risks posed by climate change and should have been better prepared. The class-action lawsuits raise the question of who is liable for the costs of global warming. [...]

“What the insurers are saying is: ‘We’re in the business of covering unforeseen risks... But we’re now at a point with the science where climate change is now a foreseeable risk.’” — washingtonpost.com

City mayors across the world are about to take delivery of some searching, angry and occasionally very funny letters from leading international architects, academics and critics at the culmination of an exhibition curated by New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture.

“Letters to the Mayor” generated 50 fascinating and varied missives [...]. The project was conceived to remind politicians and the wider public – including architects themselves – of the political side of their profession. — theguardian.com

The just-elected new Mayor of Paris, Madame Anne Hidalgo, has prepared a revolutionary sustainable mobility project whereby virtually all of the streets of the city will be subject to a maximum speed limit of 30 km/hr.

The only exceptions in the plan are a relatively small number of major axes into the city and along the two banks of the Seine, where the speed limit will be 50 km/hr, and the city’s hard pressed ring road (périphérique) [...]. — World Streets: The Politics of Transport in Cities

A fully automated mobile platform for 3D printing capable of producing objects of limitless scale does not currently exist.

In the hope of remedying this situation, Gensler’s Los Angeles office initiated Mobile 3D Printing, a Gensler research project born from an observation of present-day 3D printing technology and its limitations. — gensleron.com

The Architecture Billings Index (ABI) has reverted into negative territory for the last two months. [...] The American Institute of Architects (AIA) reported the [April] ABI score was 49.6, up slightly from a mark of 48.8 in March. This score reflects a decrease in design activity (any score above 50 indicates an increase in billings). The new projects inquiry index was 59.1, up from the reading of 57.9 the previous month. — calculatedriskblog.com