Have a closer look into the Zaryadye Park design scheme by TPO Reserve with Maxwan Architects + Urbanists, Latz + Partner, and Buro Happold. The team recently won second place in the international Zaryadye Park competition in Moscow. — bustler.net

A year after gathering ideas on how a eurozone country could leave the single-currency bloc, the organisers of the 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize are plunging into Britain’s highly politicised housing debate and challenging people to design a garden city.

Offering £250,000 in prize money, entrants are required to answer: “How would you deliver a new garden city which is visionary, economically viable and popular?” — FT.com

For other cities, order comes easily. Washington, D.C. was built all at once on the Potomac River to the specifications of the 1791 L’Enfant Plan; a half-century later, Paris was gutted and remade, top to bottom, per Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s instructions. Things in Toronto have always been a little less tidy—instead, we’ve got “messy urbanism,” as American urban planner James Rojas has called in. — thegridto.com

Diller Scofidio + Renfro has won the Zaryadye Park competition in Moscow. Set in the historic district of Zaryadye in downtown Moscow, the design competition was established to find an architecture and landscape plan to transform the 130,000 sq.m. former site of Hotel Russia into a multi-functional public park.

Coming in second and third place are TPO Reserve and MVRDV, respectively. — bustler.net

Eric Ho watches the boom on the Lower East Side...and sees...Detroit. Specifically...vacant storefronts — more than 200 of them in the area east of the Bowery and south of 14th Street.
How was it possible, he thought, that in a neighborhood where space was at such a premium, so much of it was sitting idle? ...an architect who once intended to design housing for disaster zones,, he thought: What could be done with them? — New York Times

For those who do not believe travelers’ tales, there is the Chinese government’s own report, from 2010, concluding that home ownership rates in China were then nearly 90%. This compares with a world average of 63% and a U.S. average of 65%. — Forbes

The default recourse to data-fication, the presumption that all meaningful flows and activity can be sensed and measured, is taking us toward a future in which the people shaping our cities and their policies rarely have the opportunity to consider the nature of our stickiest urban problems and the kind of questions they raise. — Places Journal

Following a strong architectural language of repetition, movement, rhythm, and proportion the ‘weeksville heritage center’ designed by American firm caples jefferson architects PC serves as a gateway to a 19th century african-american freedman’s settlement. the sustainably built complex is located in brooklyn, new york and features a new two-story, 23,000 sq ft building and 41,000 sq ft of landscape that redefines the site’s context. — designboom.com

Five teams were selected for the second stage of the international architectural "Russia" theme park competition. The Jury, the Expert Council, and "Russia" park representatives met this past September to begin searching for the concept and financial model for the theme park.

Twenty-six submissions out of 180 registered applicants from 41 countries made it to Stage I, which was then narrowed down to 18 after the Expert Council made further evaluations. — bustler.net