For generations, government policies have been geared toward creating endless landscapes of strip malls... In the process we have gutted our traditional downtowns. We have eaten up farmland and forest. We have, as Nate Berg reported this week, endangered the lives of our senior citizens. We have engineered a world where children cannot walk or bike to school without risking their lives. We have created countless places devoid of any real social value. — theatlanticcities.com
Looking at the city through the lens of landscape architecture allows us a clear view of the situation. There is just one course of action available to us: if we are to resolve the world’s ecological problems we first need to resolve the problems facing our cities. And the only way we can reach these solutions is by naming and researching them in terms of the metabolism of the city. — IABR
-Dirk Sijmons, renowned landscape architect and former Governmental Advisor on Landscape, has been appointed curator of the next edition of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. The 6th IABR has the working title “URBAN by NATURE” and opens in May 2014. It focuses on the... View full entry
The High Line in New York succeeds because it unites neighborhoods and gets people outside, building a community in a space that was planned to be demolished: it brought life from rehabilitation. As we all know, Los Angeles has many places that need rehabilitating and that could serve as a point of unification. The problem though is that unlike the High Line we don’t have an area that stretches between neighborhoods without feeling forced or unantural. — laimyours.com
Copenhagen firm PinkCloud.dk has shared with us the concept FLIP/CITY, a recent shortlist entry in the 2012 Rethinking Shanghai competition. Design team members Nico Schlapps and Fabian Busse decided to literally flip a flat cityscape vertically to create, explore and grow new types of spaces. — bustler.net
In our last post, we published Henning Larsen Architects' winning competition entry for the city center redevelopment in Klaksvík, the second-largest city in the Faroe Islands. This post now features the urban design submission of Swiss practice Kubota & Bachmann Architects. — bustler.net
We are interested in connecting architecture with the social — The Architectural League
Confronted with the complexity and political uncertainty of Mexico City, Jose Castillo and Saidee Springall of arquitectura911sc strive for a “dual commitment to an architecture that connects the physical with the social, and architecture that is grounded and informed by the city.&rdquo... View full entry
In the future the wisest zone entrepreneurs will question this central feature and ask: Why enclave? What types of incentivized urbanism will actually benefit from physically segregated infrastructure—from being separate and even distant from the dense and dynamic central spaces of existing cities? Given that the zone is now generating its own urban programs — aspiring to be a city—what economic and technical benefits can result from constructing what is in effect a double or shadow of the city? — Places Journal
On Places, Keller Easterling traces the global rise of The Zone -- "a.k.a., the Free Trade Zone, Foreign Trade Zone, Special Economic Zone, Export Processing Zone, or any of the dozens of variants." From pirate enclaves to Puerto Rico, from Shenzhen to Dubai, she interrogates the spatial logic of... View full entry
David Harvey, theorist and author of Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, says that postwar capitalism can be understood with reference to the history of urbanisation and suburbanisation. Urban investment gets you out of a crisis but defines what the next crisis is going to look like, he argues. The emerging powers of the east are now in the midst of a massive urbanisation project and could fall victim to the same outcome. — guardian.co.uk
The original is a centuries-old village of 900 and a UNESCO heritage site that survives on tourism. The copycat is a housing estate that thrives on China's new rich. In a China famous for pirated products, the replica Hallstatt sets a new standard. — news24.com
Previously: Xeroxed Village(s)? View full entry
“If you go into the hardcore urban or the hardcore rural, it is quite simple to define it, but that is not so relevant. It is more significant to talk about the condition in between. And this condition is extremely difficult to define.” – Urban planner Kees Christiaanse in conversation with Bernd Upmeyer and Beatriz Ramo on behalf of MONU Magazine — Free Association Design
MONU’s call for submissions for its latest issue (#16, Non Urbanism) asked its participants to “investigate how non-urbanism may be defined and identified today, and how non-urban areas interact with and relate to urban areas.“ Fortunately for readers, the printed... View full entry
Copenhagen's Henning Larsen Architects has won the competition for developing a 150,000 m2 (1.6M sq ft) area in the second-largest city in the Faroe Islands, Klaksvík. The area will comprise a cultural house, a museum, residences, offices and shops. [...]
On the basis of the winning proposal, the Municipality of Klaksvík will prepare a new district plan for the development of the city. The plan is expected to be ready during 2012.
— bustler.net
the canopy covers 11,000 square feet of an easement in Battery Park City; effectively, North End Way is a north-south passageway or alley, lined with shops and restaurants. Part of what makes this a notable public space is the quality of construction... But it’s the canopy, which Goldman also commissioned, that formally elevates what is really just a gap between two buildings into something almost as inspired as the nave of a great Gothic cathedral. — New York Times
A bunch of bees is inspiring what seems to escape so many people in Buffalo: waterfront development.
With the help of a group of University at Buffalo architecture students, a local entrepreneur hopes to build on a giant bee hive he discovered in an abandoned office and turn a portion of Buffalo's historic waterfront into a design campus where manufacturers, architects and others will collaborate and mastermind new ways to use locally made materials
— Buffalo News
For years city planners have looked at ways to revitalize downtown, now some University of Arizona architecture students may have the answer.
For the past couple of years the grad students have been working on a project called "The New Old Pueblo". "We did a lot of research on successful strategies used in other cities," UA Grad Student Julia Roberts says.
Roberts is one of 17 students who worked with Architecture Professor Mark Frederickson to design the plan.
— kvoa.com
“It was not typically a type of project we normally do,” says Dukho Yeon, the firm’s associate partner-in-charge on Teachers Village. “This was part of basically everybody including the investors giving back to the city of Newark.” — Fast Company