“The city is better for the starchitect phenomenon,” said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, “because it enhanced the mystique of New York’s residential housing market. But during the frenzy, those buildings were marketed as if they had inherent greater value, and the jury is still out on that.” — NYT

Jan Gehl, says the new suburb was old-fashioned from its inception. “It was built on principles — specifically those of the modernist movement — that were popular in the middle part of the last century,” he said. “Orestad was built from the top-down, rather than from the bottom-up. Plus, there was an idea that if you got enough ‘starchitects’ on board, then things would be fine.” — NYT

NEWARK — Work has begun on an education-centered community featuring three charter schools and affordable housing for teachers in the city’s decayed downtown, with much of the design work done by the noted architect Richard Meier. The development, called Teachers Village, is expected to cost $149 million when it is completed two years from now. — The New York Times

Mr. Chakrabarti said the firm is determined to shake things up in the world of architecture, development and planning. “Most master planning, you use pretty pastel drawings that rarely have anything to do with what gets built,” he said. “Planning has been static, it hasn’t been performative. Most of these plans, they get implemented over 20 or 30 years. Think of how much a city and the world changes in that span of time.” — New York Observer

Graduate-level student teams representing the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and a joint team from the University of Colorado and Harvard University have been selected as finalists for the tenth annual Urban Land Institute (ULI) Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition. This year’s finalists were charged with proposing a long-term vision for creating a distinct identity for a new downtown Houston district. — bustler.net

It’s time to put a moratorium on urban agriculture. On guerrilla street furniture. On food trucks and on yarn bombing. — Guggenheim Blog

Last December, the 2012 TED Prize winner was officially announced, and for the first time in the history of the prize, not just a single person but a collaborative idea was being awarded: the City 2.0. This week, with the TED2012: Full Spectrum conference happening right now in Long Beach, California, the TED Prize Wish - "One Wish to Change the World" - has now also been revealed. — bustler.net

You can’t just focus on housing and transit in the core of a city, you need to focus on the physical needs of manufacturing, development and the needs that go along with them. That will clearly have a huge effect not only on the city but regional level. — Wired - Autopia

We just published the winners of the design ideas competition, The Harlem Edge / Cultivating Connections, organized by Emerging New York Architects (ENYA). One of the finalist entries was the proposal Greenhouse Transformer by Dongwoo Yim and Rafael Luna of Boston firm PRAUD. The concept received an Honorable Mention. — bustler.net

The Emerging New York Architects (ENYA) Committee of the AIA NY Chapter has announced the winners of its fifth biennial design ideas competition, The Harlem Edge / Cultivating Connections. [...] The competition explored the redevelopment of the decommissioned Department of Sanitation marine transfer station located on the Hudson River at 135th Street. — bustler.net

Young Chinese firm FangCheng Architects has sent us their proposal Bridge Urban Life Typology, a city-wide network of bridge buildings which won the team the Second Prize at the 1.100.10000 Ideas Competition. The contest sought for innovative ideas to rapidly add 240,000 affordable housing units for more than 800,000 people in China's mega-boomtown Shenzhen. — bustler.net

Daniel Toole is a 26-year-old, Seattle-based architect who has, quite accidentally, found himself immersed in the hidden world of alleys. Recently awarded a travel fellowship by the local American Institute of Architects branch, he headed to Japan and Australia to study this arguably under-appreciated urban form. — theatlanticcities.com

Directed by Ai Weiwei (China, 2012). Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012.

Ordos 100 is a construction project curated by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. One hundred architects from 27 countries were chosen to participate and each design a 1000-square-meter villa to be built in a new community in Inner Mongolia. The 100 villas would be designed to fit a master plan designed by Ai Weiwei. — youtube.com

In 2008, the substantially updated town center of Plessis-Robinson, a suburb of Paris, was named “the best urban neighborhood built in the last 25 years” by the European Architecture Foundation. A composite of six connected districts ranging in size from 5.6 to 59 acres, the revitalization comprises public buildings, retail, market-rate and subsidized affordable housing, parks, schools, gardens, sports facilities, and a hospital. Construction was begun in 1990 and took a decade to complete. — switchboard.nrdc.org