U.S. engineering firm Aecom will manage the development of Neom Bay, part of a $500 billion mega city on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast [...]
The kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, is spearheading plans to develop Neom, a futuristic city being built from scratch, as part of the government’s plans to cut its reliance on oil and attract foreign investment.
— Bloomberg
Intentions for the planned Neom megacity were first announced by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017, but Saudi Arabia's suspected involvement in the death of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi a year later caused international outrage and prominent international figures on the... View full entry
Mayor Byron Brown said there will be a significant change documented in the 2020 Census for Buffalo. "We believe that in the 2020 census will allow Buffalo to show its first population growth since the 1950 census,” he said. — Spectrum News
After nearly 70 years of population declines, The City of Good Neighbors is growing once again. According to Buffalo mayor Byron W. Brown, the city could register significant population growth after the 2020 Census, a product, in part, of the city's growing refugee and immigrant communities... View full entry
The United States Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has unveiled its annual list of "highway boondoggles," a list of "budget-eating highway projects" that will "harm communities and the environment, while likely failing to achieve meaningful transportation goals." The proposed North Houston... View full entry
Big Plans: Picturing Social Reform, an exhibition currently on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, examines how landscape architects and photographers concretized contemporary social critiques through their work in American cities during the late 1800s and early... View full entry
Pelli Clarke Pelli, Adamson Associates, OJB Landscape Architecture, and developers Oxford Properties Group have unveiled plans for Union Park, a 4.3 million-square-foot marquee development that could reshape the Toronto skyline. View of the proposed rail yard cap park. Image... View full entry
Metro Oregon and Portland's TriMet are studying the possibility of creating a new below-ground transit route through the city's downtown. Planning for future growth, the organizations are working to link the Lloyd Center shopping mall on the eastern banks of the Willamette River with Southwest... View full entry
The University of California, Berkeley has named Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) founder Vishaan Chakrabarti as the new dean for the university's College of Environmental Design (CED). Chakrabarti comes to UC Berkeley after teaching at the Columbia University Graduate... View full entry
Since the first known use the term 'nuclear family' in 1941 (defined by George Murdock as "a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation and reproduction[,] contain[ing] adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or... View full entry
Faculty in the Department of Architecture have received a cash gift from Epic Games Inc. in support of their work on Virtual Places, a project that is adapting the company's virtual reality (VR) gaming engine, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), for architectural and urban design. — Cornell University
Three Cornell professors used virtual reality to create and expand on their research project Virtual Places. The study of architecture and video games is a growing focus. Within academia and practice, VR is a tool which helps unpack architectural ideas for learning as well as creating... View full entry
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Tuesday that the city had tapped Gregory Russ as Nycha’s new chairman, following 14 months without a permanent leader and after an exhaustive nationwide search, which included a salary increase to entice reluctant candidates. — The New York Times
Gregory Russ, current head of Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, has been picked to lead the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Russ told The New York Times, “Nycha’s issues actually are not just important for New York City, but they’re important nationally.” Currently, Russ... View full entry
The Regional Plan Association of New York (RPA) has named Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of architecture firm Peterson Rich Office (PRO) as the organization’s inaugural Richard Kaplan Chairs for Urban Design. The year-long research position, funded to “address a critical need for... View full entry
The opening of I-95 in Philadelphia 40 years ago cut the city’s waterfront neighborhoods off from their source. For more than a decade, the city has been planning a fix: a new park at Penn’s Landing that would cap a stretch of the highway and again connect Old City with the Delaware River. — inquirer.com
A recent report from The Philadelphia Inquirer recaps the city's long-running effort to build a pedestrian plaza over Interstate-95 linking downtown Philadelphia with an existing waterfront park at Penn's Landing and the Delaware River. Designed by Hargreaves Associates, the proposed 4-acre park... View full entry
President Donald Trump issued an executive order that establishes a White House Council focused on "eliminating regulatory barriers to affordable housing." The council is to be chaired by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson. The order reads: "These regulatory barriers... View full entry
...one issue stands out as particularly urgent and complex: housing. The lack of new supply, combined with the rising cost of living, has resulted in a severe shortage of affordable housing options for long-time middle and low income residents. As Google grows throughout the Bay Area—whether it’s in our home town of Mountain View, in San Francisco, or in our future developments in San Jose and Sunnyvale—we’ve invested in developing housing that meets the needs of these communities. — Google
Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company's pledge to invest in the development of affordable housing across the Bay Area. With the multi-billion dollar tech company calling the San Francisco Bay Area home with its beginnings starting over 20 years ago, Google is aware of its... View full entry
Sidewalk Labs, Snøhetta, Michael Green Architecture, and Heatherwick Studio have unveiled a controversial $1.3 billion plan to reprogram a portion of Toronto's industrial waterfront into a new smart city prototype that envisions a wireless, data-driven, and mass timber-filled future for the... View full entry
