The lean urbanism concept, he says, is like a software patch, or a workaround – ultimately a guide or a tip sheet to navigate the complicated, and often very expensive, maze of working in the built environment in the U.S. “It’s about knowing that with certain building types, under a certain threshold, you don’t need an elevator. Or a sprinkler system. A lot of developers know that, and we want to daylight that. We want to present that thematically.” — theatlanticcities.com
It’s easy to forget that Irvine, the minutely planned southern California city awash in tract housing and shopping complexes, was regarded as a pretty radical place at the time of its 1971 incorporation. Almost entirely ranchland up until the mid-1900s, the area that would become Irvine... View full entry
Imagine close to the entire population of the U.S. picking up and moving somewhere else.
That’s the scale of China’s urbanization campaign: 250 million farmers moving to the city over the next 15 years. [...]
In Southwest China, the city of Chongqing is being used as a test case for transitioning rural Chinese to change their residency status to urban residents. The government is persuading millions of farmers there to move to the city.
— marketplace.org
Cycling advocacy group People for Bikes has selected six U.S. cities to receive funding and consultation for new protected bike lanes, as part of its Green Lane Project. The annual Project collaborates with cities over two years to expedite the installation of protected bike lanes, one of the ways... View full entry
A city that is connected -- in all senses of the word -- is a good city. The finalists of the Dallas Connected City Design Challenge offered numerous solutions in how Downtown Dallas can be linked to the Trinity River.
To guarantee a variety of ideas for Dallas' future development, the competition invited submissions in a Professional Stream and an Open Stream. Three Professional and 4 Open entries won.
— bustler.net
Professional Stream finalists (selected by jury):Stoss + SHoP, Boston, MA: "HyperDensity/HyperLandscape"Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, Barcelona, Spain: Dallas: "Downtown & Trinity"OMA*AMO, New York, NY: "2Rivers/2Datums"Open Stream finalists (selected by jury and public voting):Kohki... View full entry
As Jersey City has cast off its stigma as a back-office-and-apartment haven of cheap rents and cheaper-looking buildings, more and more professionals and families are calling “Chilltown” and “JC” home. They’re ditching the suburbs of their parents, but also the stratospheric prices and stuffy attitudes of Manhattan and, increasingly, Brooklyn.
The so-called sixth borough has finally become a destination in its own right [...].
— nydailynews.com
The latest edition of Student Works: highlighted "Eidos" a proposal for a housing complex located in East Harlem, New York, by GSAPP students Carlo Bailey and Lorenzo Villaggi. Plus, Archinect launched a new a new feature series, highlighting some of the more ambitious and intriguing... View full entry
Before the path arrived, Indianapolis didn’t have a mainstream bike scene — just streets designed to improve traffic flow. Now, children and the elderly have joined the spandex swarms of longtime cycling enthusiasts...
The public art along the trail accentuates the path’s role as a sculptor of the city’s evolving identity. For example, Donna Sink’s “Moving Forward” is a series of seven stained-glass-hued eco-friendly bus shelters covered in lines from poems by local writers.
— mobile.nytimes.com
Ordos fell away beneath us: a wide, sweeping wasteland of empty towers and silent, disused streets. ...The odd car moved slowly along the main road, where it looped around the centre of Kangbashi to cross the Ordos bridge, and out towards Dongsheng – but for the most part, from this height, Kangbashi looked like a model city; its radical architecture reduced to novelty ornaments, its unfinished towers scattered like broken bricks across a sandpit. — Business Insider
Last year Darmon Richter had a chance to visit Inner Mongolia. He now offers a closer look at the bizarre, ghost metropolis of Ordos.h/t @sevensixfive View full entry
The commercialisation of the urban landscape has resulted in the privatisation of public space. As city centres have become tributes to consumption, private interests have permeated these spaces. They have become awash with pseudo-public consumer spaces which belong to corporations rather than the citizenry. Although these places hold the semblance of being “public”, they are owned by corporate interests and are therefore under private control and not accountable to the public. — New Left Project
From The New Left Project's series on The Contemporary City. View full entry
Archinect is delighted to present 5468796 Architecture's travelogue for their award-winning research project, Table for Twelve. The Winnipeg-based firm received the 2013 Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture from the Canada Council for the Arts, awarded to emerging Canadian architects with... View full entry
Your assignment is to come up with an idea so revolutionary that it could be considered an important advance in industrial design.
Students at Rice University in Houston accomplished that with plans for a floating city that is being considered by one of the world's largest oil companies. Last year, the students won the inaugural Odebrecht Award for a radical design of man-made floating islands where as many as 25,000 oil workers and their families could live.
— npr.org
Previously featured in our Student Works and Screen/Print series, "The Petropolis of Tomorrow" proposes a new style of floating company towns to aid Brazil in offshore oil findings. NPR now reports that the project has surpassed its academic role to be considered by Petrobas, a Brazilian... View full entry
Wendy Holm, the Boston Latin teacher who has incorporated Urban Plan into her economics courses, said it combines basic concepts she has taught her students with something very close to a real-world context.
“One of the goals that the Urban Land Institute has is that kids come out of this experience and through it have this broader view, then, of this kind of experience and take it into their adult life,” said Holm.
— bostonglobe.com
The long and varied history of waste and its removal in New York from the 18th century onwards is the subject of Elizabeth Royte’s 2005 book Garbage Land and of the Urban Omnibus City of Systems video she narrates. In the video, Royte describes how her research into where exactly her trash was going after she threw it out has led her to become a more ecological citizen, with “a systems view” of our interconnected processes of manufacturing, transportation, disposal and re-use. — Urban Omnibus
Rio de Janeiro is set to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games and there are two starkly different visions of what that will mean for the "marvelous city," as it is known[...]
"Instead of creating a space of conviviality, a space of shared culture, of community, of conversation, you are going to have this very isolated element where after 5 o'clock in the afternoon, it's going to be dead. You are creating banks, parking lots, Trump towers," Gaffney said. "It's been rezoned for 50-story buildings."
— npr.org
Previously on Archinect:Once Unsafe, Rio's Shantytowns See Rapid GentrificationOlympic Displacement: Atlanta 1996 to Rio 2016Before Olympics It's Demolition Derby View full entry