Dubai won the bid to host the World Expo 2020, being the first Middle Eastern city selected in the Expo's 160-year history. HOK, in partnership with Populous and Arup, led the design team that developed the master plan, themed "Connecting Minds, Creating the Future." Their proposal won against those from Brazil, Russia, and Turkey.
The 1,082-acre (438-hectare) Expo site is equidistant from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, next to the new Al Maktoum International Airport and near the Jebel Ali Port.
— bustler.net
Images: HOK View full entry
Indeed, one of the main criticisms of such design is that it aims to exclude already marginalised populations such as youths or the homeless...Preventing rough sleeping is a recurring theme. — BBC Future
Frank Swain discovers the "unpleasant designs", of modern cities. He talks with Selena Savic, a PhD student at the Ecole Polytechnique Federerale de Lausanne in Switzerland, who co-authored a book on the subject this year. h/t Bruce Sterling View full entry
At the intersection of these two domains – technology and civic life – a small and fascinating sector has been taking root for the last few years. [...]
Together, these types of companies and organizations have loosely come to define "civic tech" – and the potential for a future where technology finally, seamlessly, significantly alters how we relate to government and our neighbors.
— The Atlantic Cities
Not without its growing pains, the U.S. government is slowly learning to effectively use technology to connect to its citizens. The expanding field of "civic-tech" focuses on the sharing and distillation of government data, to grease the bureaucratic wheels and ramp up personal civic engagement... View full entry
It's a three-way tie for the competition to develop the urban conceptual design for the Delta and Porto Baros area in Rijeka, Croatia. The international call-for-concepts asked entrants to propose an urban design that could serve as an innovative model of feasible development that could be used to renew future development sites in the country. — bustler.net
Out of 56 submissions from around the globe, the competition jury selected three Crotia-based first-prize winners who were awarded a net amount of approx. US$35,600 (26,200 €): Studio 3LHD from Zagreb PORTICUS from Split njiric+ arhitekti/Hrvoje Njirić from Zagreb View full entry
Archinect recently took a field trip to Playa Vista, a quiet community minutes from the ocean in west Los Angeles, to check out UCLA’s new satellite architecture campus, IDEAS. Entirely housed within a 13,000sqft airplane hangar, the campus is used by architecture students in the... View full entry
Once a bustling and stylish avenue, now a street that no longer knows its identity or purpose, no other street in Rotterdam provokes as much discussion as the Coolsingel. — Sculpture International Rotterdam
The Coolsingel is Rotterdam's civic artery, a 1km street home to the city's economic, commercial and political focal points. But despite its central position and function for the last century, the street has suffered a bit of an identity crisis, and lacks the vibrancy it once channeled. To... View full entry
Two academics wondered about the number of swimming pools in the L.A. Basin. They got their answer with computer mapping, but [...] along the way, they discovered something more than just the real-world versions of the iconic David Hockney pool utopias. Their project also proved that two non-experts were able to take a massive amount of freely available data to peek into other people's lives. — Los Angeles Times
The Freedom Ship would be home to 50,000 people and have its own airport, casinos and shopping centers. The Florida-based company behind the city of the sea says it is hopeful it can raise the $1 billion needed to begin construction on the massive vessel. — nydailynews.com
My big vision is for urban districts developed on a bicycle mobility platform. What does that mean? Well consider: Venice was built around boating; Singapore has been built around transit and driving; LA has been built around driving, and the "bike city" of Groningen NL, was built around walking and horses. My work is in imagining new layers of cities, built by redeveloping brownfields and connecting them up, with unique forms, because they respond to the unique attributes of bicycle motion. — cycle-space.com
For more about Steven Fleming read Working out of the Box: Steven Fleming View full entry
Here is a wonderful central London site that has hosted the arts since 1951. If it is not working, let's make sure we either restore the original buildings with dignity, to make them as good as they can possibly be, or take the plunge and replace them with a 21st-century set of buildings, better suited to the art forms and audiences of today — Guardian
Examining plans for the proposed redevelopment of the Southbank Centre, sculptor Antony Gormley concludes that bulldozing the site would be better than the planned revamp. View full entry
Crossrail is not just about engineering: artists, designers and archaeologists are all involved in the £15bn new railway. As the amazing tunnel-boring machines approach halfway, Rowan Moore dons his hard hat and goes below — theguardian.com
In the latest development of this ongoing story, Related Companies submitted the new conceptual plan designed by Gehry Partners to the Los Angeles Grand Avenue Authority earlier today, Nov. 25. The $650 million development addresses the three-acre block across the Gehry-designed Walt Disney... View full entry
“They have taken what could have been a barren rooftop and turned it into much needed public space for the community...Because it’s elevated, it’s out of the flow of the street...There’ll be a sense of calm". - Catherine McVay Hughes, chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan — NYT
David W Dunlap reports that although plans for Liberty Park have been mostly unknown till now, last month images of St. Nicholas Church and Liberty Park appeared on the website of the architect Santiago Calatrava, who is designing the church. The park was rendered in sufficient detail that... View full entry
"Personally when I did the project of the Art Museum in São Paulo my basic concern was to make an ugly architecture...A poor architecture with free spaces that could be created by the collective...Most people find that the museum is poor, and it is. I wanted to make a poor project. That is, formally and architecturally ugly, but that would be a usable space, that would be something that could be taken over by men". - Lina Bo Bardi — Cosmopista
A recent opinion piece in O Estado de S.Paulo proposed fencing in the wonderful open plaza of Lina Bo Bardi's MASP, as one solution for addressing concerns that the space is becoming a mini cracolândia. This situation it is argued has negatively impacted the MASP and it's cultural prestige... View full entry
Shivihah Smith’s East Baltimore neighborhood, where he lives with his mother and grandmother, is disappearing. The block one over is gone. A dozen rowhouses on an adjacent block were removed one afternoon last year. [...]
For the Smiths, the bulldozing of city blocks is a source of anguish. But for Baltimore, as for a number of American cities in the Northeast and Midwest that have lost big chunks of their population, it is increasingly regarded as a path to salvation.
— nytimes.com
In light of yesterday's decision to allocate a chunk of the $13 billion JPMorgan Chase mortgage settlement to anti-blight measures across the country, I also recommend this NPR interview with Jim Rokakis, director of the Thriving Communities Institute in Cleveland, Ohio. NPR host Melissa Block... View full entry
