Breaking news from New York City today: the team of Swedish firm White Arkitekter has won the two-phase "For a Resilient Rockaway" (FAR ROC) design competition at the Arverne East site in the Rockaways. [...] The winning team also included members from ARUP and Gensler. — bustler.net

We typically see photovoltaic panels up on roofs, as they're broad, open surfaces that receive a lot of sunlight. You know what else spends a lot of time in the scorching sun, though? Sidewalks. With that in mind, a team at Washington DC's The George Washington University has created what is claimed to be "the first walkable solar-paneled pathway in the world." — Gizmag

Despite concerns about the sustainability of the glass-walled condo and the monotony they have brought to the Toronto skyline, these are not issues that concern city planners. That’s someone else’s department.

For planners, the main thing is to ensure that everything fits in — in other words, that nothing stands out. As long as a building isn’t too tall, too dense, or too good, the department is happy to give its approval. — thestar.com

The historic Targ Węglowy Square in Gdańsk, Poland was merely an empty lot before the Gdyby Group (whose name translates to "What if?") in collaboration with City Culture Institute proposed a new public space to revive it.

Back in early September, the group installed the numerous cubic box furnishings throughout the lot, where visitors of any age can play, socialize, and relax. Gdyby then gathered public feedback on the project and held an open public discussion about the Square's future. — bustler.net

The best approach, it seems to me, is to say that the genre of “social practice” art raises questions that it cannot by itself answer. But it would be missing an opportunity not to join the debate, even if the goal is to take it in a completely different direction. — isreview.org

In his 12-year tenure, Bloomberg built a gleaming Oz of new parks and plazas, skyscrapers and bike lanes. This didn’t stop plenty of terrible buildings from going up. But a focus on streets and architecture redrew whole swaths of the city: Brownstone Brooklyn boomed, the High Line opened, industrial wastelands became waterfront playgrounds. Urban living became a cause, a public good. Design, down to the curbside and the public bench, was no longer an afterthought... — nytimes.com

[Genie is] a platform with online-based planning applications to help architects and engineers in the design process, especially for skyscrapers and large buildings. The platform includes planning tools of expert architects and engineers and advance analytics and simulation tools. Genie standardizes and automates the design and construction processes with unlimited design options, enabling an architect to preserve the building's uniqueness in the urban environment. — Globes

"above all we want to show to best advantage what is after all a treasure of urban planning. Don't forget that the Paris quays are on Unesco's list of world heritage sites." - Xavier Janc — BBC News Magazine

It appears that cities of today, and especially big cities, all around the world, are all struggling with similar problems, as they all have developed huge territories - their metropolitan or "greater" areas - during the twentieth century that cannot be properly understood by anyone in terms of their form, but that now need to be recognized as something that truly exists, because it is a form that is in perpetual transformation and without limits. — http://www.monu-magazine.com

From the sparsely dotted Chinese walking man to the top-hat-wearing, cane-bearing Dane, almost a hundred “walking men” are displayed life-size on banners that line the sidewalk.

“It’s important to me that they are on human scale because they really represent us,” said Ms. Barkai.

Only rarely are the icons depicted as women, she noted. Of the hundreds of images in her collection, Ms. Barkai has only “about six or seven women, mostly from European countries.” — blogs.wsj.com

Creativity was now the most valuable quality of all, ran Florida’s argument, “the decisive source of competitive advantage.” This made creative people into society’s “dominant class” — and companies that wished to harness their power would need to follow them wherever they went...

Every element of Florida’s argument infuriated our future correspondent. Was he suggesting planned bohemias? Built by governments? To attract businesses? — salon.com

Meier supplied the project’s master plan, doing without the sculptural gymnastics he’s known for -- at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and elsewhere -- to keep costs down.

The firm designed a clean-lined four-story box, one of the first two buildings that have opened for the present school term.

Rough and smooth brick patterns echo a mix of clear and translucent glass to make a surface composition as rich as a Mondrian painting. — Bloomberg

"It became a way of documenting the processes of gentrification and urban renewal...I’ll go to Flatbush Avenue and walk from Prospect Park out to the end, because that’s what Manhattan used to be" - Randy Hage — NYT