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

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

Winners have been announced at the Bab Al Bahrain Open Ideas Competition with the proposal "Pearl Dive" by Swiss architect Lukas Lenherr taking home the $15,000 First Prize. [...]

Significance was added to this competition by the recent political events that have taken place across the region, encouraging questions about social representation, public identity, urban integration, sense of place, and historic importance. — bustler.net

The saga of Cabrini-Green compels us to engage some hard and fundamental questions. It is not enough to ask: who benefits from public housing redevelopment? We must also ask: how we measure such benefits and who gets to do that measuring? — Places Journal

The City of Dublin, Ohio is an affluent Columbus suburb typically known for it’s good schools, easy access to jobs, and low density housing and retail developments that have rapidly sprawled outward over the past forty years.

Fast forward another forty years and things may look drastically different. Officials with the city’s planning department have been steadily working on the Bridge Street Corridor plan, which calls for the redevelopment of 1,000 acres located at the core of Dublin. — ColumbusUnderground.com

The structures in Architecture Without Architects reveal a kind of purposeful, iterative, social design process that, while dating back centuries and originating in primitive cultures, offers a powerful parallel to contemporary shifts towards collaborative creation. — theatlantic.com

Nearly 40 years after its destruction, the people interviewed for the film continue to wrestle with Pruitt-Igoe's legacy and its place in their lives. They love it and hate it, but don't resent it. Despite the piles of trash, mountains of drugs, and preponderance of crime, this was their home. For some, it was their first proper dwelling. — Dante A. Ciampaglia

The collaboration of three Toronto-based firms, JET Architecture, JCI Architects, and Terraplan Landscape Architects, has won the commission to build the "Shobuj Pata" (Green Leaf) Eco Community Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh. — bustler.net

The YUL-MTL : Moving landscapes international ideas competition on the Autoroute 20 gateway corridor linking the Montreal-Trudeau Airport to downtown Montreal recently announced three equal winners. The competition [...] aimed to develop strategic visions for the development of the 17 km corridor mainly composed of transport infrastructures, residential and industrials areas and brownfields in dire need of revitalization. — bustler.net

The winners for the EUROPAN 11 challenge for Vienna, Austria were announced just last night, and the first prize, by unanimous vote, went to the urban design proposal of Dreiecksplatz (Triangle Square) by an international team comprising Artur Borejszo (PL, Architect), Leena Cho (US, Landscape Architect), Jason Hilgefort (US, Architect & Urbanist), and Andreas Karavanas (GR, Architect & Urbanist). — bustler.net

This 1959 film, "Community Growth, Crisis and Challenge," warns citizens, developers, and city officials of the dangers of urban sprawl. This historical artifact, co-sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the Urban Land Institute ULI) provides alternative approaches to land development. The film was produced by the NAHB. — ULI

The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. — Eric Jaffe

Thomas Unterseher is on a mission to make South Dakota's small towns more attractive, and he's starting in the place he knows best: his hometown of Mobridge.

Like many small towns in the state, Mobridge has been on the decline for decades and is struggling to maintain its population. [...]

But since there's little money in the city budget to pay architects or designers to develop a long-term plan to pitch to residents, Unterseher is turning to an untapped resource: architecture students. — businessweek.com