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She would ask us to look at the consequences of these sub-economies for the city – for its people, its neighbourhoods, and the visual orders involved...Talking with Jacobs, it became clear that community battles were, for her, simply part of a wider inquiry as she sought to better understand, and develop concepts for, the role of cities in the economy. — The Guardian
And if you haven't already noticed it, there's a special Google Doodle celebrating Jacobs' 100th birthday.More on Archinect:U.S. Transportation Secretary Foxx on the troubled relationship between infrastructure and race: "We ought to do it better than we did it the last time"A closer look at the... View full entry
This got us thinking about what it takes to build an ideal town: should pubs be on every residential corner or on the high street? How many trendy coffee shops are too many? Are libraries still a thing? We didn't have the answers to any of those questions, so we spoke to Matt Richards – a planner at property consultancy Bidwells – to find out what makes the perfect town. — VICE
Related stories in the Archinect news:Turning the “ugliest building in Liverpool” into an exemplar of public healthUrbanism as a public health issue: Oklahoma City's battle with obesityJan Gehl's perspective on making "a good urban habitat for homo sapiens"How urban designers can better... View full entry
In 1997 two architects set out to rethink Lagos, an African megacity that had been largely abandoned by the state. Amid the apparent chaos and crime, they discovered remarkable patterns of organisation. Two decades later, Rem Koolhaas and Kunlé Adeyemi discuss the past, present and future of the city – and reveal why their own project never saw the light of day — theguardian.com
"...it was the ultimate dysfunctional city – but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency." - Rem KoolhaasRelated stories in the Archinect news:Koolhaas guides viewers through bustling Lagos... View full entry
Masdar City, when it was first conceived a decade ago, was intended to revolutionise thinking about cities and the built environment.
Now the world’s first planned sustainable city – the marquee project of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) plan to diversify the economy from fossil fuels - could well be the world’s first green ghost town.
As of this year [...] managers have given up on the original goal of building the world’s first planned zero-carbon city.
— theguardian.com
Masdar City previously in the Archinect news: Get a drone's eye view of Foster + Partners' Masdar City in Abu DhabiFully Charged visits Foster-designed Masdar CityInside Masdar City: a modern mirage View full entry
As Deputy Director for Urban Design and Mobility in Glendale, CA, a teacher of urban design at Woodbury University, and one of the Mayor's appointees on the City of Pasadena's Design Commission, Alan Loomis has thoroughly installed himself in the shifting scene of southern Californian urbanism... View full entry
China has detailed its urban planning vision, which has been designed to make its sprawling cities more inclusive, safer and better places to live.
[...] policymakers pledged to transform urban development patterns and improve city management.
The last time China held such a high-level meeting was in 1978, when only 18 percent of the population lived in cities. By the end of 2011, in excess of 50 percent of the population called the city their home.
— chinadaily.com.cn
Related news on Archinect:China considering drastic ban on coalDisastrous landslide burying dozens in Shenzhen likely caused by piled up soil from construction workBeijing's latest "airpocalypse" is bad enough for city to issue first ever red alertChina’s "most influential architect" is not... View full entry
Germane Barnes wants Opa-Locka to be known for something else...He knows [change] can happen because he lives there, and has seen the work of a group of artists and organizers slowly change the landscape...The city's history intrigued him, not merely because it seemed like a perfect case study for his thesis about revitalizing a community without gentrification, but because it also spoke to his own experiences. — Curbed
More on Archinect:In Chicago, forming economically integrated suburbs is more complex than it looksWelcome to Evanston, Illinois: the carless suburbiaBerliners are getting their hopes up for transformed Kulturforum arts districtWith a little compromise, illegal urban squats like Ljubljana's... View full entry
Cairo is an unruly urban sprawl that has spun out of control. Now, officials want to build a new capital in the desert -- a potent symbol of President Sisi's regime. But will it ever happen? [...]
The old Cairo is an ugly city, an affront to the senses. [...] a city of contradictions, created from the bottom up, even though that had never been the intention. It has been growing wildly since the 1960s -- from 3.5 million back then to 18 million now -- against the will of the country's rulers.
— spiegel.de
Previously in the Archinect News: A New "Capital" for Cairo?Egypt's urban growth threatens Nile farmlandPhotographer documents Egypt's monumental housing developments in the desert View full entry
Cities are everywhere. Billions of us live in them, and many of us think we could do a better job than the planners. But for the past 26 years dating back to the original SimCity, we've mostly been proving that idea false. [...]
And now, here, I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour through the history of the city-building genre—from its antecedents to the hot new thing.
— arstechnica.com
Related on Archinect:The issue of homelessness in SimCityHow video game engines may influence the future of architecture (and everything else)Three guiding principles for a fine fake metropolis View full entry
With a $35,000 grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, [MITs Elizabeth Christoforetti] and her team are working on a project called Placelet, which will track how pedestrians move through a particular space. They’re developing a network of sensors that will track the scale and speed of pedestrians [and vehicles] over long periods of time. The sensors, [currently being tested in downtown Boston], will also track the 'sensory experience' by recording the noise level and air quality of that space. — CityLab
More on Archinect:The Life of a New Architect: Elizabeth Christoforetti (Featured interview)MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bikeMIT's Newest Invention Fits All the Furniture You Need in One Closet-Sized BoxMIT develops self-assembling modular robots View full entry
It’s this inevitable dichotomy between data and real life that will likely define [Google's] Sidewalk Labs...There’s a naivety to their worldview that might help to get things done inside a company but could prove a hurdle to progress in the public realm. Yes, the region does need more housing, but the politics of how, where, and when that housing is built are far more nuanced than Google can apparently handle. — psmag.com
The cloud of speculation surrounding Google as of late only grows bigger with the tech giant's recent launch of its independent start-up, Sidewalk Labs. Charging further into Google's real-world endeavors, the "urban innovation company" vies "to improve city life for everyone through the... View full entry
In a study presented last weekend to the Gerontological Society of America, University of Kansas assistant professor Amber Watts examined 26 subjects with mild Alzheimer’s Disease and 30 healthy control subjects. She tracked health outcomes over two years, controlling for home price, income, gender, and education. [...]
"Our findings suggest that people with neighborhoods that require more mental complexity actually experience less decline in their mental functioning over time.”
— usa.streetsblog.org
Ahead of a special Guardian Cities event, the renowned urban ‘rethinker’ says cities should be six or seven storeys high, Helsinki is on the verge of revolution, and that he’s sceptical of London’s cycle superhighway plans [...]
Practice partner Søholt puts forward one way of improving a city’s liveability: “Mix the city and assemble the people rather than dispersing them.”
— theguardian.com
Cartoonist and journalist Eleri Mai Harris tells the story of Canberra's creation by architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin (who also happened to be married to one another, and worked with Frank Lloyd Wright).Read the piece in full, gorgeous watercolor on Medium: The Utopian... View full entry
Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University and an untiring defender of the suburbs, begins a recent column in the Washington Post with a valid question: “What is a city for?” He then proceeds to get that question completely wrong. But really, we should be thanking him. In his article, he neatly sums up many of the key myths emerging from the anti-urbanism set, making my job of debunking these myths a lot easier. — thisbigcity.net
The aforementioned WP column already managed to spark a lively discussion last month here on Archinect. View full entry