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Li’s development company Cheung Kong will start selling “micro-apartments” for between HK$1.94 and HK$2 million ($250,000 to $260,000) a unit on July 26. The 196 mini flats, part of a larger development (pdf) of 1,071 units, are among the cheapest in Hong Kong and less than 200 square feet, or around 18 square meters. The smallest of the apartments come with usable area of just 177 sq. ft, including a 97 sq. ft living room, a 13 sq. ft kitchen and a 31 sq. ft bathroom. — qz.com
New York City is moving forward with a proposal that calls for a new high-rise apartment complex to feature separate doors for wealthy tenants and those living in the building’s affordable housing unit.
While wealthy residents will be able to enter the building from its designated front entrance, affordable housing tenants will be required to go in through a back alley.
A mandatory affordable housing plan is not license to segregate lower-income tenants from those who are well-off.
— RT
Maybe the higher-ups will employ the low-income folk as maids and janitors? Built-in servants quarters, subsidized by the city. View full entry
Looking eastward from the canyon's popular South Rim, visitors could soon see a hive of construction as workers build restaurants, hotels and shops on a distant mesa on the Navajo Indian reservation.
The developers also plan a gondola ride from those attractions to whisk tourists to the canyon floor, where they would stroll along an elevated riverside walkway to a restaurant at the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers.
— latimes.com
Work is already underway in Bel Air on a megacompound that will include the largest single-family house in the US. The enormous project, at the dead-end of Airole Way above the Bel-Air Hotel, comes from megamansion developer Nile Niami, and is slated to total 85,000 square feet with a 70,000-square-foot main house. [...]
The [Los Angeles Business Journal] guesses America's newest mega-megamansion will be listed "in the $150 million-plus range."
— la.curbed.com
In 2002, CINTRI, a branch of Canadian firm Cintec Environment Inc., was granted an exclusive 50-year contract to collect commercial and residential waste in Phnom Penh and keep the city’s main streets clean. The exact details of the company’s agreement with city hall have never been made public, but since the deal was inked, Phnom Penh’s population has swelled from just over one million to two million people. The population boom and its attendant urban sprawl seem to have caught CINTRI off-guard — nextcity.org
Ask almost any of the local architects in this Mexican border town and they will tell you Tijuana has become a hotbed of building activity.
The growing demand for designer homes, they say, is being driven primarily by Tijuana natives returning to the city...
Most of the developments in Tijuana are for upper-middle-class families ... but the spare designs and basic building materials, especially concrete, used by Mr. Medina and others make it possible for more residents to have designed homes.
— nytimes.com
A new video by doctoral student and an associate professor at Arizona State University visualizes the expansion of LA's roads, starting in 1888 and running all the way up to 2010 [...]
Variations in color denote the age of the thoroughfares, with green being the oldest roads and red being newest. Watch as the map blooms with color in the fifties and the trend carries on through the eighties to the present.
— la.curbed.com
"Growth of the Los Angeles Roadway Infrastructure, 1888 - 2010", by Andrew M. Fraser and Mikhail V. Chester, Ph.D., of Arizona State University:Compare with the following video of Los Angeles' overall growth as a city during the 20th century, from NYU's Stern Urbanization Project: View full entry
Daniel Libeskind is at it again with the recent unveiling and groundbreaking of Century Spire, a 60-story tower that will be built in the city of Makati in Manila, Philippines. Showrooms officially opened on May 28, and Libeskind joined Century Properties and Armani/Casa officials at the... View full entry
Election day means Gujarat is closed for business—except in Gift City.
Officially known as Gujarat Information Finance Tech City (hence, Gift), construction equipment is everywhere and dust is in the air. [...]
This is the type of development that Narendra Modi supporters hope will be a microcosm for the rest of India should he become prime minister. [...] Here’s a (very stylized) artist rendition of what the area will look look, according to the government brochure.
— qz.com
How many Battery Parks, CCTVs and Sliced Porosity Blocks can you spot? View full entry
A treasure trove of Coast Miwok life dating back 4,500 years - older than King Tut's tomb - was discovered in Marin County and then destroyed to make way for multimillion-dollar homes, archaeologists told The Chronicle this week.
The American Indian burial ground and village site, so rich in history that it was dubbed the "grandfather midden," was examined and categorized under a shroud of secrecy before construction began this month on the $55 million Rose Lane development in Larkspur.
— sfgate.com
When all stages are completed, the 65,000 people daily who pass through the Hudson Yards’ office towers, residences, shops, restaurants, hotel, public school, and public open space will contribute to a massive stream of data intended to help answer the big questions about how cities of the future should be managed. [...]
“It really started from the question: If we could know anything about the city, what would we want to know and how could we do a better job at measuring the pace of life?”
— fastcoexist.com
The axe is set to fall on the American Folk Art Museum -- after months of controversy and protest, MoMA initiated its expansion and began preparing the FAM for demolition this past Monday. As per prior concessions by MoMA, the museum's distinctive façade will be preserved, but it's unlikely to... View full entry
The plan’s backers say it represents a rare chance at economic revitalization for the neighborhood. Its opponents say it would destroy the fabric of Holy Cross, and might represent the first step toward changing the traditionally low-rise New Orleans waterfront into something very different [...]
“The argument is that the Lower Ninth Ward has to take what it can get,” says DeBacher. “We believe that we deserve—as any community deserves—good development, not just any development.”
— The Atlantic Cities
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 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