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This post is brought to you by Blank Space. The Driverless Future challenge seeks proposals that actively shape NYC’s response to driverless technology - will offer resources to help finalists transform their proposals into real companies and products.Blank Space is proud to announce... View full entry
An unpopular president, a myth-making architect, and a multibillionaire tycoon are building an oversize airport in a nature preserve. Can they make Mexico great again? — Places Journal
The progressive capital of Mexico has a long history of massive infrastructure projects — megaproyectos — with egalitarian aims. Daniel Brook looks at the social, political, and environmental issues surrounding the latest — a $13bn new airport rising on a sinking lakebed. This article... View full entry
Donald Trump has chosen Richard LeFrak and Steve Roth, “two of the wealthiest men in real estate” according to Forbes, to head a “council of builders and engineers”. This new council will be tasked with overseeing Trump’s plan to invest $1 trillion in infrastructure. As Archinect... View full entry
In the summer of 2014, Anthony McGinty and Michelle Sosa were hired by Los Angeles World Airports to lead a unique, new classified intelligence unit on the West Coast. After only two years, their global scope and analytic capabilities promise to rival the agencies of a small nation-state. Their roles suggest an intriguing new direction for infrastructure protection in an era when threats are as internationally networked as they are hard to predict. — The Atlantic
Being the world's fifth-busiest airport (74,937,004 travelers passed through LAX in 2015) makes this infrastructure megaproject one of the top-ranked terrorist and aviation targets in the country. With billions of dollars spent on the usual airport expansion and modernization projects in recent... View full entry
Uber has A rocky history with city governments—to put it mildly... Now, Uber is making something of a peace offering. The company is launching a new service that could help cities master their traffic. It’s called Uber Movement, and it uses information on the billions of rides Uber has completed. — Wired
Uber Movement is free for the select planning agencies and researchers granted access to it. With it, you can gauge travel times between any two locations. Since, as Uber's chief of transportation policy notes, Uber doesn't actually do any urban planning, they figure they might as well give all... View full entry
Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times has published an article about the 65,000 new streetlights now illuminating the streets of Detroit. This seemingly prosaic infrastructural adjustment actually has a lot of import. For a long time, according to the article, Detroit’s decline was... View full entry
Nominee for Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao laid out her vision for DOT should the senate confirm her, and it's heavy on lifting regulations while breezing past funding issues. According to Politico:Chao said she wants to reduce "regulatory burdens when appropriate." And she hopes to speed... View full entry
It's not at all clear that President-elect Donald Trump's plans to spend massively on infrastructure are going to unfold as he promised.
Trump made rebuilding the nation's aging roads, bridges and airports very much part of his job-creation strategy in the presidential race. But lately lobbyists have begun to fear that there won't be an infrastructure proposal at all, or at least not the grand plan they'd been led to expect.
— AP
More on President-elect Trump:Former Texas Governor Rick Perry nominated as Secretary of U.S. Department of EnergyCities should be very wary of Trump's 'Plan for Urban Renewal'Trump pilfers Clinton's plan for an 'infrastructure bank'Why is Trump seeking private equity for public infrastructure? View full entry
A key member of Donald Trump’s transition team said the incoming administration is exploring ways to fund fixing bridges and roads including by establishing an “infrastructure bank,” a concept Hillary Clinton promoted and the Republican’s campaign had previously derided.
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Trump’s campaign had criticized Clinton’s proposed infrastructure bank as being “controlled by politicians and bureaucrats in Washington” and funded by a “$275 billion tax increase on American businesses.”
— bloomberg.com
Find out more about Trump and Clinton's plans to remedy America's crumbling infrastructure here.More on the President-elect:Architects Respond to the AIA’s Statement in Support of President-Elect Donald TrumpCompared to AIA letters issued during Obama's election, CEO Robert... View full entry
The indefatigable Paul Krugman takes a closer look at Trump's proposed infrastructure funding plans in his column for The New York Times, wondering why the President-elect would seek private equity for public projects. Is this a profiteering scheme that sneakily privatizes ownership of... View full entry
US President-Elect Donald Trump, who built his business on constructing towers, used his victory speech early today in New York to repeat his pledge to put “millions of people to work” rebuilding American infrastructure, airports, schools and hospitals.
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“We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals,” he said to whoops and applause.
— Global Construction Review
“We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none, and we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”More on how the Trump residency may impact the built environment:AIA releases statement on 2016 U.S. Election results... View full entry
Each day, New York’s public garbage trucks collect nearly 7,000 tonnes of residential mixed solid waste. After finishing their routes, most of these trucks will deposit the garbage in one of New York’s waste transfer stations located throughout the city. From there, the garbage will eventually be loaded on to a barge or train and carried as far as 600 miles to its final stop. For most of New York’s mixed solid waste (about 80% of it by tonnage), this last stop will be a landfill. — the Guardian
"The remaining 20% will end up at a waste-to-energy plant, where it will be incinerated and converted into energy."For more on the infrastructure of waste, follow these links:Shitting Architecture: the dirty practice of waste removalGeotectura's ZeroHome turns waste into... View full entry
The Dutch-Chinese firm NEXT Architects has a well-deserved reputation for designing eye-catching bridges. Their latest project, a bright red, Mobius strip-like pedestrian bridge for the Chinese city of Changsha, is set to become another jewel in their portfolio. Credit: Julien Lanoo185 metres long... View full entry
LIke everything else in the 21st century, infrastructure is no longer about big moves but rather about nuance, refinement, and creative strategy. This is the argument advocated by The Hill, which makes the case that all infrastructure projects should be resilient and made to serve multiple... View full entry
It’s going to be “yuge”. It’s an inflated descriptor thrown around a lot these days, but architects have always been trained to think big, whether laying out bathroom plumbing or master planning cities. Sometimes those ideas get built; sometimes others build on those ideas. This October on... View full entry
