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Designers for The Wave, Muscat, were tasked with the challenge of engineering a luxury, mixed-use development stretching along six kilometres of natural beach coastline between Al-Athaiba and Al-Mawelah while ensuring it was protected as much as possible from the Sea of Oman. — DesignBuild Source
'[R]emember that a place like Dubai really emerged in the last 50 years. It was a sleepy, you know, Bedouin town half a century ago. And what you do is when you bring in the world’s, you know, most sophisticated architects and engineers, you can literally build anything, including a building of 140 or 150 stories. But designing a municipal network of sewage treatment is in some ways more complex. - KATE ASCHER — Boing Boing
Terry Gross recently interviewed Kate Ascher about her skyscraper book, and ended up discussing the common lack of sewage connections in Dubai - including the Burj Khalifa. So they end up using trucks to cart the sewage to the central treatment plant, where they often end up queuing for 24-hours... View full entry
As it turns out, infrastructure really matters. Your chance of injury drops by about 50 percent, relative to that major city street, when riding on a similar road with a bike lane and no parked cars. The same improvement occurs on bike paths and local streets with designated bike routes. And protected bike lanes – with actual barriers separating cyclists from traffic – really make a difference. The risk of injury drops for riders there by 90 percent. — m.theatlanticcities.com
Terminal workers speak a florid corporate language of “space optimization” and “key performance indicators.” Longshoremen click computer mice and complain about Microsoft Windows as everyone else in the white-collar world does. — NYT
Over the weekend Alan Feuer, took readers along on a tour of the six container terminals belonging to the The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The visit gave him an opportunity to report on how the; infrastructural-logistical pressures of a post-Panamax infrastructure, along with... View full entry
One of the longest bridges in northern China collapsed on Friday, just nine months after it opened, setting off a storm of criticism from Chinese Internet users and underscoring questions about the quality of construction in the country’s rapid expansion of its infrastructure. — nytimes.com
Just one month ago: Beijing Infrastructure Not Fit for Torrential Rains View full entry
As growth slows, China's huge investment in infrastructure is looking ever harder to sustain, leaving a string of ambitious projects - towns, shopping malls and even a theme park - empty and forlorn. — bbc.co.uk
As China's flood-ravaged capital dealt with the aftermath of the heaviest rain in six decades Monday, including the deaths of 37 people, questions were being raised about whether the city's push for modernization came at the expense of basic infrastructure such as drainage networks. [...]
The city has seen tens of billions of dollars poured into its modernization [...] — all while basics like water drainage were apparently neglected.
— npr.org
The city is deep in debt; it's got a state-appointed board managing its finances, so it's gotta cut services it can't afford. Services that it can't afford in part because it's a city built for two million people that's now home to just over 713,000.
So street lights could be a luxury Detroit can't completely afford.
— marketplace.org
In anticipation of this week's event, Publish Or... bracket [GOES SOFT], we are showcasing a piece from the book each day this week. We hope to see you this Thursday! ESP // Estuary Services Pipeline by Bionic / Marcel Wilson The Estuary Services Pipeline is a regional utility... View full entry
[Beijing] started expanding the system in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and has kept pushing forward ever since. In 2001 it had 33 miles of track. Today it has 231.
Meanwhile, when you hear the completion dates for big U.S. transit projects you often have to calculate your age to figure out if you’ll still be alive.
— salon.com
The new 1.1-kilometer (0.68 miles) route will link the Greenwich Peninsula next to the O2 Arena with the Royal Docks on the north bank of the Thames and will cost an estimated £40 million ($65 million)... Transport for London (TfL) are hoping that building work on what will be the first urban transport system of its kind in the UK will be completed in time for the opening of the London 2012 Olympics on July 27. — Matthew Knight, CNN
The line is expected to take 2,500 per hour 300 feet above the River Thames with an a trip lasting just 5 minutes. Design by Wilkinson Eyre, of Gateshead Bridge and Guangzhou International Finance Centre fame, will be constructed by Mace, who's known for projects such as the London Eye and the... View full entry