Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
Last year, skyrocketing demand sent a record $128 billion into investments for E.V. manufacturing and battery plants, which require a large footprint. A battery plant can cover 4.5 million square feet, roughly the size of 25 Walmart Supercenters. Projections suggest the country may need 120 or more additional such plants.
Before those batteries and the cars that use them can be made, they must be conceptualized. So automakers are pouring money into research and development facilities.
— The New York Times
The Times speculates that the money being dumped into facilities that support E.V. development could lead to a golden era of highly technical corporate design for car manufacturers. Projects such as El Dorado’s 300 Kansas in San Francisco and the Snøhetta-led Research & Engineering Campus for... View full entry
Never before has a mundane theory of urbanism been such a lightning rod for outrage [...] Some online forums have claimed that the 15-minute city represents the first step towards an inevitable Hunger Games society, in which residents will not be allowed to leave their prescribed areas. They see it not as a route to a low-traffic, low-carbon future, but as the beginning of a slippery slope to living in an open-air prison. — The Guardian
The man widely credited with developing the “15-minute city” concept, Colombian-born French academic Carlos Moreno, is the most likely source for paranoia owing to his radical left-wing identity. Though, as Wainwright points out, the idea dates to the 1920s, many conspiracists view its... View full entry
The Biden Administration has announced 21 winners of its $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge funded through last year’s American Rescue Plan and administered by the U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA). Five-year capital grants ranging between $... View full entry
“It’s not that no one has a car,” said Peter Kindel, an urban design and planning principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who helped create the framework plan for the site that project overseers approved last year. “We’re suggesting it’s more than possible to live with one car to make that big-box [store] trip or go skiing. But for families and young people that are going to be part of the community, they won’t need that on a day-to-day basis.” — Bloomberg
The 600-acre The Point development in Draper, Utah, will replace an aging prison complex and will include some 40,000 parking spaces — a typical figure for a community of its planned size of about 13,000 residents. Previously on Archinect: A '15-minute' planned community is set to... View full entry
Researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab have unveiled their latest project, which seeks to understand human mobility in cities. Titled Wanderlust, the project uses large-scale cellphone data to understand the movement of people in the metro areas of Boston, Abidjan, Braga, Lisbon, Porto, Dakar... View full entry
Early in 2020, Archinect reported on Toyota and BIG's collaborative project "Woven City." The 175-acre project aims to turn the former factory site located in the city of Susono in Shizuoka, Japan into a "revolutionary smart city." On February 24, 2021, Toyota announced that the "futuristic city"... View full entry
BIG has drawn up the masterplan for the “Toyota Woven City”, which will transform a 175-acre former factory site in the city of Susono in Shizuoka into a new smart city that will be fully “dedicated to the advancement of all aspects of mobility”. Bjarke Ingels and Toyota CEO Akio... View full entry
This all makes what is happening now all the more remarkable. Last summer, Ford Motor Company announced it had bought the building, with plans to invest $740million to transform it into a world-leading research centre for ‘future mobility’. The very industry that signed the station’s death warrant in the first place is now set on resuscitating it as a beacon of sustainable transport. — The RIBA Journal
Oliver Wainwright pens a piece on the upcoming renovation of the Michigan Central Station, which was a celebrated icon of Detroit when it first opened in 1913. After the station closed in 1988 and was abandoned, it became the epitome of the city's ruin porn. After buying the building last summer... View full entry
Whether you live in San Francisco or New York, [Seiichi] Miyake has shaped the streets that we walk on.
That’s because Miyake invented the tactile squares installed near the edge of subway platforms and street crosswalks. Originally called Tenji blocks and sometimes referred to as braille blocks, the bright yellow tiles have bumps that help visually impaired people navigate potentially dangerous public spaces.
— Curbed
The yellow floor tiles commonly installed in street corners, subway platforms and urban areas in general are one of the most pervasive and effective forms of accessibility design in the modern era (and it was under our noses all along). The subtlety and minimal obstruction of Seiichi's design made... View full entry
The most densely populated rural area in the world, East Africa's Lake Victoria basin is home to 35 million people. Many in hard-to-reach, rural locations, these communities often lack necessary infrastructure, separating them from vital services as well as from markets where they can sell their... View full entry
AERIAL FUTURES, a non-profit think tank exploring innovation in the architecture of flight, have created a new film titled Urban Constellations looking at the relationship between a city and its airports. Using NYC as a case study, this video asks how fragmented pieces of infrastructure can be... View full entry
The value of all this for engineering is currently hypothetical. But what if transport engineers were to improvise design solutions and get instant feedback about how they would work from their own embodied experience? What if they could model designs at full scale in the way choreographers experiment with groups of dancers? What if they designed for emotional as well as functional effects? — The Conversation
UCL Urban Design and Culture Researcher John Bingham-Hall writes about how choreography techniques can potentially be used by engineers in designing solutions for better city-planning and mobility. “We need new approaches in order to help engineers create the radical changes needed to make it... View full entry
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
Car and Driver caught up with Foxx in Pittsburgh. The DOT chief, previously mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, reflected on the promise of autonomous and connected cars, the recent Smart City Challenge, the massive increase in traffic deaths, the potential of the shared vehicles unfolding right outside the window, and more. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for grammar and brevity. — blog.caranddriver.com
Related stories in the Archinect news: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"Uber lets you hail its self-driving cars in Pittsburgh later this monthColumbus, Ohio wins DOT's $50M Smart... View full entry
“I believe it’s important for all ages to interact on a day to day basis. It...hopefully removes the labelling of people as ‘elderly’ or ‘past it’ and the self-fulfilling behaviours that are often generated by this.”
“Cities need cross-generational activities...People living alone of whatever age can become isolated, lonely and then mental health problems can develop.”
“Teach young people that we are not going to move over, nor do we have to.”
— The Guardian
How do you define an age-friendly city? Share in the comment section below.More on Archinect:Nation's first combined housing complex for LGBT youth and seniors coming to HollywoodLoneliness is on the rise throughout the world's citiesMidwest developer planning shared residence for seniors and... View full entry
