Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
Indonesia expects to begin construction in the second quarter on apartments worth $2.7 billion for thousands of civil servants due to move to its new capital city on Borneo island, an official said late on Tuesday.
Authorities have already started building basic infrastructure in the area, with an aim to start relocating some government administration and civil servants in 2024.
— Reuters
The 450,000-acre starter city’s initial residential program will include 184 apartment towers for a total of 14,500 government employees. AECOM and Nikken Sekkei are leading the development of its master plan towards an expected inauguration date to coincide with the country’s Independence Day... View full entry
Multinational engineering firm AECOM announced Tuesday that it is relocating its global headquarters from Los Angeles to Dallas, effective October 1, 2021. AECOM CEO Troy Rudd and select corporate leaders will move to the company’s existing Dallas office, joining the more than 1,200 employees... View full entry
The Walt Disney Co. said Thursday it planned to build a new regional campus in central Florida to house at least 2,000 professional employees who will be relocating from Southern California to work in digital technology, finance and product development. — CNBC
Chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products, Josh D’Armaro, in a letter to employees, said the move would allow creative and business teams to be better integrated. The new campus will be located about 20 miles to the east of Disney World in a master-planned community called Lake... View full entry
Citing overcrowded conditions in Bangkok, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has said moving the capital is a possibility. [...]
“There are two possible approaches to moving the capital,” Prayut said. “The first is finding a city that’s neither too far nor too expensive to move to. The second is to decentralise the urban area to outer Bangkok to reduce crowding.”
— The Nation Thailand
In August, another Southeast Asian nation, Indonesia, announced that it had picked a site for an as-yet-unnamed new capital — away from the sinking and increasingly congested current capital Jakarta. Egypt has also been working to move its capital out of the wildly sprawling 'old' Cairo. View full entry
President Joko Widodo announced Monday that officials had chosen an area in East Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, for the as-yet-unnamed capital. Construction on the 450,000-acre site would start next year, and people would move in beginning in 2024. [...] Critics of the plan have warned that the cost of moving the capital could be untenable. [...] What’s more, shifting civil servants and their families to a new city in Borneo will not stop Jakarta from sinking, they say. — Washington Post
With some areas of Jakarta sinking as much as 10 inches a year, caused by the digging of underground aquifers and worsened by climate change, the need to relocate the capital has become more pressing in recent years. The effort will cost an estimated $33 billion, President Widodo said during... View full entry
In the language of climate change, “adaptation” refers to ways to blunt the immediate effects of extreme weather, such as building seawalls, conserving drinking water, updating building codes, and helping more people get disaster insurance. [...]
But some researchers are going further, calling for what some call the “deep adaptation agenda.”
— Bloomberg
Bloomberg's Climate & Environment Reporter, Christopher Flavelle, lays out a range of climate change projections—from the general consensus to the more pessimistic—and how an array of 'deep adaptation' measures could help to mitigate the damage. "Rather than simply asking people to water... View full entry
In a highly unusual case of urbanism, the whole town centre and its surrounding neighbourhoods are to be demolished...The 3,050 homes that would be affected by the impact of the mining – in addition to shops, offices, schools, the city hall and the hospital – will all be bought by [the LKAB mining company], knocked down and relocated. The process of moving the city will happen in phases, with the majority estimated to be completed by 2040. — The Guardian
Rapid mining activity in Kiruna is already posing a serious threat to the city, to the point that the mining company LKAB plans to relocate the entire municipality two miles eastward to prevent buildings from collapsing into the mine. The Guardian gives an overview on how locals are reacting to... View full entry
The United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square, a Modernist concrete building in the heart of Mayfair, London’s most exclusive neighborhood, has been a potential terrorist target for years, creating anxiety for both employees and neighbors...So a new embassy [by KieranTimberlake] is under construction for a move by 2017, and the residents of Mayfair are relieved. But this being Britain, the new embassy has become the object of debate and, in some quarters, ridicule. — The New York Times
Related:KieranTimberlake’s U.S. Embassy in London celebrates groundbreaking View full entry
When it was unveiled in New York City in April 1931, the starkly modern Aluminaire House was an overnight sensation that emboldened an architectural movement. Designed as a case study by architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, the three-story house, which was built in 10 days, became the first all-metal prefabricated house in the U.S. — Palm Springs Life
After Sunnyside Gardens was a no-go, it looks like the Aluminaire House will be heading to sunny Palm Springs, California, according to an announcement by Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet during a fundraising event at Palm Springs Modernism Week last month. The Aluminaire House Foundation plans on... View full entry
Atterwasch is tiny, its single street lined with sturdy brick and stone houses. The village has a single church whose bells peal out at noon each day, a small volunteer fire department, and a cemetery with a special section devoted to German soldiers who died nearby in the closing months of WWII.
Atterwasch may soon be gone.
Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, hopes to relocate the village and its residents in order to strip-mine the ground underneath for lignite, or "brown coal."
— news.nationalgeographic.com
This survey is not based solely on quality of life, number of trees or the cost of a month’s rent. Instead, we examine some cities that aim to be both smart and well managed, yet have an undeniably hip vibe. Our pick of cities that are, in a phrase, both great and good... — nytimes.com
The NYT selects Auckland, Berlin, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Curitiba, Santiago, Shanghai and Vilnius as the hippest cities for young professionals. View full entry