For half a century, a dark tunnel of crumbling concrete encased more than three miles of a placid stream bisecting this bustling city.
The waterway had been a centerpiece of Seoul since a king of the Choson Dynasty selected the new capital 600 years ago, enticed by the graceful meandering of the stream and its 23 tributaries. But in the industrial era after the Korean War, the stream, by then a rank open sewer, was entombed by pavement and forgotten beneath a lacework of elevated expressways as the city’s population swelled toward 10 million.
Today, after a $384 million recovery project, the stream, called Cheonggyecheon, is liberated from its dank sheath and burbles between reedy banks. Picnickers cool their bare feet in its filtered water, and carp swim in its tranquil pools.
It was in 2000 that the Chinese government formulated a plan to build 400 new cities by 2020, in order to install the migration coming from the countryside towards the new urban agglomerations. This is the equivalent of 20 cities per week.
The site, located on the Qi’Ao Island, 27 square kilometer island in the north of Zhuhai, has the potential to become a gateway for Hong Kong – Shenzhen due to its strategic location and the increasing passenger flows through it. The island is threatened to become another generic Chinese urbanization that spread across farmlands. Thus the signs of scarcity of water resources, deforestation, fish farming and industrial pollution are already present.
Jorge Ayala started first with a research of new materials for the city with regards to performance and functionality. The project generated a rich base of indexes which traduce environmental, topographical and geographical parameters into a material ready to be use for the design. The spatial strategy that Ecotransitional Urbanism uses is an implementation of the relationship between the built and its context.
400 years after Hudson found New York harbor, Eric Sanderson shares how he made a 3D map of Mannahatta’s fascinating pre-city ecology of hills, rivers, wildlife — accurate down to the block — when Times Square was a wetland and you couldn’t get delivery.
When I was growing up in New York City, on summer weekends my family would often drive to Jones Beach, the great park that Robert Moses built on the southern shore of Long Island. It wasn’t wilderness by any stretch, but it was cool and open, more than enough to put the stifling city at a distance, if only for an afternoon. But what I remember as clearly was the drive back: Manhattan appearing out of the haze, emitting wavy lines of heat like a cartoon pie. Then being back in the thick of it, with the buzz of hundreds of thousands of air conditioners making the city itself feel like a single massive machine. The contrast was clear: the ocean air and the incredible physical presence of the water were invigorating, literally life-giving in their feeling of connectedness to broader natural processes. The city was hot, dirty, disconnected; nature was hidden.
Urban sprawl has rightly been blamed for contributing to increasing fuel consumption in the United States, since many commuters have little choice but to drive to work. But policies designed to make cities more compact will do little to reduce gas consumption by 2050, in time to prevent the worst effects of climate change, according to a new report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
Dharavi, at the heart of Mumbai megalopolis, recently became the iconic symbol of slums in Asia and in the world through its intrinsic permanence, multiplicity, dynamism, density and scale. Partially caused from the emergent glamour of informality and feticisation of poverty, and its strategic location in the modernisation of the city, Dharavi emerged as the last frontier of oppositional practices confronting neo-liberal mega-projects of urban redevelopment and thus symbol of a contested urbanism.
Sometime in the last two years, the world crossed a threshold. For the first time in history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas.
For Carolyn Steel, it begs one of the great questions: How do you feed a city? We take food for granted, she says. We assume that it will magically always be there in our restaurants and supermarkets, but “it’s remarkable that cities get fed at all.”
We are as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were.
Some 120,000 people work in Tysons Corner, Va., but only 17,000 live there. To transform this hotbed of suburban gridlock into a green, walkable city, a soon-to-be-adopted plan-as envisioned by our artist-calls for as much as tripling the current square footage by expanding upward, with the tallest buildings located next to four new train stations, which should be completed by 2013.
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