Archive for Emergence
March 16, 2010 · Filed under Density, Diversity, EcoCities, Emergence, Health, Infrastructure, Investment, Parks, Resilience, Urban Agriculture
“Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.
Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.
Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.
It’s time we gave this some thought.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
That quote is 40 years old, but I continue to be amazed by the extent to which we haven’t begun to address the problem Fuller highlighted. There’s a staggering glut of empty space around the country right now, unused space that’s not doing anyone much good. That in itself isn’t new; what is unprecedented is our ability to visualize that data in an entirely new ways.
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Popularity: 58% [?]
March 10, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Diversity, Emergence, Place making, Urban Design, Urban Structure
When we speak of the identity of a place, we express a recognition of the patterns formed around us. We may not be conscious of them to the point of being able to draw them back with precision like Stephen Wiltshire, but we can remember them in the abstract, and in this way, identify different places from the abstractions we recall of their patterns. This is how one street can look sufficiently alike another that we can identify a neighborhood, and it is also why a landscape like Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto can feel like New York City, despite the fact that every object has been reconfigured to create a parody environment.
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Popularity: 27% [?]
December 15, 2009 · Filed under Diversity, Emergence, Information Design, Infrastructure
Our world is now riddled with what C. West Churchman referred to as “wicked problems”: issues like climate change, healthcare, and education that are difficult to address because of their complex interdependencies and changing requirements.
Our day-to-day lives are also full of small problems and basic tasks that are becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to frequency and volume. For example, as healthcare moves towards a more consumer-oriented model, people will be asked to electronically track every aspect of their health. Add this to the complexities of managing a Netflix queue or digital photo library, or keeping computer software up to date, and you begin to get the picture. And these are just the simple tasks. We need new strategies for engaging with these complexities.
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Popularity: 29% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Emergence, Grassroots, Master Planning, Place making
The importance of small ideas to urban revitalization isn’t widely appreciated. Particularly in the most recent real-estate cycle, many planners, design professionals, and developers produced grand schemes instead. But profound change is more likely to result from a deeply considered idea that alters an essential component of an urban environment than from an elaborate master plan that requires abundant resources and considerable political capital. While some large-scale plans, like Rockefeller Center, are successful, most become impersonal, overbearing failures—or, even more often, are stillborn, the victims of the long process of assemblage, environmental remediation, community participation, zoning adoption, and the securing of financing.
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Popularity: 33% [?]
October 23, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Climate Change, EcoCities, Ecosystems, Emergence, Infrastructure, Landscape, Resilience, Urban Structure, Water
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.
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Popularity: 57% [?]
October 15, 2009 · Filed under Density, Diversity, Emergence, Urban Design, Urban Structure
The International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, an organization sponsored by the Prince of Wales Foundation in order to support and renew traditions of construction. While this organization does great work to preserve the techniques of traditional building cultures, they have yet to define what the traditional urbanism of their name really implies. The importance of such a definition I believe to be primordial. If modern planning measures continue to be adopted from one country to the next, any traditional technique of construction will become irrelevant, as they have in western industrialized (and post-industrialized) countries.
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Popularity: 20% [?]
July 31, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Ecosystems, Emergence, Exhibitions, Landscape, Nature, Urban Structure
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The work of over 500 AA students will be shown in a combination of displays from small-scale models to 1:1 installations.
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Popularity: 55% [?]
July 28, 2009 · Filed under Diversity, Emergence, Heritage, Housing, Urban Structure
Urban society may seem a modern phenomenon but cities have been around for a lot longer than one might think. Indeed, once nomadic tribes began to settle in one location, they saw that it was good, became fruitful, and multiplied. Decades, centuries and millennia passed while war, climate change and human migration all took their toll. Relatively few ancient cities have managed to survive the test of time. Here are 10 that have not only survived, but continue to thrive.
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Popularity: 38% [?]
July 28, 2009 · Filed under Creative Cities, Emergence, Information Design, Infrastructure, Mobility, Urban Structure
So these cities of the future are still made of concrete, but also of transient slivers of silicon and amorphous clouds of wireless activity. Atoms and bits. The great promise of informatics – or whatever we end up calling it – is that the fabric of the city is once again malleable, responsive and can adapt through learning from layered patterns of behaviour. Perhaps we don’t call it informatics, but architecture and engineering, just a new form of both crafts. Yet these developments pose radical changes, from the point of view of skills, processes, business models and purpose, and Ratti and his crew of collaborators are indicating one possible future for our work. He concludes by tentatively suggesting, “It’s almost redefining, I believe, what being an architect is.”
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Popularity: 45% [?]
July 24, 2009 · Filed under Cities from Scratch, Emergence, Generative Design, Master Planning, Urban Design, Urban Structure
Mixed-used neighborhoods work because they provide a marketplace for mixed people. Each person brings along his own specialized economic know-how, and so knows how best to provide in details the building program for his specific economic activity. A neighborhood, in that sense, becomes mixed-used because it is the product of mixed users all contributing their part to its complexity.
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Popularity: 45% [?]
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