Archive for Emergence
June 30, 2009 · Filed under Emergence, Generative Design, Urban Design, Urban Structure, Visualization
In ‘You are the City’, the 22 diagram drawings are split into four operational categories: Cosmological Ground; Leglisative Agencies; Currents, Flows and Forces; Nodes, Loops and Connections.
By combining different sheets, and adding layers, a huge range of different compositions can be created – a handmade decon version of SimCity. It invites the user to make new urban connections and realities, as different spatial arrangements and possibilities reveal themselves. In these digital days it’s quite refreshing to play with something so low-tech and tactile. The slick sophistication of digital interfaces often make it easier to gloss over them, here the simple act of shuffling clear plastic sheets and seeing the resultant overlays makes for a contemplative pleasure.
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Popularity: 46% [?]
June 25, 2009 · Filed under Emergence, Information Design, Media, Mobility, Visualization
When real-world and computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time, you have reached augmented reality (AR). Combining live video imagery with computer-generated graphics, motion-tracking and other data, Layar promises a mobile web where users can walk down a city street and receive real time demographic information, histories of buildings, and block-by-block news. and More…
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Popularity: 39% [?]
June 18, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Artificial Landscapes, Cities from Scratch, Creative Cities, EcoCities, Emergence, Infrastructure, Master Planning, Nature, Urban Design
Most “green building” solutions are actually obvious: extremely good insulation, smart ways to use natural ventilation, and, perhaps, ways to reduce water use or recycle water. If you want to get fancy with it, throw in a solar panel or two; add on a couple of smart energy meters.
But what’s next? What’s the future of green, after we address those basics outlined above?
The architect Michael Pawlyn has created some of the world’s most intriguing answers.
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Popularity: 32% [?]
May 26, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Diversity, Emergence, Gentrification, Planning, Urban Actions
In pre-modern map making processes, “…unknown land within the “known” world was frequently filled with pseudo-topographies, including speculative mountain ranges, vegetation, and rivers.”(1) As map making became increasingly influenced by scientific paradigms and empirical procedures during the eighteenth century it became less acceptable to fill in the blank spaces of the map with fictional speculations and instead those areas that had not been surveyed by Europeans were retained as blank.
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Popularity: 21% [?]
May 8, 2009 · Filed under Beauty, Diversity, Economics, Emergence, Happiness, Health, Statistics
If the rest of the world cannot get it right in these unhappy times, this tiny Buddhist kingdom high in the Himalayan mountains says it is working on an answer.
“Greed, insatiable human greed,” said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, describing what he sees as the cause of today’s economic catastrophe in the world beyond the snow-topped mountains. “What we need is change,” he said in the whitewashed fortress where he works. “We need to think gross national happiness.”
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Popularity: 21% [?]
May 8, 2009 · Filed under Emergence, Grassroots, Planning
Cities, by their very nature, are always in a state of change. Responding to the myriad of internal and external forces placed upon them, they ebb and flow continually. At certain times throughout history, the profound changes have shaken the foundation of cities and the human made systems that create them – many of which decline as a result.
We are living in such a time: as radical environmental, social and economic shifts have driven us to question the way we have organized and planned our urban centres for the past century. Cities are currently developing and changing at a rate exponentially faster than planners’ attempts to shape them. Economic, political and environmental circumstances are changing so quickly that by the time a plan is realized, it is often already obsolete. As we have readily witnessed locally, a sudden change in political leadership or economics can fundamentally alter the assumptions and objectives of a project or planning initiative.
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Popularity: 15% [?]
April 6, 2009 · Filed under Diversity, Emergence, Generative Design, Planning
Of the different domains of design urban design is an oddity. While the design of a machine can be traced to a definite, deliberate act of invention, and even the design of buildings (architecture) is rooted in known production processes, the design of cities was never seriously attempted until well after cities had become a normal, ordinary aspect of civilized living, and while the design of machines and buildings was a conscious effort to solve a particular problem or set of problems, cities appeared in the landscape spontaneously and without conscious effort. This places the efficacy of urban design in doubt. The designers of machines and buildings know fully how the processes that realize their design operate, and this knowledge allows them to predictably conceive the form they are designing. Urban designers do not enjoy such a certainty.
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Popularity: 24% [?]
February 21, 2009 · Filed under Creative Cities, Emergence, Slums
In many ways, Dharavi is the ultimate user-generated city. Each of its 80-plus neighborhoods has been incrementally developed by generations of residents updating their shelters and businesses according to needs and means. As Ramesh Misra, a lawyer and lifelong resident, puts it: “We have always improved Dharavi by ourselves. All we want is permission and support to keep doing it. Is that asking for too much?”
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Popularity: 17% [?]
February 16, 2009 · Filed under EcoCities, Emergence, Families, Garden Cities, Nature, Public Life, Urban Agriculture
FRUIT takes up the challenge of elevating the ecological knowledge of consumers and encouraging a way of life that is friendly to the environment. We want consumers to be conscious of the entire life of a product, from production to utilization, and not just what they see in the stores. Consumers must be aware that every phase of a product’s life influences the environment and ourselves. While cities are often seen as set aside from nature, we aim to investigate the agriculture which feeds urban dwellers. For Beyond Green, Free Soil will use oranges as a vehicle to explore the complex relationships that make up the worlds Food Systems.
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Popularity: 28% [?]
February 9, 2009 · Filed under Density, EcoCities, Emergence, Families, Grassroots, Shelter, Urbanization
The Mumbai shanty town featured in the film Slumdog Millionaire offers a better model than does western architecture for ways to house a booming urban population in the developing world, Prince Charles said yesterday.
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Popularity: 28% [?]
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