The Hatoyama government’s ambitious carbon reduction goals position Japan for leadership in the postindustrial global economy. Less discussed is Tokyo’s remarkable energy efficiency, urban ecology innovations, and its potential for playing a leading role in the next decade’s biggest environmental challenge: creating sustainable cities with human and environmental benefits.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Visiondivison shared their entry for the Koivusaari Idea Competition to create a new city district on an island just outside Helsinki, Finland. The competition asked participants to organize a master plan for the island that would provide the framework for further planning. Visiondivison’s proposal, Urban Fade, is comprised of a highly efficient city grid that allows users the option of moving around the district to interact with the different areas.
Popularity: 69% [?]
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.
Popularity: 45% [?]
Eric Gordon, a professor of new media at Emerson College, and Gene Koo, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, just won a MacArthur Foundation grant for their innovative new take on community planning using Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world which users explore as avatars.
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Popularity: 43% [?]
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.
Popularity: 46% [?]
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.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Either enjoying the ride on their parent’s bike or following behind on their own bike, children are as much a part of urban bicycle commuting as anyone else.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Its title might be self-explanatory and it sure looks intriguing… however kokkugia fails to give a thorough description for this architectual piece. Classified as ‘peculiar image’ until further notice.
Popularity: 26% [?]