Archive for Infrastructure
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% [?]
December 15, 2009 · Filed under Economics, Infrastructure, Landscape, Place making, Social Justice
Mike Davis and I met on a summer day in San Diego. He graciously drove his truck and showed me his collection of “interesting sites” he planned for us to see in the area. As we were visiting those places, we talked about variety of subjects.
His selection of the sites was nothing less than socio-cultural paintings in action plus a rough sketch of complex connections drawn by him.
Popularity: 35% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Highways, Infrastructure, Public Art, Suburbs, Traffic, Urban Structure
New Yorkers maintain that Los Angeles is a city with no center. But Angelenos argue that the city of freeways has its core in the Stack, a tower of overpasses — the first four-level connector interchange, according to the California Transportation Department — where the Pasadena, Harbor, Hollywood and Santa Ana freeways intersect.
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Popularity: 55% [?]
November 11, 2009 · Filed under Creative Cities, Density, Economics, Infrastructure, Investment, Real Estate, Revitalization, Shrinking Cities, Urban Agriculture
The troubles of Detroit are well-publicized. Its economy is in free fall, people are streaming for the exits, it has the worst racial polarization and city-suburb divide in America, its government is feckless and corrupt (though I should hasten to add that new Mayor Bing seems like a basically good guy and we ought to give him a chance), and its civic boosters, even ones that are extremely knowledgeable, refuse to acknowledge the depth of the problems, instead ginning up stats and anecdotes to prove all is not so bad.
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Popularity: 46% [?]
November 2, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, EcoCities, Energy, Food Deserts, Infrastructure, Landscape, Multi-Level Urbanism, Urban Agriculture
Gensler’s winning design, co-created with 4240 Architecture, transforms Chicago’s abandoned Bloomingdale rail line into a three mile long greenhouse and hydrogen generator that provides 10 acres of farm land year round, powers city schools, and creates a beacon for the city.
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Popularity: 44% [?]
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 21, 2009 · Filed under Infrastructure, Modernism, Planning, Resilience, Urban Structure
This is Los Angeles — the consummate infrastructural metropolis, famous for its networks of freeways and its dispersed, vehicle-based urbanism. This is also the departure point for The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles [ACTAR, 2008], an anthology of essays examining contemporary LA and contemporary urbanism. Today’s metropolis, as described above by volume editor Kazys Varnelis, depends upon layers of infrastructural networks — not just freeways — that connect the metropolis globally.
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Popularity: 27% [?]
October 2, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Artificial Landscapes, Infrastructure, Pedestrians, Transit
When Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle in 1900, it unveiled its vision for the future of transport. Below ground, the city’s stylish new Metro made its debut, while above ground was something more avant garde. The trottoir roulant was a moving walkway that circled the fair in a 3-kilometre loop, its articulated wooden segments “gliding around like a wooden serpent with its tail in its mouth”, according to one reporter. Nearly 7 million visitors hopped on. A few even brought folding chairs, which proved useful when one woman gave birth in transit. Her child was promptly christened Trottoir Roulant Benost. A new kind of traveller had been born.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
September 30, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, EcoCities, Infrastructure, Landscape, Revitalization, Urban Structure
Greenwich Street would be the “spine” of a more accessible neighborhood the Downtown Alliance calls Greenwich South. A vision of the future for an area would include green rooftops meant to be wildlife habitats.
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Popularity: 26% [?]
July 30, 2009 · Filed under Cities from Scratch, EcoCities, Energy, Infrastructure, Planning, Urban Design, Urban Structure, Visualization
Off-Grid Scenarios: solutions for the endless city was recently chosen by Mark Linder of Syracuse University, Stanley Tigerman of Tigerman McCurry Architects and Sarah Whiting of Princeton University as “best in show” at UIC, an annual award given to the top project of the school. The studio, which was led by Alexander Lehnerer of the ETH Zurich, was titled Chicago Rules: inclusionary regimes within the American city.
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Popularity: 57% [?]
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