‘It’s like a mini Centre Parcs!’
Imagine a community where you like your neighbours. You share meals and your children grow up together.
Popularity: 43% [?]
urbanism.org
Urban news [almost] daily.Archive for Resilience
What Makes Cities Great
Was coal a curse to Pittsburgh? Did cars destroy Detroit? Does the dominance of a single industry destroy the innovation and entrepreneurship of a region? If it does, then the economic crisis may have actually helped New York by enabling the city to avoid an over-concentration in finance.
Popularity: 37% [?]
Space: It’s Still a Frontier
“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.
Popularity: 58% [?]
City farm to go on site of van Egeraat scheme
A “pop up” city farm is to be created on the site of Erick van Egeraat’s multi-billion-pound masterplan to regenerate east London’s Canning Town and Custom House, which starts in 2012
Popularity: 37% [?]
Urban Resilience
Merging complex systems science and ecology, resilience scientists have broken new ground on understanding—and preserving—natural ecosystems. Now, as more and more people move into urban hubs, they are bringing this novel science to the city.
Popularity: 36% [?]
Forwarding Dallas
Nature has been working forever, what challenges us now is finding how it will keep working forever. Intelligence as brought us to a point at which we have at hand an array of technical solutions that can either deprive or provide us with comfortable, culturally rich living conditions. The way we arrange such devices will ultimately make all the difference. In this project we aim at recognising how natural cycles work and replicate them; as a vast strategy, as a way to organise space, and as a model to technical solutions that are incorporated.
Popularity: 36% [?]
Fracture Critical
It’s clear in retrospect that the fracture-critical structures of the 1950s and ’60s reflected the larger culture — this was when John Kenneth Galbraith famously critiqued the United States as a nation of private affluence and public squalor. In an era when America could have afforded the best infrastructure in the world, we began instead to channel wealth into private hands and to impoverish the public realm.
Popularity: 25% [?]
A Vision of a Green Future From Arup
As part of his presentation at the Creative Places and Spaces conference, David Buckland showed this silent video prepared by global engineering firm Arup. Called Infrastructure in an Ecological Age, at 30 seconds into the video it shows the transformation of a typical city (Manchester in this case) into a green wonderland of rooftop food production, smart bus systems, turning buildings into photovoltaic and algae generators. It is all doable, too: a bright green city.
Popularity: 26% [?]
How to Design Resilient Cities
“Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change,” published earlier this year, argues that cities need to plan their future development considering their ”resiliency” to changes in climate and the availability of fossil fuels. Authors Peter Newman (Curtin University, Australia), Timothy Beatley (University of Virginia), and Heather Boyer (Harvard University) predict that in the next couple years, energy demand will outmatch oil supplies worldwide, resulting in a situation exceeding the challenges of the OPEC oil embargo in the early 1970’s.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Ecotranistional Urbanism
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.
Popularity: 57% [?]