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: 24% [?]
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: 23% [?]
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: 19% [?]
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: 31% [?]
“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: 22% [?]
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: 53% [?]
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.
Popularity: 30% [?]
Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world. Understanding the flow of food will help us reconnect with what we eat.
Popularity: 24% [?]
The competition resulted in more than 50 inquiries and 22 formal entries received from around the globe, including proposals centered on cities in India, Mexico, Israel, Tibet, Germany, as well as the USA and Canada. “Many of the entries presented very credible and implementable solutions that could be utilized today to move our cities towards greater resiliency,” said Craig Applegath, founding member and moderator of ResilientCity.
Popularity: 26% [?]
You’ve heard all the reasons before: We drive too much. We eat too much meat and processed food. We spend too much time with plugged-in devices—computers, TVs, air conditioners.
But what problem are we talking about—climate change, or the worldwide rise in obesity?
Popularity: 39% [?]