When we speak of the identity of a place, we express a recognition of the patterns formed around us. We may not be conscious of them to the point of being able to draw them back with precision like Stephen Wiltshire, but we can remember them in the abstract, and in this way, identify different places from the abstractions we recall of their patterns. This is how one street can look sufficiently alike another that we can identify a neighborhood, and it is also why a landscape like Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto can feel like New York City, despite the fact that every object has been reconfigured to create a parody environment.
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.
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.
Doug Farr is an architect and planner who wrote the book Sustainable Design: Urban Design with Nature. In this talk, Farr discusses how LEED certification of buildings can only do so much since it doesn’t take into account how buildings are integrated sustainably with its surroundings. He argues that we need to think differently about we organize our cities – more densely in more compact, complete, and walkable neighborhoods – to design sustainability into the way we live. The video is an hour and 20 minutes long, but may be worth it for the ideas and case studies presented about planning and architecture design.
Real estate agents often chant the mantra “location, location, location,” which essentially means “find a home in a well-kept neighborhood with good schools and a low crime rate.” Some may cite a fourth factor, “walkability,” a concept supported by self-styled “new urbanists” who advocate denser cities designed for the pedestrian and mass transit as much as for the car. In their ideal neighborhood, you could walk to a bookstore and then to an ice cream shop, and your children could walk to school, probably unescorted. (It sounds like so many movie depictions of America in the 1950s.)
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.
Orenco Station, the award winning neighborhood touted as an ideal of mass-transit oriented New Urbanism, has failed to persuade a majority of its residents to use mass transit to get to work.
About two out of three Orenco residents drive to work in cars, slightly less than some other suburbs but hardly the car-free utopia many idealists expect of the transit-oriented area. Even as the neighborhood has grown closer, block by block, to the MAX light rail station named for it, the use of cars for work trips remains relatively high.
“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.
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.
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.
