When our planet is in peril, it is no surprise that major attention should be taken to cities, after all “urban centers are the ticking hearts of civilization,” to use words of Sarbuland Khan, of the Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Much has been written about how suburbs have taken people away from the city and that now suburbanites need to return back to where they came. But in reality most suburbs of large cities have grown not from the migration of local city-dwellers but from migration from small towns and the countryside.
It is true that suburban areas have been growing strongly, while core cities have tended to grow much more slowly or even to decline. The predominance of suburban growth is not just an American phenomenon, but is fairly universal in the high income world).
Popularity: 23% [?]
If the world is so flat, then why are cities growing so quickly, especially in the third world?
One might have thought that striking declines in the costs of shipping goods and communicating knowledge across space would have led to a great dispersal of population. After all, it is at least technically possible to telecommute over great distances. Yet the share of the world living in urbanized areas increased from 40.9 percent in 1985 to more than 50 percent today.
Popularity: 18% [?]
“Location, location, location” has been the mantra of the real estate industry for as long as anyone can remember. Still, as the national economy transforms in the wake of the economic crisis, the power of place will prove to be ever more important for a broad range of small businesses.
Popularity: 12% [?]
A pair of new studies say that more people than ever lie in harm’s way from earthquakes, droughts, floods and other disasters, largely because of a surge in urban populations in developing countries.
Popularity: 12% [?]
This animation presents MVRDVs vision for Greater Paris 2030. The project Paris Plus petit by MVRDV in collaboration with ACS and AAF is one of ten proposals by international architecture and urbanism teams to envision the future of the French capital and its vast agglomeration. The urban challenge has been commissioned by Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France.
Popularity: 15% [?]
In his under-appreciated novel Super-Cannes, easily amongst his best, J.G. Ballard explored the psychological, sexual, and even epidemiological implications of landscape design. This is “the secret life of the business park,” Ballard writes.
At one point the book’s narrator is speaking with the corporate director of Eden-Olympia, a planned live/work community in southern France. The director somewhat off-handedly refers to medical research that the narrator’s own wife, a doctor, has been performing: “She’s running a new computer model,” the director says, “tracing the spread of nasal viruses across Eden-Olympia. She has a hunch that if people moved their chairs a further eighteen inches apart they’d stop the infectious vectors in their tracks.”
Popularity: 9% [?]
After four decades of false starts, Mr. Chan, a 67-year-old engineer, is supervising an army of workers operating 60 gargantuan tunneling machines beneath this metropolis in southeastern China. They are building one of the world’s largest and most advanced subway systems.
The question is whether the burrowing machines can outrace China’s growing love affair with the automobile — car sales have soared ninefold since 2000. Or are a hundred Los Angeleses destined to bloom?
Popularity: 20% [?]
This is not a scientific statement by any means, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that every universe pretty much gets just one big bang.
However, architecture and planning (both professions in which I have some experience) generally are practiced as if the opposite was the case. Not in a literal sense, of course. It isn’t like we walk around our offices worrying about celestial events. Yet we are clearly entranced with the possibility of using our arts to magically sweep aside – all at once – every wrong that we see before us; replacing entire cities and neighborhoods with little mini-novas of creative destruction. The Big Bang model of urban planning – where existing matter is rubbed out, the new stuff is all good, everything is pre-decided, and the outcome inexorable. It’s very mechanistic.
Popularity: 29% [?]
With his eclectic studies, urban researcher Kai Vöckler, curator of the exhibition Balkanology: New Architecture and Urban Phenomena in South-eastern Europe is trying to accomplish a “mission impossible”: to prove that a participatory and sustainable urban life is also possible in South-eastern Europe.
Popularity: 23% [?]