Archive for Water
November 3, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, EcoCities, Ecosystems, Landscape, Master Planning, Nature, Parks, Public Life, Public Space, Urban Design, Water
For half a century, a dark tunnel of crumbling concrete encased more than three miles of a placid stream bisecting this bustling city.
The waterway had been a centerpiece of Seoul since a king of the Choson Dynasty selected the new capital 600 years ago, enticed by the graceful meandering of the stream and its 23 tributaries. But in the industrial era after the Korean War, the stream, by then a rank open sewer, was entombed by pavement and forgotten beneath a lacework of elevated expressways as the city’s population swelled toward 10 million.
Today, after a $384 million recovery project, the stream, called Cheonggyecheon, is liberated from its dank sheath and burbles between reedy banks. Picnickers cool their bare feet in its filtered water, and carp swim in its tranquil pools.
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Popularity: 62% [?]
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: 53% [?]
October 15, 2009 · Filed under EcoCities, Water
I am co-curating an exhibition in conjunction with the University of Toronto, InfraNet Lab and Alphabet City, which includes a daylong symposium. Called Hydrocity, the symposium/exhibition will be “devoted to studying the relationship between urban forms and the hydrological systems in which they are embedded.”
If the twentieth century has been marked by our global thirst for fuel, the twenty-first century, will be defined by our collectively growing need for water. Impending water shortages are changing patterns of urbanization and requiring increasingly elaborate infrastructures by which to source, collect, divert and transport water to the urban centres that hold a growing majority of the world’s population. These population centres will in turn need to be redesigned and retrofitted to conserve, collect, repurify, and recirculate increasingly precious water resources while at the same time rethinking and rebuilding their cities’ relationships with the complex watersheds on which they are built and upon which they depend. The resulting liquid infrastructure is poised to redefine our notion of natural and artificial landscapes, as disparate ecological environments are networked and conflated. What forms of urbanism and landscape systems will emerge, and what design potentials exist, in this expanding liquid infrastructure?
Participants in the symposium include such top-notch hydrospatialists as Alan Berger, of P-REX; Katherine Rinne, of Aquae Urbis Romae; and Aziza Chaouni and Liat Margolis, whose have also organized a traveling exhibition with a similar theme, The Out of Water Project.
As for the exhibition, some projects have already been selected, but the curators are very keen to include other visionary projects — “built, unbuilt, dreamed, etched, scripted, carpet-bombed, etc.” — that address the same issues, preferably recent and unpublished.
To be considered, send a PDF (3 pages or less and under 6Mb) of any project by October 15 to editors[at]infranetlab[dot]org. Space is limited, so earlier submission is preferred.
Popularity: 15% [?]
July 2, 2009 · Filed under Climate Change, Visualization, Water
As a U.S. citizen I’m trying to decide my own position on climate legislation “The American Clean Energy and Security Act,” aka the Waxman-Markey bill (pros/cons via Worldchanging), now going through congress. Should my letters to congressional representatives be for or against? At the same time, last Thursday I attended “Sustainable Lives? The challenges of low-carbon living in a changing economic climate” a conference in London by the RESOLVE research group. I’m interested in their “lifestyles” strand looking at sustainable consumption.
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Popularity: 27% [?]
June 18, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, EcoCities, Infrastructure, Urban Design, Water
Sometimes it’s not the lack of water that causes problems but the difficulties in reaching the nearest water source that can send societies scrounging. But for centuries, inventive city planners have found ways to work around that challenge, moving mass amounts of water over incredible distances. Read on to see some of the most brilliant ways - both ancient and modern - that humans have found to control their water supply.
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Popularity: 27% [?]
June 11, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Artificial Landscapes, Density, Ecosystems, Landscape, Water
Typically, wastewater is drained away via a complex network of tunnels that requires vast financial resources just for its maintenance, an infrastructure that’s undoubtedly deteriorating just as fast as tax revenues get siphoned off away from public works budgets to General Motors and Bank of America. Miles and miles away from its point of origin, the water then gets treated in an energy intensive process. But it still isn’t entirely clean afterwards. Thus, when discharged, it still poses a risk to bodies of water, contributing in many instances to elevated bacterial count and eutrophication.
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Popularity: 29% [?]
May 15, 2009 · Filed under Climate Change, Ecosystems, Water
That the news is familiar makes it no less alarming: 1.1 billion people, about one-sixth of the world’s population, lack access to safe drinking water. Aquifers under Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok, and dozens of other rapidly growing urban areas are drying up. The rivers Ganges, Jordan, Nile, and Yangtze — all dwindle to a trickle for much of the year. In the former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea has shrunk to a quarter of its former size, leaving behind a salt-crusted waste.
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Popularity: 24% [?]
February 4, 2009 · Filed under Climate Change, Urbanization, Water
These projections of per-capita water availability were made by Martina Floerke and colleagues at the University of Kassel in Germany. They combined different types of forecast to obtain their results. A computer model of climate change developed by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre generates projections of how temperatures and rainfall are likely to change in the future.
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Popularity: 29% [?]
January 31, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Cities from Scratch, EcoCities, Families, Garden Cities, Highways, Traffic, Transit, Urban Design, Visualization, Water
I have always loved those great Cities of the Future from the thirties even to the present; they always present some bucolic vision that is never quite achieved. Canon set up a vision at the CES show to showcase their high def cameras; Unpluggd said “Think Playmobil meets TV studio diorama.”
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Popularity: 80% [?]
January 21, 2009 · Filed under Health, Multi-Level Urbanism, Nature, Transit, Urban Design, Water
Manhattan’s Annex: The Crosstown Excess proposes ten “waterscrapers” that would slice across the urban space of Manhattan, cutting through buildings, through parks, and through the urban grid itself, forming strange aquatic intersections with the city.
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Popularity: 37% [?]
