Some office buildings in Toronto are cooled by water from Lake Ontario instead of air conditioning. Check out this and four other ideas for creating smarter cities.
Start Up Street - What will you start up?
I absolutely love the ambition of this! It’s a very commendable example of using local skills, knowledge and assets to make something bigger!
Architecture+Design Scotland have launched ‘Start Up Street” in Stirling (Scotland), in response to an ideas workshop attended by the members of the local community, business owners and the Council, to examine how to generate sustainable economic activity and employment opportunities locally in Stirling.
The ‘start up street’ in Stirling is a local street that currently has 7 empty shops. They plan to use the underutilised assets to set up a hub to explore creative solutions that could stimulate and develop local enterprise and economic activity and deliver positive outcomes. To set the ball rolling the video also gives some great examples of various projects that could be launched that focus on health and well-being.
The High Street is a key element of our settlements. Its role as the central space of villages, towns and cities has been challenged by changes in the pattern of retail, of leisure, and living. In many High Streets in many settlements there are vacant and underutilised assets. In some cases the High Street is under pressure. It is an issue of concern for many, from businesses, to citizens, to investors.
Meeting the challenge of how to re-think the High Street as a central place requires creative thinking about how we make the best of what we already have. The communities in Stirling City Centre recently participated in a co-design exercise to re-think the centre of the City. The Urban Ideas Bakerybrought together citizens, officers of the Council, businesses and other stakeholders to look at how the people resources of the city and the spatial resources might be managed differently. Out of this thinking emerged an idea to re-consider King Street as a ‘start up street’, which enables business start ups, scaling of small business and curating events and activities in the public space. The proposal is to explore how people with ideas, talents and capabilities in the city can be matched with the available spaces in the city, supported by a community of interest. This idea is being tested in a prototype phase to engage a wide range of interests in exploring how the idea works, what is feasible, what is not. The objective is to use this practical method of testing the idea to develop a live project, to start small and build up a sustainable, self supporting enterprise.
The project is open to anyone with an interest in High Streets, how they work, and how they can be enhanced. This short video explains the thinking behind ‘Start Up Street’, whats involved and how you can get involved.
via irishboyinlondon:
Atelier Bow-Wow’s completed ‘BMW Guggenheim Lab’ pavilion opens in New York City as part of a 6-year initiative exploring new ideas for urban living.
via designboom
Digital Urbanisms: The overlap of social media and architecture in urban space
Here’s a great article from Metropolis Magazine (Here but Not Here, by Andrew Blum) that addresses the yet to be discovered overlap in architecture and social media. This overlap is precisely what my research in China is about - how the use of cellphones and computers changes people’s…
Reading the Evolution of Places | Sustainable Cities Collective
This essay is a virtual collaboration with Ana Maria Manzo, a Valencia, Venezuela architect who frequently writes in English and Spanish at the place of dreams and el lugar de los sueños, respectively. Although we have not met, we were compelled — by shared and determined optimism during a time of upheaval in certain world regions — to combine perspectives on how best to read urban evolution.
The evolution of place is far from a linear process. Rather, it is an interactive story which features the blending of many dimensions.
Time, of course, creates new and old approaches to the look and feel of habitation, workplace, and the transportation routes between. The elements of water and land interface and interact, sometimes together, with the built environment. Climate drives seasons and forms of building, access and the manipulation of light. And cultural approaches to ownership and stewardship modify these responses to climate, and create alternative forms of building on the ground.
Today, we are driven by a new sustainability ethic, necessarily systemic in scope. Carbon-neutrality is a commonly stated goal, and location efficiency, clean energy and the return of neighborhood are the watchwords of change. Formulas, metrics, and new regulatory systems attempt results, and show the quest to measure how close we are to achieving ideal forms of location and development.
But as both of us have written in different languages, context is key, and adaptation to a multi-environmental sense of place, associated imagery and sensation is an essential element of building design, urban development and innovation going forward.
You Are Listening To | The Sounds of Cities
youarelistening.to appeared online on March 6, 2011 and I was hooked instantly. The combination of the police scanner and ambient music is an intriguing, and distinctly live, experience (unlike most of the time shifted audio I tend to consume). Its other appeal is its simple and elegant execution. There are three component parts: a police radio stream from Radio Reference, a pre-screened ambient music playlist from SoundCloud, and a cool photo from Flickr. Each element is from some other source, that never could have envisioned that this is the way their content would be used. This is the power of a shareable and mashable web.
Building Better Cities -Urban planner Arif Hasan charts the scale of settlement in Pakistan and its consequences.
Hassan surprises the audience with statistical evidence that calls for a second look at the population demographic.
About the speaker
An architect, teacher and social researcher, Arif Hasan has worked diligently to promote urban planning through the Urban Resource Centre. He has worked on various sites in Karachi and has developed successful housing programs including Urban Community program, Hasan Square and the Orangi Upgrading Project.
Mr. Hasan has worked on both local and international levels by serving as a consultant to United Nations agencies in hopes of facilitating better building practices among the people of the world. In 1990, Mr. Hasan was awarded the International Year for the Shelterless Memorial Award by the Japanese government, the Prince Claus Award for Urban Heroes in 2000. He also went on to receive the Hilal-e-Imtiaz by the Government of Pakistan and is an Ashoka Fellow.
via socialconsciousness:
Beyond Sprawl: Creating Self-Contained Neighborhoods | Sustainable Cities Collective
A rendering of Dockside, in British Columbia Credit: Busby, Perkins + Will
Look at many large North American cities and you see a sea of suburban houses. Sprawl has become the norm. But it is costly, damages the environment and affects quality of life. A new generation of planners and architects is beginning to look at sustainable, human-centered solutions to the creeping suburbs. There are several reasons for the rise of the suburbs. The planning structures put in place after WW II encouraged the construction of low-density neighborhoods. Low gas prices created a car-dependent culture. And most developers are resistant to changing the paradigm of the suburbs because it has worked for them. The four architects profiled in this series offer their own analyses of how North America has come to face this situation, and how it might be solved.
Amsterdam Osdorp
by The QBF
What architecture & urban planning could be…
“MetaboliCity will be presented in Venice in September as part of the Design Week that coincides with the venice biennale’s international architecture exhibition its great to see that are value are also reflected in the U.S. pavilion that will showcase the work of seven architects and collectives who act independently as forces for social change….
one of the projects that will be on display is ‘new york city (steady) state’ by new york based non profit organization terreform led by architect michael sorkin.”
-http://www.metabolicity.com/profiles/blogs/terreform-michael-sorkins-re
via edificecomplex
(via citybreaths)
