London, Chicago and Rotterdam look to emulate New York’s Highline.(via BBC News - New York’s High Line: Why cities want parks in the sky)
(via thisbigcity)
(via urbantimes)
(via urbantimes)
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Cities | Sustainable Cities Collective
- Be Proactive. There’s much any city can do today. Even without sufficient budget or authorization from ‘senior levels’ of government, every city has a full menu of things that can be carried out immediately, generating positive momentum and goodwill. Business rewards the active entrepreneur, and the public desperately wants active cities. The rewards are great.
- Plan – Plan Right. All cities carry out master plans for their key services, long-term infrastructure needs, and land use planning. Before starting these plans, the end needs to be clear. They are guidance documents, aspirational, and ways to rally supporters and give fair hearing to opponents. But a plan, no matter how good, can never be seen as a finished product. Before starting the plan an agreement is needed that the city is moving forward on this issue: the plan is the vehicle to bring along as many supporters as possible and identify potential potholes and trouble en route. Like a city, good plans are living documents.
- Put First Things First. How many cities have we visited where they are building a new grand City Hall, yet much of the garbage still isn’t being collected or the water isn’t flowing? A city’s priorities should be basic services, professionalism and quality of staff, clear metrics, a reliable ongoing base budget, and nurturing a respectful two-way conversation with its residents. All great buildings need a solid foundation.
Tsunami-proof micro-villages, a design response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake by Sako Architects. Bears some resemblance to a Fujian Tulou
12 Floating Airports That Turn City Skylines and Rivers into Landing Strips | Gizmodo
Whether sitting atop the Hudson or drifting just above a skyscraper, these conceptual floating airports put landing strips where they’re needed most: in the middle of bustling metropoleis. Our friends at Oobject have assembled 12 of the best.
Be sure to also check out these converted jets and jungle planes.
Peter Calthorpe on ‘Resilient Cities: Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change’
From the California Academy of Sciences, via Fora TV:
This event is the second part of a two-part discussion featuring Bay Area architect and planner Peter Calthorpe, author of Sustainable Communities and Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, discusses the aspects of a livable city.Click here for part 1 featuring Timothy Beatley, author of Biophilic Cities and Resilient Cities. For more from Calthorpe check out his interview with Grist where he explains ‘Why urbanism is the cheapest, smartest way to fight climate change’.
via plantedcity:
Tube City: A sustainable water-purifying city for Delhi
Tube City is a design for a 21 km long tube running over the Yamuna River in the city of Delhi. Conceived by Abhinay Sharma, the tube itself would be a living sustainable city with in-house farms and residential, commercial and office zones. A central metro spine and road network would keep the tube well connected, and the structure could also draw in water from the river for purification and consumption.
(via Ufahari)
via poptech:
Top 10 Indicators of Good Urban Design
There are so many things to consider when designing a city- but when considering urban design specifically, here are what I believe to be the top 10 indicators of a well-designed place (in no particular order):
1 A Space Becomes a Place
2 Built on the Past
3 Connected to the Landscape
4 Expect the Unexpected
5 Mix and Match
6 Cohesion, Not Uniformity
7 Economically Viable
8 Equitable and Inclusive
9 Environmentally Conscious
10 Focus on the People, Not the Car
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.
