My Ideal City / Mi Ciudad Ideal – six-month collaborative urban design project from PSFK and W Radio in Bogota, Columbia is using social media to generate discussion and ideas from around the world. The results will be reviewed by an architect and urban planner as they redevelop a neighborhood in …
ArchiAfrika Magazine #2 – this second issue covers a wide range of topics, from the cover story on musician Hugh Masakela to African architects at Milan Design Week (shown here) to recycling practices in 6 African cities to community-built compressed-earth block schools in the Dogon to informal housing in Accra …
Announcing here.stamen.com – designers of maps and data visualizations at stamen design have been working with Nokia map data from Here.com to create shareable, embeddable WebGL 3D maps at here.stamen.com. A description of this early-release prototype: It uses 3D data from HERE for San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin to …
Living Walls Effectively Mitigate Air Pollution – investigators in Karlsruhe, Birmingham, and Lancaster have established that plantings like green walls or even trees, bushes, and creeping plants can improve air quality in cities by up to 30%. Biochemist Thomas Pugh and colleagues … conducted the street canyon study by utilising …
Adaptation: Architecture, Technology and the City – great digital magazine from the analysis-based architectural practice of Jeffrey Inaba on how cities and technology are adapting to each other. There’s a lot of thoughtful content here. A brief selection: (p. 43) Measuring the City: The infrastructure of data …
Remedies for Healthcare Design: Major industry directions you need to address – interview with Chris Seper, founder of MedCity, on trends in the business of healthcare and in hospital design. Here’s the part I found especially interesting: Hospitals are the least inviting of any buildings, but now they are the …
The world’s economic center of gravity shifts – a post in McKinsey Quarterly’s Chart Focus newsletter about … 440 largely obscure urban areas that will account for close to 50 percent of expected global GDP growth between 2010 and 2025 McKinsey Quarterly has a …
Circular bicycle bridge hovers over busy highway – walkers and bicyclists in the Dutch city of Eindhoven have a great way to cross a major intersection, via this wonderful floating bridge designed by ipv Delft. You get a taste of it in the 1-min clip accompanying the post and also …
African cities with high growth potential – about recent release of MasterCard’s African cities growth index. The index covers sub-Saharan cities. According to the the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, the urban population of Africa is expected to triple by 2050 to 1.23 billion (from 395 million in …
Santiago’s biggest newspaper takes a visual approach to urban issues – the Santiago edition of newspaper El Mercurio started a series, Santiago en 180°, with panoramic photos of sections of the city annotated with information on traffic, nearby changes, history, etc. Though a simple project, by rethinking what’s newsworthy El Mercurio has …
Going With The Flow – article in NYTimes looks at a new way the Dutch are dealing with regular flooding and what lessons it might hold for the U.S. after Hurricane Sandy. Instead of fighting to keep the water out, the Netherlands is now experimenting with controlled flooding, what …
Sci-Fi Stylings From A Legend Of Architectural Fantasy – upcoming exhibition (Feb 16-June 2, 2013) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Lebbeus Woods, Architect, will feature the visionary architect’s work since the mid-1990s (he died late last year as the exhibition was being planned). There aren’t many built projects by …
SHoP Breaks Ground on Africa’s Silicon Valley – “state-of-the-art business and technology hub” just outside Nairobi, Konza Techno City is expected to be complete in 20 years. It will include a university campus (with many universities and affiliated research labs), a technology and life sciences district, and a government …
Biomimicry used as a guiding force to design Lavasa Township – post on World Architecture News’ Metroblogs about HOK’s award-winning masterplan for 12,500-acre town of Lavasa, near Mumbai. The development is expected to [be] complete in the year 2020 and will include five planned urban villages that can accommodate …
Downtown Chicago projected in a new light – Time for a break? Watch this 3:48 min clip by Chris Pritchard of bustling Chicago in all kinds of light and shadow, from all kinds of vantage points, from on and off the water.
Chart Focus: How to compete in emerging markets – from McKinsey Quarterly’s Chart Focus newsletter, a recommendation for international companies to group cities in an emerging market by shared characteristics as a way to more efficiently expand into that region. …in China, to give just one example, …
We’re In This Together: What the Dutch Know About Flooding That We Don’t – The Dutch attitude toward flood control is very different from that in the U.S. Being a much smaller country where everyone shares the dangers of flooding, the Dutch have developed a collective approach to mitigation. That collectivist …
Happy 150th birthday to the world’s oldest underground train system. Learn more at Transport for London. The London Transport Museum has a timeline, the London Evening Standard has stories from 150 Londoners, the BBC features stamps and related stories, MSN News lists things you didn’t know about the Underground, Huffington Post has a collection …