January 2011
51 posts
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Green building
“Both the landscape urbanists and the traditionalists they’re trying to unseat think they know what must be done to conserve energy, limit emissions, and protect the environment from further harm, and both are certain that the other is wrong. As they joust in the pages of architecture publications and take swipes at each other from podiums, they are competing not just for commissions, but...
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China to create largest megacity
“City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta. The ‘Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One’ scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales. The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s...
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Cyborg City
“The city’s digital nervous system, as it exists now, is a patchwork of public and private endeavors, with corporate and government applications that are discrete. There’s one program in the Department of Transportation, another program organized by the guys at Foursquare. The real excitement, for people working in this sector, is the ‘appification’ of the city: What...
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Literary New York
‘For writers, New York City has always been a magnet with two poles, one that attracts, another that repels. Visiting from England, Anthony Trollope was drawn to the place; he thought it “intensely American.” Alexis de Tocqueville, on the other hand, found the city “bizarre and disagreeable.” Decades later, Henry James seconded that assessment: “New York is appalling, fantastically charmless...
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Robert Moses, the musical
“Someday, let us sit on this bench
And reflect on the gratitude of man.
And when someone asks,
‘Who built this road, this bridge, this park?’
Say: A giant, a genius.
Moses.
He built it all.
He built New York.”
NYT
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Lagos
“Lagos: the first true mega-city in sub-Saharan Africa, home to between 9 million and 17 million people, depending on where you draw the lines and who’s doing the counting. With an estimated 3,000 more people arriving every day, Lagos is one of the fastest growing cities on the planet. Yet it is set on an infrastructure that was meant for a far, far smaller place. As a result, everything...
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Beijing
In Lao She’s novel Camel Xiangzi (1936), Xiangzi realizes when he reaches Beijing that he loves ‘the medley of horses, the cacophony of sounds, the stench of dust’:
‘He had no parents or brothers, no relatives at all; the only friend he had was this ancient city. It had given him everything. So even if he starved here, he loved it better than the countryside. Here there were...
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Streetscapes
“In the 1830s St. Marks Place was one of New York’s best addresses, a dignified street of chaste Federal-style mansions for the city’s first families. Today, just three remnants of the street’s golden age still stand, and it is a fair contender for the title of bong capital of the world, with its tumbledown shops for vintage records, punk clothing and drug paraphernalia.”
NYT
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WatchBy 2012, 34 of the world’s 100 tallest buildings will be in China, compared to just 18 in the US. China has become the new home of the skyscraper. [article] [via Planetizen]
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Tech City
“The Old Street area has good infrastructure in terms of bars, restaurants, cafes and some level of culture. The worry would be that if you shipped people outside that hub, then you detach them. I’m from the north of England and I’ve seen a lot of incubator spaces set up outside of the city centre. They always just felt stagnant to me. That would be my worry about sticking a load...
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Watch [via @urbanverse]
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Cities in 2035
“Cities will be too big and complex for any single power to understand and manage them. They already are, in fact. The word “city” will lose some of its meaning: it will make less and less sense to describe agglomerations of tens of millions of people as if they were one place, with one identity. If current dreams of urban agriculture come true, the distinction between town and...
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Future cities
“Cities will be smart. They will be more beautiful, more exquisitely made in parts and more assembled ad hoc in other parts. More resourceful and more transparently knowable. Unlike today’s “dumb cities” that sit like the dead materials that they are, future cities will be alive in a Biomimicry sense, evolving, learning, and growing. The caveat is huge. A city as a functioning extension of...
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