PD Smith

“Change the dream and you change the city.”

Nice piece on MoMA’s “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” on polis.

Image: “Nature-City” by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORKac.

Design for a street scene in Blade Runner. [Guardian]

Lower Manhattan, ink drawing by Lebeus Woods, 1999.

“I wanted to suggest that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region.”

Interview with Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG. 

‘Authorities in the central Japanese city of Fujisawa are hoping their “smart town”, due to open its gates in 2013, might provide a model for the way forward. With a total budget of 60bn yen (£463m), the pilot experiment is expected to cut average carbon dioxide emissions by 70%.

“Our aim is to build a smart town that will be the model for ‘smart life’ [that is being] called for worldwide,” says Teruhisa Noro, a spokesperson for the project at Panasonic, which sees its involvement as part of Japan’s rebuilding efforts after March’s tsunami.

As a minimum, every house will have solar power generator units and home fuel cells. Energy storage devices and heat-pump hot-water systems will come as standard. The same with energy-saving air conditioners and sensor-controlled lighting. Green energy systems lie at the heart of the leaf-shaped city, a structure intentionally designed to show the natural interconnectedness of its constituent parts.

One of the critical innovations underpinning the project is a smart grid, which will see every villa, apartment and condominium hooked up to same real-time information network, enabling the supply of electricity to be lined up with demand.’

Source: Guardian

Tour Signal (2008), Jean Nouvel.

Abandoned skyscraper designs for La Défense [via Market Urbanism]

The 1934 plan to fill in the Hudson River and join Manhattan to New Jersey:

“When every possible subterranean necessity had been anticipated and built, a secondary fill would bring the level up to within twenty-five feet of the Manhattan street level. Upon this level would rest the foundations and basements of the buildings that would make up the new city above, planned for fresh air, sunshine and beauty. Thus, below the street level would be a subterranean system of streets that would serve a double purpose. All heavy trucking would be confined to it, but primarily it would serve as a great military defense against gas attack in case of war, for in it would be room for practically the entire population of the city.”

Full story, Gothamist.

Rooftop airport, by Paul Frank, Amazing Stories (1928).

More (Ptak). [via @UnlikelyWorlds] 

“Environmentally speaking, Earth 1.0 cities were takers not givers, in that they consumed resources without replenishing them. The relationship cities have with the wider world has to change. Cities need to become resourceful and to do that they have to become smart – evolving new ways to reduce their environmental footprint and to start giving back at least as much as they take.” Futurologist Melissa Sterry. (Urban Times)

Image: sustainable building concept by Vincent Callebaut Architecture.  

“Bangkok is still laboring under a very ante-diluvian mindset where flooding is considered a crisis and not a constant. Bangkok has always been flooded and the latest apocalyptic predictions only suggest that flooding will return with increased consistency.”

S+PBA, a Bangkok based Architecture firm, have looked into Bangkok’s post-diluvian future…

More at Magical Urbanism

From “Sense and the City”, an exhibition at the London Transport Museum [via Paleofuture]

“Cities” by olschinsky [via @olimould]