Future Cities: The Latest Architecture and News

In early 2021, Saudi Arabia unveiled the Line, a 170-kilometer-long linear city, part of the NEOM project. NEOM has since expanded with proposals for the region, including a ski destination set to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games, a floating port city at Oxagon, and cliffside hotels at Leyja. However, the Line continues to be one of the most debated of the proposals due to its scale and unprecedented design. According to the official releases, the city would measure 170 kilometers in length, 200 meters in width, and 500 meters in height, making it the 12th highest skyscraper in the world. In its final phase, it is expected to welcome 9 million residents, nearing the size of London or New York’s five boroughs.

On October 23, 2023, during the closing of the Line Exhibition in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, ArchDaily’s Editor in Chief, Christele Harrouk spoke to Tarek Qaddumi, Executive Director of The Line Design at NEOM, asking questions that probe into both the conceptual aspects and the technicalities of The Line project. In this video interview, the conversation addresses notions such as accessibility, transportation, and sustainability, while also exploring the concept of Cognitive Cities and the intended phasing of the project.

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We’re all familiar with the plot of a movie that occurs in a city still standing in a post-apocalyptic era. The streets are empty, except for a few survivors who wander aimlessly, searching for signs of life. Buildings begin to crumble and rust away after years of neglect, public transportation sits idle, and overgrown weeds spring from the cracks in the unmanaged sidewalks and streets. The scene feels eerie because we can’t imagine letting our physical environment sit in decay. It seems impossible that our built environments where we live and work each day suddenly fall silent. It’s a city without a pulse.

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Despite Winston Churchill’s words, architects are shaped by our culture, and our work reacts to it. Because our culture evolves, the practice of architecture evolves. What is “New” in architectural practice has had accelerating change, exploding in the 21st century because new technologies have changed everything on a level of the Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago.  

We are still at the dawn of the Metaverse, the next wave of the Internet. The current “mainstream” Metaverse platforms serve as experimental containers to host the wildest dreams of virtual worlds where we are supposed to unleash the imagination. However, from a spatial design perspective, they have so far been lame and ordinary. Without the constraints in the physical world, how do we draft the urban blueprints in the metaverse? I believe metaverse planners can find inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in which he revealed a poetic and mathematical approach to “urban planning” in the imaginary worlds.

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Nike recently acquired RTFKT, a design studio that was founded in Jan 2020, and is known for its virtual “metaverse-ready sneakers and collectibles”. Metaverse land purchases are making headlines with multi-million dollar price tags. We’ve also seen mainstream adoption for NFT art this year and the sales are expected to surge to $17.7 billion by the end of 2021.

Beneath the hype and frenzy, we can spot a fundamental shift that unlocks a new creator economy. It provides the creators with direct access to the market, builds ongoing relationships with fans, and unites strangers in self-governed communities. In this article, we will discuss why every 3D designer/architect should embrace the Web 3.0 movement to adopt a new business logic and benefit from the creator economy in the metaverse?

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You might have heard that Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to become a Metaverse Company, and earlier this year, Epic Games, the company that develops the Unreal Engine announced that it completed a 1 billion round of funding to support the long-term vision for the metaverse. Metaverse is definitely the hottest buzzword in the tech scene. In this article, we will briefly discuss what is Metaverse, who will build it, and most importantly why it matters for architects, and how can designers play a significant role in this upcoming digital economy?

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By some estimates, cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy, and account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions: a figure sure to increase as the global migration from rural to urban areas continues. In the pursuit of exploring new models for how healthy cities could more effectively sustain these demands, Dutch design and research studio FABRICations has investigated how cities of the Netherlands can reduce carbon emissions through new design-led approaches.

EPISODE 9 will focus on Future Cities. Our guest will be Jonathan Ward, a Design Partner at NBBJ, who is developing Chinese technology company TenCent’s Net City, in Shenzen China. At roughly the size and shape of Midtown Manhattan, Net City features a new Tencent office, a residential neighborhood, schools, retail and other amenities. The project focuses on sustainability, including photovoltaic panels on rooftops, sensors that track environmental performance and flooding, and a comprehensive transportation network that prioritizes public transit, bicycles and pedestrian access. Ward’s other notable projects for NBBJ include headquarters for Samsung in San Jose and South Korea, Ant Financial in Hangzhou, the Wellcome Trust in Cambridge, Telenor in Oslo and Reebok in Massachusetts.

Desplans and KooZA/rch have revealed the three final winners of the #mycityscape competition. Inviting young creatives to this conversation, the open call questions the definition of the city, by asking “What establishes the identity of a city? What distinguishes one urban environment from the other? And What defines our relationship to the built landscape we inhabit?”

Trying to find the tools to map the city of the 21^st century, the competition encouraged young creatives to record the essence of their cityscape into one image. After selecting 12 shortlisted entries, the contest solicited a wider audience to decide the final winning designs, by voting for their favorites on social media. Following the release of the results, Christele Harrouk from ArchDaily had the chance to talk about the #mycityscape competition with both Desplans and KooZA/rch, discussing the theme and the whole process. Discover in this article the exchange as well as the final winning designs.