There are few recent trends in urbanism that have received such widespread support as cycling: many consider cycling the best way for cities to reduce congestion and pollution, make cities more dense and vibrant, and increase the activity and therefore health of citizens. Thus, it's no surprise a number of schemes have been proposed worldwide to promote cycling as an attractive way to get around.
However, recently it seems that many cycling schemes are running into bumpy ground. Read on to find out more.
The Mayor of Lyon, France, has unveiled plans for a dense, mixed-use district planned for the Lyon Confluence. Masterplanned by Herzog & de Meuron, in collaboration with landscapist Michel Desvigne, the 35-hectare scheme will be the first plot developed in the second phase of a larger regeneration initiative that aims to “double the city-center” by reclaiming a massive, post-industrial site on the city’s central peninsula. Once complete, the second phase, known as “Ilot A3”, will provide more than 2,000 homes in a lush residential park and vibrant “market quarter.”
In response to the death of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last week, Eyal Weizman has written an interesting investigation into how the controversial politician used architecture and urban planning as a tool in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, deploying settlements like military tactics rather than simply as housing strategy. The piece is an insightful examination of how power and even violence can be manifest in design, as evidenced by Sharon's "architecture of occupation". You can read the full article here.
Among the biggest challenges facing city planners is to implement plans which are not just needed, but also popular. In a bid to address this common problem of democratic city design, the Strelka Institute developed What Moscow Wants, an online platform designed to crowdsource ideas for the development of Moscow.
What Moscow Wants consists of a three-step process: residents first propose ideas on the website (ranging from the prosaic suggestion of a standardized city-wide parking bollard, to the outlandish idea of an underwater museum in the Moscow River); next, local architectural practices chose suggestions which they felt they could contribute a solution to and posted their proposals to the website; finally, the most popular choices were presented by the architects at the Moscow Urban Forum from the 5-7th of December.
Read on after the break to see a selection of the most popular projects
About 40% of the area of Hamburg, the second largest city in Germany, is made up of green areas, cemeteries, sports facilities, gardens, parks and squares. For the first time ever, the city has decided to unite them together via pedestrian and cycle routes. It's all part of the "Green Network Plan," which aims to eliminate the need for vehicles in Hamburg over the next 20 years.
According to city spokeswoman Angelika Fritsch, the project will help to turn the city into a one-of-a-kind, integrated system: "Other cities, including London, have green rings, but the green network will be unique in covering an area from the outskirts to the city centre. In 15 to 20 years you'll be able to explore the city exclusively on bike and foot."
As part of their coverage of the Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation, Grasp Magazine interviewed Joi Ito, director of MIT's Media Lab. He voices his opinion that current strategies for masterplanning do not work, as designers struggle to reliably "predict and cause a future to occur" (a better approach is to enable and empower innovation on a grass-roots level); that designers need to find the right balance between intuition and data; and that new technologies should not just improve existing systems, but preferably overhaul them entirely. You can read the full article here.
Architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) have been commissioned to design of a new urban development project on a 45 hectare site in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. The competition-winning proposal comprises a transportation hub including five underground railway stations, a border control point and numerous commercial areas. Above ground there will be a range of tower blocks of different heights with apartments, shops and offices to form multi-functional city quarters.
Italian Practice RRC Studio has released designs for new residential and commercial quarters in Al Dhakira, Qatar. The design will roughly double the size of the small city, situated 60km outside the capital of Doha, providing new housing blocks, villas, hotels, and a new commercial district.
From the window of an airplane it's all too plain that apartheid has been deeply written into the South African landscape. Even the smallest town appears as two distinct towns. One features a spacious grid of tree-lined streets and comfortable houses surrounded by lawns. The other, its shriveled twin, some distance away but connected by a well-traveled road, consists of a much tighter grid of dirt roads lined with shacks. Trees are a rarity, lawns non-existent. This doubling pattern appears no matter the size of the population: here, the white town; over there, the black township. -- Lisa Findley, “Red & Gold: A Tale of Two Apartheid Museums.”
There are few systems of government that relied so heavily upon the delineations of space than the Apartheid government of South Africa (1948-1994). Aggressively wielding theories of Modernism and racial superiority, South Africa’s urban planners didn’t just enforce Apartheid, they embedded it into every city - making it a daily, degrading experience for South Africa’s marginalized citizens.
When Nelson Mandela and his party, the African National Congress, were democratically elected to power in 1994, they recognized that one of the most important ways of diminishing Apartheid’s legacy would be spatial: to integrate the white towns and the black townships, and revive those “shriveled twin[s].”
As we remember Mandela - undoubtedly the most important man in South Africa’s history - and ponder his legacy, we must also consider his spatial legacy. It is in the physical, spatial dimensions of South Africa’s towns and cities that we can truly see Apartheid’s endurance, and consider: to what extent have Mandela’s words of reconciliation and righteous integration, truly been given form?
Niemeyer observa maquete da escola projetada em Belo Horizonte (MG). Image Courtesy of ON
It's been exactly one year since the world first mourned the passing of a great master of 20th century architecture: Oscar Niemeyer.
After 104 years of life, the renowned architect left a profound legacy. His works - known for their impressive curves, embrace of light, and profound relationship to their surroundings - made him an icon. Not just in Brazil, but the world.
Town square in Letchworth Garden City, one of the UK's first. Via Flickr CC user. Used under Creative Commons
After the Wolfson Economics Prize announced a challenge to deliver new garden cities in the UK for the 21st Century, Feargus O'Sullivan of Atlantic Cities responds, calling the attempt to bring back garden cities "misguided". His article gives a comprehensive rundown of why garden cities were popular during the 20th century, why they are becoming popular again and, ultimately, why they are a bad idea that will not succeed this time around - finishing with some ideas from The Netherlands and Sweden that would be much more appropriate. You can read the full article here.
The challenge of converting a sea of parking lots, that so often riddles auto-dependent suburbs, is in densification. Architects are introducing compact urban living models to small towns all across the country, retrofitting single-use zoning into more walkable, diverse and connected communities. Perhaps nowhere is this evolution more evident than Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood, home to the country’s oldest shopping malls. Learn how the town became denser and greener, transitioning to a transit-oriented development, “Gray, Green, and Blue: Seattle’s Northgate.”
https://www.archdaily.com/451596/how-car-dependent-towns-are-adapting-compact-living-strategiesJose Luis Gabriel Cruz
Sou Fujimoto Architects has released details on a conceptual master plan for a commercial complex in a prominent, yet anonymous Middle Eastern city. Situated between an education and financial center, the modular complex reinterprets the “vibrant atmosphere and lively qualities of the traditional market” as well as the “inherent beauty of vernacular Islamic architecture” to create a “timeless” landmark for a currently underused portion of the city.
UPDATE: The video detailing Diller Scofidio + Renfro's winning proposal for Moscow's Zaryadye Park has just been released. In it the three partners discuss the central idea behind the proposal - "Wild Urbanism" - in which plants and people are of equal importance and "nature and architecture are merged into a seamless whole." They explain how each of Russia's varied landscapes - its tundra, steppe, forest, and wetland - will be imported to the park and overlapped into "enfolded nodes" that will house sustainable, artificial micro-climates that will allow for year-round use of the park.
The consortium led by the New York-based firm, beat out an impressive shortlist. Russian-led TPO “Reserve” came second and MVRDV third.
Zaryadye Park, 13 acres of land just a minute’s walk from the Kremlin and the Red Square, is hoped to “project a new image of Moscow and Russia to the world.” See the renderings from Diller Scofidio + Renfro's winning proposal for Moscow's new and most important public space, after the break...
OMA’s comprehensive strategy to rebuild the New Jersey city of Hoboken, after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, has been selected as one of ten initiatives moving forward in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Rebuild by Design competition. The proposal, Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge, focuses on establishing resiliency through the integration of key infrastructural elements that not only protects coastal neighborhoods, but also the entire city of Hoboken.
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