Fast Cities 2007

From Chicago to Shanghai, urban centers that are shaping our future.

"You're smart, young, newly graduated from a university with the whole world before you. You could settle in a small town with well-tended lawns, pancake suppers, and life on a human scale. Or you could truck it to the big city, with all its din and dog-eat-dog lunacy. Your choice?
There is no choice. For all the challenges cities face--congestion, crime, crumbling infrastructure, environmental decay, plus occasional issues with basic civility--they are still where jobs and youth gather, where energy begets even greater energy, where talent masses and collides. Worldwide, the pace of urbanization is only accelerating. This year, for the first time, more of the earth's population will live in cities than in rural areas--a cool 3.2 billion, according to United Nations estimates. "In a world where we can now work anywhere, we're tending to concentrate in fewer and fewer places," says Carol Colletta, president of CEOs for Cities, an advocacy group. "Smart people are choosing to live near smart people." ..read more

Source: Fast Company

A City Without Billboards

- via Designverb

From Sao Paolo - Brazil

BusinessWeek article
Sao Paulo: The city that said No to AdvertisingThe “Clean City” law passed last year by the populist mayor, Gilberto Kassab, stripped the Brazilian city of all advertising. So how’s it looking now?
by Patrick Burgoyne

A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing.
It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist’s dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality.
In September last year, the city’s populist right-wing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, passed the so-called Clean City laws. Fed up with the “visual pollution” caused by the city’s 8,000 billboard sites, many of them erected illegally, Kassab proposed a law banning all outdoor advertising. The skyscraper-sized hoardings that lined the city’s streets would be wiped away at a stroke. And it was not just billboards that attracted his wrath: all forms of outdoor advertising were to be prohibited, including ads on taxis, on buses—even shopfronts were to be restricted, their signs limited to 1.5 metres for every 10 metres of frontage. “It is hard in a city of 11 million people to find enough equipment and personnel to determine what is and isn’t legal,” reasoned Kassab, “so we have decided to go all the way.”
The law was hailed by writer Roberto Pompeu de Toledo as “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash… For once, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.”
Border, the Brazilian Association of Advertisers, was up in arms over the move. In a statement released on 2 October, the date on which law PL 379/06 was formally approved by the city council, Border called the new laws “unreal, ineffective and fascist”. It pointed to the tens of thousands of small businesses that would have to bear the burden of altering their shopfronts under regulations “unknown in their virulence in any other city in the world”. A prediction of US$133 million in lost advertising revenue for the city surfaced in the press, while the São Paulo outdoor media owners’ association, Sepex, warned that 20,000 people would lose their jobs.
Others predicted that the city would look even worse with the ads removed, a bland concrete jungle replacing the chaos of the present. North Korea and communist Eastern Europe were cited as indicative of what was to come. “I think this city will become a sadder, duller place,” Dalton Silvano, the only city councillor to vote against the laws and (not entirely coincidentally) an ad executive, was quoted as saying in the International Herald Tribune. “Advertising is both an art form and, when you’re in your car, or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom,” he claimed.
There was also much questioning of whether there weren’t, in fact, far greater eyesores in the city—such as the thousands of homeless people, the poor condition of the roads and the notorious favelas: wouldn’t Kassab’s time be better spent removing these problems than persecuting taxi drivers and shop owners? Legal challenges followed while, in an almost comical scenario, advertising executives followed marches by the city’s students and its bin men by driving their cars up and down in front of city hall in protest...read more"

Hopefully Beirut is Next...

Waves of Change - cities at crossroads

International Urban Design Conference, being held on the Gold Coast, Australia 6,7 & 8 September, 2007.

The Conference theme “Waves of Change – Cities at Crossroads” will challenge us all to examine our towns and cities.

Population growth and economic prosperity have consequences on the environment and on the longer term social well-being of our communities.
The wave of environmental challenges will affect communities through global warming and likely sea level rises. The ability of urban centres world-wide to cope with the impacts of high level fuel costs will also be examined. The physical separation of home from work and recreation may need to be re-addressed in city design.
>> Day one celebrates the official conference launch followed by challenging keynote addresses about the issues confronting our cities and what we might do about it.
>> Day two is a whirlpool of presentations taking the macro view down to micro insights into local and international research, design tools and models that can lead the way towards sustainable urban habitats.
>> Day three erupts with a hot debate moderated by Jennie Brockie, followed by even more keynote addresses exploring the ways and means of building capacity within our communities, our future designers, and policy makers to implement the necessary adaptations to our cities.

read more ...

Global Cities

- via Pentagram

Angus Hyland and William Russell have designed Global Cities, a major free exhibition that is taking place in the spectacular Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London from June 20 to August 27.

The exhibition has been developed from a show that formed the centrepiece of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2006 by the Tate curatorial team, Professor Richard Burdett and his team at the London School of Economics (LSE), with Pentagram providing art direction throughout.
read more...

Intelligent Coast Tourism

- Via Intelligent Coast

Intelligent Coast* is a center of research on coast and tourism. It aims to develop new qualified coast systems with the help of thinkers and experts coming from different fields.


INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUMINTELLIGENT COAST TOURISM XXL. THE EUROPEAN MEGALOPOLIS at CCCB - Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 19 - 20 - 21 of July 2007

The International Symposium Intelligent Coast [IC] invites thinkers, businessmen and politicians to debate about new models of development for coastal territories, as a privileged land of tourist economy and new society.
The debate focuses on an emergent European phenomenon, the Spanish Mediterranean coast is going to be next future the first European megalopolis, comparing with Tokyo, Mexico City and Shanghai.The Symposium is organized over 3 days, when it will be possible to attend lectures, dialogs and round tables between experts, politicians and directors of private companies directly involved in the tourist market and coast development.

Download the Program

post modernism in the cathedral of modernism.

- Via Perfect City

On the 9th of June, the university of Anhalt organized a conference called digitalcities. Jürgen Mayer (J. Mayer H Architects, Berlin), Alain Chiaradia (Space Syntax, London), Neri Oxman (MIT Computation Group, Boston), Kas Oosterhuis (ONL Architects, Rotterdam) and some more interesting speakers presented their work on how new digital tools are being used to analyze and design architecture and cities.
Most of the speeches were focused on sophisitcated forms which were created with software tools like generative components by bentley, of which few are even being realised like Metropol Parasol in Sevilla (Spain) by J. Mayer architects. It was obvious that with software tools and scripting possibilities of how to design our future cities are grown which we were never able to think about. According to my opinion the aspect of digital generative urban planing, mentioned in the speech of Yusuke Obuchi (DRL Architectural Association, London) who introduced some work of his students, was nowhere near enough.

Opportunity Urbanism: re-invigorating the urban middle class

- via Claiming Public Space

In the first decade of the 21st century, several critical analyses have emerged about the future of American cities. This paper attempts to lay out a new notion: that of “Opportunity Urbanism.” This concept stresses a region’s ability to create jobs,offer affordable housing, and present entrepreneurial openings to a growing and highly diverse population as the surest signs of urban vibrancy. It embraces the fundamental principle that one of the primary historic roles of cities has been to nurture and grow a middle class—to be an engine of upward social mobility.

download this report

urban militarization: The Automated Border

- Via Subtopia

"...a completely futuristic border barrier where human personnel are entirely substituted by unmanned aerial vehicles, intelligent robots, networks of surveillance cameras and satellite-connected border posts, self-adjusting light systems, ground sensors – essentially, technology which potentially could eliminate the physical constructs of an actual fence altogether; invisible walls, hidden checkpoints, secret surveillance landscapes, border security that – for all visible intents and purposes – has been designed to not exist, or, rather to disappear. ..." read more

image source: The Mini-Samson RCWS

Bus, mobile public space - beirut, Lebanon

via Archis - unbuilt lebanon

The lack of common space can be seen in the public domain. This goes not only because of the lack of space itself, but also because of the connotation existing public spaces have.
During the civil war in 1975, Lebanon was architecturally divided into sectarian regions, in which each religious community exercised its own urban rules and formed its own public space that reflected its perception and ultimately was only used by this specific community. The urban development during this period (outside Beirut) was chaotic since the government had no power to exercise restraint or to implement any laws.
Adding to that the snipers and bombs who deprived the Lebanese, and for a long time, from the culture of walking the streets or hanging in parks.
A daring project is intended to address this issue and to create public spaces that initially will be as generic as possible and where different people from diverse backgrounds can meet.
read more on Archis/Unbuilt

Books you need to read... v.1

hello,

i tried to summarize a short list of essential books that every architect needs to have on his bookshelf, i am starting now with books related to city planning and urbanism.

1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
2. Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler
3. Suburban Nation : The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany , Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk , Jeff Speck
4. All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman
5. The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl by Peter Calthorpe, and William Fulton. "articulately advocates for a sustainable region through New Urbanist design and social equity"
6. Urban utopias in the twentieth century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier by Robert Fishman. "an eloquent intellectual history of three leading urban visionaries of the 20th Century"
7. Cities of tomorrow: an intellectual history of urban planning and design in the twentieth century by Peter Hall
8. The city in history: its origins, its transformations, and its prospect by Lewis Mumford. "a classic from a giant among 20th Century urbanists: an intellectual bridge between Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes from the past and the modern regionalists."

SUMMERSCHOOL BEIRUT / PEARLS IN LEBANON - 17/8 till 1/9, 2007

A case study on the concept of public space in Lebanon
Initiated by Studio Beirut, Archis, Partizan Publik, Pearl and the University of Amsterdam - Center for Conflict Studies. An international multidisciplinary team of international and local students and professionals from the fields of architecture, urban development, design, sociology and political science, shall identify, analyze formally and socially, and propose interventions and new programs for the nearly infinite number of derelict or marginal spaces in Beirut. These terrains vagues, at many scales, from kilometers to centimeters, present a potential for territorial reassessment and cultural redefinition that will constitute a body of both research and action.
On the 1st of September on the Pearls in Lebanon event, results will be presented and debated. During Pearls in Lebanon a mixed audience will be brought together for discussion. The platform also gives the opportunity for project presentations of Studio Beirut and its projects to possible Lebanese cooperating partners and investors.
MORE INFO, AND APPLICATION FORM >>> STUDIOBEIRUT.ORG

Helpless Hands: From Arts and Crafts to Blobitechture

- via Architecture and Morality

Organic Baby Farm's Wacky Hermit follows up on a discussion by Glenn Reynolds about the lack of basic hand-skills among younger adults. Hermit blames the rise of foreign trade, which have made cheap goods so widely available that many skills that substituted the need to buy new replacement have lost their value in saving money. Hermit provides a good example of this change:
Myself, I have the ability to make over a dress, taking it apart down to its component parts and re-making it into a different dress. Back when dresses were not cheap, this was a valuable skill. Not so much anymore, when you can go down to the dollar store and buy spangly knit things off the rack. Who would pay me a couple hundred dollars to make over a dress, when for half that they could have a new one? read more ...