Cities: The Latest Architecture and News

Think about the city or town where you live. How long does it take you to get to the grocery store on foot? Is your school or work close enough to walk to? What about a public park, a doctor’s office, a daycare, or any other places that you visit on a daily basis? While some cities have already considered what it means to live near all of these necessities, others are revamping their urban planning strategies and designing their neighborhoods to be more pedestrian-friendly with the concept of a “15-Minute City”.

Whether as a retrospective, a collection of contemporary works, or a compilation of prospects for the future - and all the other possibilities in between -, architecture and urban planning exhibitions have played an important role in shaping the future of cities over the decades. These events are often open to the public, reaching many people who don't necessarily have a background in the field, thus providing great environments to explore a collective view of the future of architecture and cities.

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The Un-Habitat or the United Nations agency for human settlements and sustainable urban development, whose primary focus is to deal with the challenges of rapid urbanization, has been developing innovative approaches in the urban design field, centered on the active participation of the community. ArchDaily has teamed up with UN-Habitat to bring you weekly news, article, and interviews that highlight this work, with content straight from the source, developed by our editors.

Around 440 fast-growing cities in emerging economies will contribute by 2025, to nearly half of global economic growth. If given the right planning and management tools, this urbanization “can be transformative, creating jobs, reducing poverty, and improving citizens’ quality of life”. As a matter of fact, the Global Future Cities Programme (GFCP) aims to deliver this required support. Based on urban planning, transport, and resilience principles, the program provides “technical assistance for a set of targeted interventions to encourage sustainable development and increase prosperity while alleviating high levels of urban poverty”.

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Suburbs as we know them are changing forever. Partially exacerbated by the effects of the pandemic, residents are leaving cities in droves in search of more favorable living conditions where more space, privacy, and affordability offers what some consider to be a more comfortable lifestyle. But as time goes on, and development sprawls, it’s harder to tell where cities end and suburbs begin.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

I attended graduate school, in geography, in Tucson, Arizona, United States, in the late 1990s. Tucson draws fame from a number of things, including its Mexican-American heritage, its chimichangas, its sky islands, and its abundant population of saguaro cacti.

Design and the City a podcast by reSITE, on how to make cities more livable and lovable, raising questions and proposing solutions for the city of the future. In the second episode of its second season, PAU's founder and creative director Vishaan Chakrabarti explains the possibility of creating an architecture of belonging, discussing social impact, climate change, infrastructure, and reimagining cities.

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Cities would be nothing without the sense of experimentation and the future-forward push to always break the status quo in demand of a better urban life. As many successful urban designs and strategies as there have been, the world has also seen some not-so-successful ones, that have been pushed to the sidelines becoming a forgotten memory over time. While we look ahead and speculate about what the future of cities could and should be, maybe it’s time to take the lessons learned from these failed projects and pay homage to their misfortunes, so that history’s mistakes aren’t repeated in the present day.

The pandemic provided a unique circumstance for city-scale experiments regarding mobility, while immediate responses showed the transformative power of tactical urbanism. In many cities, the measures meant to ensure social distancing are to be kept in place post-pandemic, paving the path towards recovery with less traffic and more outdoor activities. How did the pressure of rethinking streets, functions, and transportation systems transform public space in 2020?

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For companies or leasers that own large buildings, building maintenance can seem daunting, costly, or even superfluous, particularly when building functions appear to be running smoothly. But proper and consistent building maintenance is imperative for a number of reasons. Buildings inherently function less effectively over time due to natural causes such as climate, daily occupant use, mechanical obsolescence, and more. When left unresolved, these issues can devalue user experiences, create dangerous and unhealthy environments, and even incur costs higher and more sudden than consistent building maintenance costs.

Before the pandemic, the world was already facing a series of global transformations in the field of construction, where emerging countries were at the forefront of a powerful economic shift. As the world's population is expected to reach the 10-billion milestone before 2100, the construction sector should be able to understand and adapt to the megatrends that are reshaping the globe.

Design and the City a podcast by reSITE, on how to make cities more livable and lovable, raising questions and proposing solutions for the city of the future, kicks off its second season, with Winy Maas. In this first episode, the co-founder of MVRDV and The Why Factory discusses ideas that are seemingly larger than life, pushing the boundaries of our urban potential.

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Newly built houses, with their sizable carbon footprints, don’t just contribute to climate change. For many Americans, they’re also too expensive—a bitter irony in cities rife with vacant buildings and record evictions.

Given the urgency of both issues, projects that retrofit livable housing into existing low-carbon shells (the initial embodied carbon was spent long ago) might be worth a closer look. We searched for them and came across a handful that promise a cure for housing insecurity and excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

The Un-Habitat or the United Nations agency for human settlements and sustainable urban development, whose primary focus is to deal with the challenges of rapid urbanization, has been developing innovative approaches in the urban design field, centered on the active participation of the community. ArchDaily has teamed up with UN-Habitat to bring you weekly news, article, and interviews that highlight this work, with content straight from the source, developed by our editors.

In order to support local governments in developing countries to implement the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, UN-Habitat has created the Participatory Incremental Urban Planning Toolbox, “a step-by-step methodology to assess, design, operationalize and implement urban planning processes”. The guideline proposes a timeline of phases, blocks, and activities, helping city leaders, stakeholders, and the community to have a comprehensive and strategic overview of the whole strategy.

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Autodesk has just acquired Spacemaker, a platform that “gives architects and developers the automation superpower to test design concepts in minutes” and explore the best urban design options. Targeting architects, urban designers, and real estate developers, the cloud-based AI-powered generative design helps professionals taking better early-stage design decisions.

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With the promising news of a potential vaccine that could soon return the world to a semi-normal way of life, questions are being raised about what the future of public transit might look like. While some predict that it will be years before we revert back to the muscle memory ways of packing like sardines into crowded subway cars during rush hour commutes, it’s not just about how individuals feel being within close proximity of one another while moving about the city. It has more to do with how our other daily habits, which have been reshaped as a result of the pandemic, might change the overall goals for public transit systems around the globe. What strategies might be implemented to bring ridership back to normal levels and to bring the mobility landscape back to where it once was as society continues to undergo major fundamental shifts?

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“When there is a convergence of crises, like we have now, there needs to be a convergence of solutions,” argued Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at the 2020 GreenBuild conference. These solutions need to be net-zero in terms of energy and greenhouse gas emissions, regenerative, and reconnect humanity to nature. And while progress towards these solutions is now “irreversible,” we need to move much faster towards a net-zero world.

This June, the Global Cities program of the University of São Paulo (USP) carried out the research Emoções Momentâneas (lit. Momentary Emotions) to measure how the pandemic was changing the relationship of individuals with public spaces in São Paulo. Among the collected data, there was one that caught the attention of the group of researchers: 86% of the surveyed people wanted to spend time in green environments such as parks and squares.

"The research indicates a desire for reconciliation with the public space," explains architect Deize Sanches, one of the people involved in the research. "A desire to see the potential of green spaces to improve the quality of life in a way that was not being experienced before the pandemic."

Henning Larsen’s proposal for Seoul Valley was selected as the winner of the Central Seoul Development Competition. Seeking to become a new home for the public in the center of the city, the mixed-use development “merges Seoul’s global commercial profile with an ecological return to downtown pedestrian life”. Other entries included schemes by MVRDV and SOM.

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