Courtesy of AECOM

The master planning of the CBD of Jilin city is a collaborative project by AECOM, a team formed by architects, urban designers, landscape designers and economists. Its collaboration across different disciplines was highly affirmed by the client and the government officials, which led to the project situated in the historical city in northeastern China. Their design is proposed to be the future CBD area by the government and has high-value natural and historical resources like the Songhua River and the Xiaobai Mountain. More images and architects’ description after the break. read more »

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Grimshaw Architects recently announced that they have been selected by the All England Lawn Tennis Club to design their “Wimbledon 2020” masterplan for future development requirements. After a competitive selection process, it was decided that they will design the new masterplan to continue the previous ‘Long Term Plan’, which was commissioned in 1993 and completed in June 2011.  Working with such a prestigious British and internationally renowned institution, Grimshaw will embrace Wimbledon’s unique history of tradition and innovation to enhance further its position as the pre-eminent tennis Grand Slam. Another image of their design can be viewed after the break. read more »

Courtesy of Broadway Malyan

Global architecture, urbanism and design practice Broadway Malyan has pushed into Indonesia with their winning proposal in the masterplan for the high-profile Cilandak Bisnis Square (CIBIS) project in Jakarta, on behalf of client Bhumyamka Sekawan. CIBIS is the practice’s first project in Indonesia, which has one of the world’s fastest growing construction markets and is predicted to represent some four per cent of global construction spending from 2010 to 2020. More images and project description after the break. read more »

Professor Doug Muzzio of City Talk sits down with Joshua David and Robert Hammond, co-founders of Friends of the High Line, and Dan Barasch, co-founder of the Delancey Underground. The conversation focuses on the latest plans for the third and last section of the High Line and the potential of the subterranean public park proposal below Delancey Street. Muzzio states, “Ones a great West Side story, the other could be a great East Side story.” City Talk is known to discuss the important issues of New York City with the people who help the city function. Professor Doug Muzzio is a political analyst for CUNY TV and a professor at Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs.

© MVRDV

The Urban Community of Bordeaux (CUB) and MVRDV recently presented the master plan for Bastide Niel, a 35ha extension of Bordeaux’ city center onto the right bank of Garonne River. The dense urban master plan will offer 3200 homes, offices and urban amenities, respect the existing fabric of the city and become one of the largest zero energy neighborhoods in the world. Construction is to start in 2014. More images and architects’ description after the break.

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© Iwan Baan

Charlie Rose discusses the story of the New York City High Line with Amanda Burden, director of the New York City Department of City Planning, Diane von Furstenberg, High Line contributor, Robert Hammond, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Friends of the High Line and Joshua David, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Friends of the High Line.

Click here to watch the video on the Charlie Rose website.

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Located on the Wele-Nzas, the new capital city will be built in order to fulfill the President’s dream. The new capital city will be the attraction for an estimated 160.000 inhabitants and will extend for 8.150 Hectares. The concept is characterized by modernity and respect by the country’s cultural roots, optimizing its identity and the richness of the ecosystem where it belongs. Sustainability is also a privileged feature in every strand. The concept, by IDF-Ideias do Futuro, has its origin in the fusion between the river and the orthogonal matrix represented by the road net, in progress. More images and architects’ description after the break. read more »

Courtesy of 10 Design

10 Design architects has recently been awarded a 93 ha Masterplan for a CBD in Pingtan, a New Cross-Strait District for China and It’s Trading Partner, Taiwan. Pingtan is planned as a new commercial hub to drive communication and commercial trade between China and Taiwan. Part of the competition included the design of a new Cross Straits Forum including theatre, convention, exhibition and auxiliary commercial and cultural facilities. More images and project description after the break. read more »

View towards Dead Sea

The detailed master plan for the Jordan Development Zones Company (JDZ) by Sasaki Associates encompasses 40 square kilometers of land along the north and east coast of the historic Dead Sea. Over the past 15 years, the Kingdom of Jordan has focused on a balanced approach towards development and preservation in order to capitalize on increased tourism and to provide improvements to local existing communities. In 2008, a development authority was created to establish a detailed master plan as a sustainable framework for existing committed lands, future development parcels, infrastructure provisions, and natural resources protection. The resulting master plan establishes a comprehensive and site specific approach to the social, economic and environmental sustainability issues facing this stunning setting. More images and project description after the break. read more »

Santiago, Chile © Nico Saieh

The rise in human population continues to exert enormous strain on earth’s ecosystems and finite resources. Scientific American recently devoted an issue to one solution among many needed to solve this worrisome situation. The cover reads, “We have seen a brighter future, and it is urban.” People living in dense urban environments “typically have smaller energy footprints, require less infrastructure and consume less of the world’s resources per capita.”[1] But, what is the cost? There are always tradeoffs. Alla Katsnelson, from Scientific American, notes that city dwellers suffer “higher rates of mental illnesses, including anxiety disorders and schizophrenia” than their rural counterparts.[2] All the factors underlying this difference are not known or well understood, but some of the possible causes appear to stem from the fact that urban environments are nothing like the ancestral environments from which our sensory systems evolved. As our hunter-gather ancestors learned during the Agriculture Revolution, our biology does not take kindly to rapid upheavals in cultural evolution. In a way, their experience somewhat parallels the one we face today. Put simply, the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent urbanization has been to our sensory systems what the agriculture revolution was to our digestive system.

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Tokyo © Tom Purves - www.thomaspurves.com

The Japanese Government has revealed a radical plan to construct a standby city for Tokyo. The Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and BackupCity, known as IRTBBC, will provide backup to the capital in an event of an immobilizing earthquake.

IRTBBC will incorporate all vital functions of government, with duplicate facilities for parliament and ministries. Offices complexes, resort facilities, casinos, parks, and the tallest tower in the world at 652 meters, will employ 50,000 IRTBBC residents and over 150,000 workers from the nearby city of Osaka.  The government is considering the existing 1236 acre site of the Itami Airport, located approximately 300 miles west of Tokyo.

A member of the ruling Democratic Party, Hajime Ishii, stated, “The idea is being able to have a back-up, a spare battery for the functions of the nation.”

Reference: World Architecture News

In this video from Cities of Opportunity 2011, architectural superstar and OMA founder Rem Koolhaas shares his views on the contemporary evolution of the city and his vision for the future of urban centers. Produced by accounting giant PwC (a.k.a PricewaterhouseCoopers before their 2010 re-branding) and the Partnership for New York City, Cities of Opportunity 2011 “analyzes the trajectory of 26 cities, all capitals of finance, commerce, and culture and through their performance, seeks to open a window on what makes cities function best.”

Courtesy of Trans_City Architecture and Urbanism

Over the last 18 months, Trans_City architecture and urbanism, has developed a comprehensive plan for the reconstruction of Jacmel, Haiti based upon the concept of satellite cities located at the edge of the existing, earthquake-ravaged city center.(A concept developed in accordance with the universal design principals of the Housing Reconstruction Framework of the Haitian Government)

The concept includes an urban masterplan, and a proposal for prefabricated houses, in which the building shell is industrially manufactured in Austria, and finished by local hand workers. In line with the content of the project, the architecture does not attempt to be spectacular. Rather, it is the holistic integration of the many levels of an urban system that makes this project interesting. More images and project description after the break. read more »

SOM, © Torkel Korling

Many engineers, scientists, and other workers were recruited to East Tennessee during WWII for the development of the Manhattan Project. Because of this growth, SOM was contracted to design a master plan and home designs for the secret site planned by the U.S. Federal Government.  The Oak Ridge New Town Master Plan would become a foundation for urban design projects not just for SOM, but for American standards as well. More on the Oak Ridge New Town Master Plan after the break.

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In late August, the Key West Truman Waterfront Advisory Board heard from three firms vying to design a future park on the Truman Water Front.  The seven-person board ranked the three presenting firms as follows: Atkins (formerly Post Buckley Schuh and Jernigan), Bermello Ajamil & Partners Inc., and Parker/Mudgett/Smith Architects Inc.  

For more information on the firms come back after the break. read more »

Photo by David Hilowitz - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dhilowitz/

USA Today has put together a list of city neighborhoods which are satiated with activity, areas which offer a “great slice of urban life.” These districts trend from the urban vicinity to its very core, each in itself exemplifying the revitalization of the American city. The list includes regions which have been influenced by deliberate urban revitalization projects, such as High Line Park in Chelsea; while other neighborhoods have experienced an influx of a younger populace which has contributed to its growth, such as Lawrenceville in Pittsburgh.

See the 10 Up and Coming Urban Neighborhoods after the break.

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Photo by low.lighting - http://www.flickr.com/photos/low-lighting/

The emergence of China on the global economic stage has been discussed at nauseum in myriad publications. But this emergence has had an impact on the world of architecture, providing a testing ground where architects can experiment with new ideas about sustainability and urban growth. These new ideas have been realized in recently completed structures, and more are just beginning construction or have been proposed for the future. More on these new buildings after the break.

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© www.arcosanti.org

70 miles north of Phoenix, in central Arizona lies an experimental town created by Paolo Soleri, intended to house 5,000 people. Arcosanti is the study of the concept of arcology, which combines architecture and ecology. The intensions of this community is to form a gestalt that houses the relations and interactions that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment.

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Photo by John Martinez Pavliga - http://www.flickr.com/people/virtualsugar/

In 2009, the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District was created in an attempt to preserve the rich history of the buildings, neighborhoods and communities that lay north of San Francisco’s Market Street. It has not only kept developers from modifying or even eradicating key buildings that have shaped the city of San Francisco, but has also helped to prevent the process of gentrification, enabling middle and lower-class inhabitants to continue living in the city at reasonable rates. Although building projects north of Market Street are now heavily restricted, not all of San Francisco is off limits.

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Photo by ifmuth - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ifmuth/

The recession that began in 2007 technically ended in 2009, but you wouldn’t know it from visiting Detroit. The capital of U.S. auto manufacturing has been hit particularly hard, and stories of its plight during the economic downturn abound. Less reported, though, are the ideas and proposals put forth to return this city to its former glory. The urban renewal projects proposed are some of the latest in a long line of design projects that attempt to bring renewed prosperity and well being to the downtrodden sections of cities throughout the world. More on urban renewal and Detroit after the break. read more »