Urban Architecture (UA Studio 7) and Aedas' winning proposal for the Hongqiao Central Business District has broke ground at Shanghai’s domestic Hongqiao Airport, mainland China's fourth busiest airport. The 18.4 hectare office and retail center, masterplanned by UA, has been divided into two parts: UA Studio 7 will design the office district, “a flower with eight leaves,” while Aedas designs the shopping, hotel, and conference center along a "bow curve" of pedestrian flow.
According to UA, the winning scheme's success was "due to a highly energy-efficient architecture proposal combined with an urban plan that allows for pedestrian-friendly spaces."
Plaza. Image Courtesy of José Muñoz Villers Arquitectos + lab07
A design team led by Carlos Marín and José Muñoz-Villers has claimed first prize in Mexico City’s "La Merced" competition for their masterplan proposal to re-conceive the popular marketplace, Plaza Central La Merced. The team’s design, which beat out about 100 other entries, proposed the realization of a new public square to centralize pedestrian activity and to anchor strategies for urban revitalization, such as the reclamation of local heritage sites, the careful manipulation of natural elements, and the installation of urban furniture as a means for placemaking.
The RIBA's recent report "City Health Check: How Design Can Save Lives and Money" looks at the relationship between city planning and public health, surveying the UK's 9 largest cities in a bid to improve public health and thereby save money for the National Health Service. The report includes useful information for city planners, such as the idea that in general, it is quality and not quantity of public space that is the biggest factor when it comes to encouraging people to walk instead of taking transport.
Read on for more of the results of the report - and analysis of these results - after the break
In the following article, originally published in Polish in theDecember 2013 issue of A&B, Ewa Szymczyk interviews Vicente Guallart, the Chief Architect of Barcelona since 2011 as well as the founder of Guallart Architects and IAAC (Institute of Advanced Architecture in Catalunya). Szymczyk questions Guallart about his experience in urban design, asking: how can you measure a city's success?
Ewa Szymczyk: When measuring the contemporary city’s success we typically use economic measures. In this sense Barcelona ranks very high, being a top tourist destination and managing its budget in times of global crisis. But there are many other ways to measure its success. What in your opinion makes a city a good city? Isn’t it much more than economic prosperity?
Vincente Guallart: A good city is a place where the citizens live well. So the best measure for a good city is how the citizens live. The truth is that the city is a physical representation of a social agreement. If you think for instance about Phoenix in Arizona, maybe people live there the way they want and the way they like to live. Obviously there are also questions related to cost. I mean, questions related to environmental and economic costs. Therefore the cost of a city like Phoenix is very different from the cost of a city like Hong Kong, which is the densest city and probably the most efficient urban structure in the world. So the question is the economic efficiency and also the quality of life of the citizens. And the best way to know is to ask citizens how happy they are to live in a place like this. The truth is that if you are a citizen of Barcelona you are quite happy. We have been evaluating this over the past few years and the average rating is seven out of ten. So that is in general very good! The people are proud to live in a place like this.
PLASMA Studio, in collaboration with Groundlab, won first prize in an international competition to masterplan the relocation of the Innichen/San Candido train station in North Italy. The project, now under construction, forms a new "Mobile Centre" that integrates a new public plaza, skate park, youth centre and more into a streamlined rail station that enhances connectivity throughout the town.
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?
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