Cities need to prepare for a wave of declining houses of worship. While faith institutions, at least the Christian ones, have been asking WWJD (What would Jesus do?), municipalities need to get them to ask another question: WWJJD (What would Jane Jacobs do?). Doing so might lead to a new model for true community houses of worship.
Designed by Mecanoo, Amstel Design District is a mixed-use development that includes social housing, mid-rent residential spaces, private sector homes, and collective facilities. The 80,000 square meters master plan also provides spaces for creative offices and retail, along with cultural institutions such as the 800 square meters design museum. Located between the highway and the metro line, the project responds to site constraints and concerns about noise pollution by creating a composition of stacked volumes with setbacks. This allows for the creation of comfortable public spaces in between the buildings as pocket parks and plazas.
Countries around the world have urban, suburban, and rural problems- and it’s all connected by the problem itself. There are too many highway systems. In some cities that are notoriously known for their traffic jams, like Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Atlanta, there are almost five miles of road per every 1000 residents. This has also impacted how some forms of public transit, like rail cars and busses, operate, significantly reducing their efficiency. So why do we build these superhighways, and how can we fix their congestion?
For every car that drives on the road, we need to find a place to put it- but are parking garages the answer? Parking garages are often seen as the antithesis of people-friendly urban planning. Large gray boxes are used solely to store cars that make temporary visits and seem like a poor use of space, especially in cities where land comes at a premium. Because of these garages, urban cores have quickly been transformed into parking districts, where vehicle storage dominates the aesthetic of a business district. Building codes only contribute to the problem, where the number of spaces is passed down as a mandate, even spreading out into suburban areas. Parking garages are everywhere- flanking shopping malls, connecting to residential towers, and surrounding sporting venues.
When Airbnb began nearly 15 years ago, it offered a new and innovative solution to book short-term stays without any hassle. By renting out a spare room or an entire apartment, it provided an alternative to traditional hotel models which were often overpriced and overbooked. Airbnb now faces many critics as the company quickly grew, offering hundreds of thousands of stays around the globe, but not without a handful of negative experiences. Now, planners and policymakers are beginning to see the effects of the abundance of Airbnb listings and how it impacts a growing housing crisis.
What is the 15-Minute City? It’s every city ever built by humans on this planet until a century ago, but with a catchy new name. If a city’s old parts haven’t been destroyed in the past century, it’s the areas that attract the most tourists. And people will travel across continents and oceans to experience the best of them.
Forty years ago, a few pioneers decided to start building 15-Minute Cities again. Actually, they built 5-minute cities because they didn’t think people would walk for 15 minutes—and, in the early 1980s, they were right, because people were so conditioned to driving everywhere back then. Seaside, Florida, is where it all began. Time magazine called it “the little town that changed the world.” For the first time in the modern history of sprawl, people could toss their car keys in a drawer or hang them on the wall and leave them there for days. When people returned from Seaside vacations, they came back asking, “Why can’t we build this way at home?” And soon, the New Urbanism was born.
The Austin Transit Partnership has selected UNStudio, HKS, and Gehl to lead the architecture and urban design of Project Connect, a major expansion of the public transportation system in Austin, Texas, in the United States. The project is set to become a transformative investment, including and integrating the light rail system, expanded bus routes, and connectivity with more services across the city. The initiative is also voter-approved. In November 2020, Austin citizens approved Project Connect, leading to the creation of the independent entity Austin Transit Partnership charged with implementing the project. The citizens of Austin are invited to continue to get involved and provide feedback.
With many high streets hollowing out and the National Health Services Association pushed to its limits, Heatherwick Studio is calling for a new kind of health space in metropolitan cities. The Health Street initiative is placed right at the heart of urban communities, reimagining the way we look at well-being and the holistic health of complete localities. Moreover, this radical approach to health creation is based on integrating community-led facilities into the local high streets.
Over the last few years, bike share systems experienced a renaissance as the pandemic forced a hard decline in other forms of public transportation like trains and commercial flights where people wanted to avoid close contact with strangers. While ridership is now on a slow decline, since much of the “normal life” aspects have returned, many people continue to see bike shares as a viable means of transportation, lured by the ease and affordability of getting from place to place.
In 2018, the Roman neighborhood of San Lorenzo hit the headlines when a young girl was found dead in a derelict building. The media focused on the area’s decline, ignoring its long political and cultural history. Known as a “red” territory, San Lorenzo was one of the few districts to resist Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome. Built in the late 19th century to house a working-class population of artisans as well as rail and factory workers, there’s a gritty feel to the neighborhood, defined by remnants of its industrial past and buildings that still bear the scars of Allied bombing in World War II. This small, centrally located neighborhood is wedged between Termini, the main train station, Verano, the monumental cemetery opened in 1812, and the Città Universitaria La Sapienza (La Sapienza University).
https://www.archdaily.com/997358/romes-possible-city-and-the-gentrification-battle-in-san-lorenzoMarina Engel
Subject to the forces of capital, migrating populations, and political circumstances, our planet’s cities are constantly evolving. This continuous evolution is evident in the built fabric of settlements, as architects and planners build upon layers of the built environment, with some having the strenuous task of having to integrate the historic urban areas of cities successfully with contemporary architectural interventions and systems.
The cities of this category are frequently in an internal conflict — oftentimes having to grapple with the sometimes contradictory aims of both sustaining local populations and welcoming outside investment and national development projects.
Airbnb has long been a reliable way to find a homestay. Since its inception in 2008, the site has hosted more than 7 million homes around the world where travelers can stay in a room, or rent an entire house out for themselves. Recently, many cities have been cracking down on short-term stays, citing safety issues, false listings, and rising property prices which push people out of their homes when housing becomes used just for Airbnb rentals. What are cities doing about these issues? What is Airbnb doing to help remediate them? And will Airbnb be viable for much longer?
In the architectural world, unestablished practices are often overlooked, yet, by challenging the traditional dogmas of the industry, they can have a significant impact on the built environment. The Young European Architecture Festival (YEAH!) explores the work of these upcoming architectural offices, looking at how they share ideas visions and experiences at the European level. The event is divided in two sections: Habitats, exploring ideas of domesticity and the residential typology, and Hybrids, initiatives that are rethinking the traditional systems of city planning.
The following represents a selection of projects by emerging architectural practices selected by YEAH! For the Hybrids category. Many of these initiatives are challenging the ideas of public space, but in doing so, they are also shedding light on the larger social structures at play in these spaces. The selection includes community spaces, schools, transportation hubs, and even projects initiated by the architects themselves, who have noticed deficiencies in their environment and are working to not only correct them but to enhance their presence and empower the local community through them.
Suburbs have experienced a sort of renaissance over the last decade. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people fled urban cores in favor of open space and decentralized amenities. For some people, the word “suburb” or “suburbia” flashes images of manicured lawns and rows of identical homes, but what makes a successful suburb may have more in common with cities than you might think.
There are countless good bones in American downtowns across the country, but they’re seldom connected to enough good tissue to be filled with life. This post is on the 10 things needed to make downtowns thrive. And none are the usual suspects. I’ve omitted stuff everyone else talks about because many of you already know those things.
Covid has been particularly hard on cities: downtown business districts are still struggling due to the shift to remote work; some cities have seen population declines; and crime has spiked virtually everywhere. In addition, the pandemic pushed more people into cars, setting back the safe streets movement. After years of progress, cities like New York City saw big increases in pedestrian deaths. This is a nationwide problem—with one notable exception: Jersey City recently announced that no one died on its city streets in 2022, meeting its Vision Zero plan for the city. The milestone was the result of years of work by the city and its collaborator, Street Plans, a planning firm founded by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia. Lydon, a DPZ alum and co-author of the 2015 book Tactical Urbanism (currently being updated), began working with Jersey City on a whole raft of initiatives six years ago. I spoke with Lydon last week and asked him, specifically, how the city and he did it.
Master plans, or large-scale urban planning projects, are one of the main tools for shaping and structuring land use and development to ensure that the built environment is coherent and functional. The interventions vary in scope and approach. While some projects are extending the buildable area by creating floating neighborhoods off the coast of Florida, others are reusing the existing spaces and heritage to reimagine the future of their communities.
Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z have long dominated the conversation around how different generations influence architecture and the built environment. From views around city planning and zoning efforts to the great debate about whether workplaces should be completely open or office-intensive, each generation has had its strong opinions about how spaces we inhabit are designed- largely shaped by the socio-economic, political, and technological influences that have shaped our lives in different ways. Looking ahead, what can we expect next? Enter Generation Alpha, the first generation born entirely within the 21st century.