Urbanism: The Latest Architecture and News

It is projected that by 2025, the world’s population will reach over 8.1 billion people- and a large majority of those people will be heavily concentrated in cities. While much of the focus has been on preparing and reconfiguring our already hyper-dense urban to absorb even more people, in the peripheral, smaller cities and towns around the globe have experienced significant expansion, and have defined themselves as “up-and-coming”. Places that were perhaps once overlooked are putting themselves on the map for their rapid growth, economic vitality, and affordability, among other characteristics.

Cities around the globe have widely adopted the concept of adaptive reuse and the importance of investing in historic sites and bringing them into the present day. Instead of focusing on brand new, ground-up construction, many are seeing the value in repurposing structure for new programs. Old churches are becoming restaurants, factories are transformed into museums and apartments, and warehouses are designed to become iconic office spaces. But beyond individual buildings, some planners and preservationists are reimagining what it means to revitalize in a similar way, but at a city scale, and how we can determine the buildings that would benefit our neighborhoods if they are repurposed.

The urban settlements we inhabit today exist in their present form due to a host of reasons. There are cities that have grown due to their proximity to water – such as the growth of Dar es Salaam to the major port city it is today. There are the planned capital cities scattered around the world, governments of countries such as Brazil and Nigeria building cities from scratch from the input of acclaimed architects. There are also the settlements that exist and grow because of certain industries, such as Silicon Valley in the American state of California being home to giants of the technology industry. There’s an industry, however, that has spawned both pulsating cities and abandoned towns – the mining industry.

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The way our world looks like today is a result of centuries and centuries of human migration, of complex natural phenomena that has resulted in the geographic appearance of the world’s continents today. We understand this world through our lived experiences, but we also understand this world through a two-dimensional man-made invention – maps. Maps define the many contested borders of the world and have been used in an oppressive capacity, in particular places, for example, segmenting off sections of a place from marginalised societal groups.

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Over the last 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurant owners around the globe have continuously suffered over the past year- especially small, independent establishments. If there’s one glimmer of hope that many of them have experienced, as public health guidelines continue to evolve, it’s that many cities have relaxed their policies and allowed restaurants to construct temporary shelters on sidewalks and in streets as a means to keep their businesses afloat. But in life after the pandemic, how should we address these setups? Should we turn them into something more permanent and allow outdoor dining to stay?

Migration across towns, cities, states, countries, and continents is part of everyday life. As we move to seek out new opportunities in our personal and professional lives, our individual choices actually have greater impacts on the large, highly-interconnected socio-economical systems around the globe. Moving from a small farm town into a major metropolis, or from one continent to another comes with more implications than you may think- and architecture, paired with the concept of “Brain Drain”, might be helping to pull the strings behind the scenes, influencing you to go from one place to the next.

The discussion around how we plan the cities we want to live in is a never-ending conversation. As our world experiences shifts that impact urban designs in both predictable and unpredictable ways, some principals have held true- that cities that rely less on private transportation, create walkable neighborhoods, boast a multitude of public parks and spaces, and are designed at a more human scale tend to be favored and well-recieved by the people who inhabit them. Enter the concept of New Urbanism. Backed by these ideologies with a modern spin on is how they might apply to our 21st-century lifestyles, New Urbanism a planning strategy that has been both praised and critiqued since its implementation.