Female architects and urban planners account for 63.47% of the 174,513 registered professionals currently in the country. Despite being the majority in the profession, the spotlight remains focused on men. To break this paradigm and promote dialogue and ways to foster the inclusion and visibility of women in the multiple fields of Architecture and Urban Planning, the Council of Architecture and Urbanism of Rio de Janeiro (CAU/RJ) has launched the CAU + Mulheres Award.

Most architecture schools in Brazil also focus on the study of the city. This is only logical, considering that architecture and urbanism can be seen as the same discipline viewed from different scales. However, career opportunities at the urban scale may not always be clear. Consequently, Anthony Ling shared an article on ten ways to work in urbanism.

The new space of São Paulo's Museum of Image and Sound (MIS) will open its doors with an exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci. Scheduled for October of this year, the opening of the museum's new branch, located in the Água Branca neighborhood in São Paulo's west zone, will host the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci – 500 Years.

The City of Camaçari and the Institute of Architects of Brazil – Bahia Department have announced the winners of the national design competition for the public park on Morro da Manteiga. The goal was to select a viable project that provides Morro da Manteiga with a socially inclusive and environmentally healthy use.

With the popularization of virtual reality and augmented reality, new ways of exploring architectural representations have become available to professionals and students. Immersion in three-dimensional digital models is increasingly common, whether through a computer screen, smartphone or VR headsets. In light of this reality, which seemed overly futuristic up until a few years ago, the online platform Tour Fácil has launched a free plugin that can view exported 360-degree images from SketchUp in virtual or augmented reality.

Installed about three years ago, the vertical gardens occupying the blind walls of several buildings near the Minhocão have lacked maintenance for over a year and have become a nuisance for residents. According to an article published in Folha de S. Paulo, the green walls went from being an attraction to a liability for the buildings that chose to adopt the system.

The City of Florianópolis and the Santa Catarina State Government plan to inaugurate the first phase of the urban redevelopment project for the famous Hercílio Luz Bridge and its surroundings by the end of the year. Named Ponte Viva: Hercílio Luz Para as Pessoas (Living Bridge: Hercílio Luz for People), the project encompasses not only the restructuring of the iconic landmark as road infrastructure, but also its activation for other uses, such as sports, leisure, and culture.

The Portuguese firm Aires Mateus, led by brothers Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus, has won the international competition to design the renovation of the Museum of Fine Arts of Reims in France. This is the duo's third large-scale cultural project in France, alongside the Olivier Debré Contemporary Creation Center in Tours and the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse.

Japanese architect Kengo Kuma won the closed contest to design the expansion of the gardens of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the new entrance of the Modern Collection of the Gulbenkian Museum. The result was announced last Saturday by the Portuguese newspaper Expresso.

Brazil has just received another World Heritage designation. Paraty and Ilha Grande (RJ) were recognized this Friday, July 5, by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Committee during a meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan. There are now 22 Brazilian properties on the list of sites of outstanding universal value.

For its 31st competition, organized in partnership with the Associação Parque Minhocão, the Projetar.org portal invited students and young professionals to envision what the Minhocão Park could be. In total, 310 students participated, representing 74 cities, 13 states, and 51 universities.

While visiting a city one has never been to before, it is common to go to touristic places, the 'must-see' spots advertised in the media. On the other hand, when establishing residency in a place, it is likely that one will start to attend some less popular locations, and will often spend a long time without passing by the city's most famous touristic sights. Artist Eric Fischer has developed a project that explores precisely the difference in perceiving - and photographing - a city from the point of view of tourists and locals. The work, which is entitled Locals and Tourists, gathers the maps of 136 of the largest - and most visited - cities in the world.

Traveling around Japan can be an impressive experience for a Western tourist - especially if they have some connection with architecture. In addition to the huge cultural differences, the country is known for its rich architectural production - eight of the 42 Pritzker Prize laureates are Japanese - which has maintained its consistency since the 1960s.

Álvaro Siza and Carlos Castanheira have unveiled the design for another major structure in Asia, this time for the Haishang Museum, located in the Jiading District of Shanghai, China. The proposal comprises a museum building and three smaller structures—a pavilion, a tea house, and a bridge.

As part of our monthly topic (travel), we invited several Brazilian and Portuguese architecture firms to suggest buildings and public spaces in their respective cities that are well worth a visit. In Brazil, projects in Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, Olinda, Fortaleza, Belo Horizonte, and Porto Alegre will inspire our readers to get to know the country better—or cross the Atlantic to visit works in the Portuguese cities of Guimarães, Porto, and Lisbon.

Architects and urban planners evaluated the services offered by CAU/BR and the state-level CAU/UFs. Out of nine services analyzed by the professionals, seven received an average score above 7 on a scale of zero to 10. These and other findings are part of the CAU Evaluation Survey conducted by the Datafolha Institute in May. The study interviewed 1,500 architects and urban planners and 500 architecture and urban planning firms by telephone to assess the effectiveness of the Council's communication channels with professionals and society, as well as to gather information to support initiatives ensuring access to the entity's information.

The transparency of the Glass House, the residence where Lina Bo Bardi and her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi, lived for forty years, is the subject of the work Casa de vento, by the visual artist Lucia Koch, native to the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Koch is known for employing filters, screens, photographs, and videos in her investigations of light, spatiality, movement, and time, in close dialogue with architecture. Her intervention in Bo Bardi's house is another of her works that aims to shift our understanding of built reality through the superimposition of other layers of reality.

The National Secretariat of Housing of the Ministry of Regional Development and the Council for Architecture and Urbanism of Brazil (CAU/BR) agreed, during a meeting this week in Brasília, to create methods that will allow architects and urban planners to participate directly in real estate financing throughout the country. However, the agreement has not yet been finalized, and the procedures will be developed jointly with financial institutions.