City: The Latest Architecture and News

The art installation, Salt - Microcosm of Life[Style] is currently exhibiting at 2015 Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Hong Kong Edition). Stanley Pun and Rina Ko are recent graduates from London and Hong Kong and the work is a reflection of what ability do we have to influence the way we want to live - by changing our perspectives - and in turn, how it could shape our future city.

The Superscape 2016 title Future Urban Living – Functional Reduction with Maximum Space Gain opens a field for visionary design suggestions and space concepts which focus on building the urban residential space of the future. Innovative solutions are sought, combining high-quality residences with great space efficiency and the greatest functional flexibility possible. In this context, the changing needs and requirements of urban dwellers for their residences during the next 50 years shall be taken into consideration. The goal is to formulate forward-thinking concepts, to question familiar residential patterns and to risk experiments in design, but also to consider their feasibility, and to check the possibility of realising them within existing building substance and existing urban structures. Furthermore, the subject is highly relevant with regard to increasing mobility and urban traffic flow within the context of urban planning.

This coming October, the international month of architecture, BABEL is launching a new project: Macau Architecture Promenade. MAP opening is schedule for 10/10 at 6.30 at the Creative Albergue and it will last until 1/11.

This article was written by Rodrigo Bitencourt and Gláucia Dalmolin, and translated from Portuguese by Rodrigo Bitencourt.

The city and civilization are concomitant phenomena. The city can be seen as a receptacle that both accommodates and transmits civilization. In fact, as man differs from other creatures in his ability to learn indefinitely, his perfectibility (ants that lived six thousand years ago had the same features of current ants: they are confined to a narrow range of behaviors dictated by their genetic programs), he acquired the power to extrapolate nature and thus build in his own way, creating history. As every human life is unique and no one can predetermine how it will be carried out, it could be said that the human being bears a historical duality: the individual history, or education, and the collective history, or culture.

UPDATE: The BBC reports that construction on the Kiruna re-location is scheduled to begin next month. For more on this extraordinary project, read the article below.

Everyone is familiar with the stresses of moving to a new house, but the residents of Kiruna, a small town of 18,000 in Sweden, face a more daunting task: moving their entire city.

For more than 100 years, residents of Kiruna have developed their city center around the world's largest iron mine, operated by the state-controlled company, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB (LKAB). In 2004, LKAB determined that to continue extracting iron would mean digging deeper, unsettling the ground beneath 3,000 homes as well as the city hall, train station, and century-old church.