Mobility: The Latest Architecture and News

As co-living becomes increasingly associated with students, young professionals, and other mobile residents, it raises a broader architectural question: if home is no longer tied to long-term residence, what should architecture expect the private dwelling to provide?

People move for school, for a temporary job, or for a career that keeps taking them somewhere new. Many now expect to spend a defined period in a place before leaving it. Housing built for them has to do more than provide shelter. It has to support the routines through which someone adapts to an unfamiliar place, in the short time they know they have there. A year in a city asks something different of an apartment than a lifetime does, even if the square meters look the same on paper.

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Every twelve years, the banks of the Ganges at Prayagraj become one of the largest cities on Earth — and then disappear. The Maha Kumbh Mela draws over 400 million pilgrims across six weeks, requiring the construction of a full urban infrastructure: pontoon bridges, field hospitals, kilometers of temporary roads, a grid of tent cities visible from space. When the festival ends, it is dismantled entirely. No gathering in human history produces a more complete architecture of movement; built for arrival, engineered for transience, and designed to leave no permanent trace. The Kumbh Mela is exceptional in scale, but not in condition: movement has become a defining spatial problem of the century.

This month, ArchDaily explores Architectures of Movement: Land, Borders, and the Politics of Belonging, a theme that examines how mobility reshapes architecture's relationship to territory, ownership, and identity. The topic does not treat movement as a crisis to be managed, but as a fundamental lens through which to reconsider what buildings, cities, and borders actually do: who they accommodate, who they exclude, and what they make permanent.

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How can the most structured elements in architecture give rise to unplanned forms of everyday life? "Spontaneous order" describes how structured systems can generate unplanned but coherent patterns of behavior. In urban discourse, it is often used to describe cities: frameworks of streets, plots, and buildings that are designed, while everyday life is not. Movement, encounters, routines, and informal uses emerge from simple spatial rules rather than explicit programming. In cities, this is visible in how sidewalks, stations, and thresholds operate. The structure is fixed, but the social order is fluid, setting conditions for behavior rather than defining it.

A similar logic can be observed in architectural micro-infrastructures such as locker systems. Like cities, lockers rely on structured frameworks that do not prescribe how life unfolds within them. A locker system is highly controlled in architectural terms: repetitive modules, strict grids, standardized dimensions, controlled access. Yet once in use, it produces spontaneous behaviors. People pause in corridors, return at irregular times, linger near locker zones, or briefly interact with others doing the same. What appears to be a strictly infrastructural storage system begins to generate informal social and spatial behavior.

Across Europe and North America, pedestrianisation is increasingly being deployed as a context-specific urban strategy shaped by distinct economic, social, and spatial pressures. As cities continue to reassess the role of streets in the wake of economic shifts, climate pressures, and changing mobility patterns, pedestrianisation is emerging as a tool in current urban transformation efforts. Across London, New York, Houston, and Stockholm, ongoing pedestrian-first projects are testing different pathways toward more resilient and walkable cities, ranging from statutory planning and capital construction to research-driven visioning. London's Oxford Street is advancing through consultation and governance reform to address retail decline; New York's Paseo Park is moving from a temporary pandemic intervention into permanent infrastructure; Houston is accelerating the pedestrianisation of its downtown core in preparation for a global sporting event; and Stockholm's Superline is using design research to rethink the future of an inner-city motorway. These initiatives reveal how pedestrianisation is being actively negotiated, designed, and built today, adapting to local motivations while converging on a shared objective of streets that perform as resilient public spaces rather than traffic conduits.

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UNS's design proposal for Turin's new Metro Line 2, developed in collaboration with Settanta7, Mijksenaar, Frigorosso, 3BA, and WSP, has been selected by an international jury of experts chaired by Dominique Perrault. The proposal is based on the idea of "flow," a concept that has historically shaped the Italian city, from the Po and Dora rivers to the 18 kilometers of arcaded porticoes that structure how residents and visitors move. The project envisions Line 2 as a new "urban river," guided by three design principles to facilitate this flow: branding, transit experience, and scales of identity. With 32 stations planned in total, the initial design phase includes 10 stations, among them Mole Giardini, San Giovanni Bosco, and Carlo Alberto.

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This week has been marked by the deliberate, rampant, and unjust destruction of war in Southeast Asia. As one of the most damaging manifestations of human abuse of power, we have witnessed the destruction of places that hold memories and sustain culture, as well as the loss and irreparable harm to the human lives that lend them their identity. With the expectation of offering brighter and more constructive scenarios in the future, we present, in contrast to this reality, a scenario of progress in the gender gap that characterizes architecture and its paths forward, a group of landmark projects of public and community interest moving forward from Türkiye to Mexico, and three major multimodal transport infrastructure projects improving the way we circulate and inhabit public space in Europe and the United States.

Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district. For many years, built-environment professionals have treated infrastructure as a technical challenge. Mobility justice insists it is, fundamentally, a political one.

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The future of transportation hubs in the United States will not be defined by iconic metropolitan airport terminals and expansive central train stations. Rural communities contain the majority of the nation's road miles, carry nearly half of all truck vehicle miles traveled, and originate two-thirds of rail freight. These realities position rural transportation hubs as vital regional access points and distribution centers that shape national mobility outside models of urban extensions.

Rural transportation hubs in the United States are essential civic and logistical anchors whose success cannot be measured against urban metrics. Instead of replicating transport hubs of dense urban typologies, designers are developing architectural models that reflect rural realities: dispersed populations, freight-dominant infrastructure, modest multimodality, safety challenges, and social access needs. In many rural regions, a modest airport terminal sustains economic viability, a rail transfer facility connects resource-based industries to national markets, and a regional bus depot provides access to employment, education, and essential services.

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Urban masterplans remain an exploratory ground for unbuilt speculation, offering insight into how cities might recalibrate mobility, ecology, and collective life in response to accelerating environmental and social pressures. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects bring together a range of large-scale proposals that examine urban centers, waterfront districts, infrastructural corridors, and cultural landscapes as spatial frameworks for reconnection and resilience. Rather than treating the masterplan as a rigid blueprint, these projects approach urbanism as an adaptive system shaped by climate, topography, infrastructure, and public space.

Across varied geographies, from Northern European town centers and Mediterranean coastal districts to Central Asian polycentric hubs and Gulf megacities, the proposals explore diverse architectural and urban strategies. They range from park-led civic transformations built over highway tunnels to elevated pedestrian networks above active transport systems, mixed-use blocks structured by historic planning logics, marina developments integrating environmental stewardship, and research-driven models for equitable landscape urbanization.

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Across different geographies and scales, this week's architecture news reflects a sustained focus on how cities and buildings are being recalibrated in response to evolving patterns of movement, work, and collective life. Across multiple contexts, public space and mobility remain central concerns, with streets, downtowns, and large-scale developments serving as testing grounds for new approaches to accessibility, resilience, and everyday use. Pedestrianisation initiatives and community-led visions point to evolving governance models and long-term urban strategies, while cultural and research-driven platforms continue to frame these changes within broader public discourse. In parallel, progress on major mixed-use and corporate projects underscores the growing integration of digital infrastructure, environmental performance, and flexible spatial frameworks within contemporary architecture.

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Every year on 3 December, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities brings renewed attention to the need for inclusive, equitable environments, both socially and spatially. The 2025 theme, "Fostering disability inclusive societies for advancing social progress," highlights how persistent barriers in employment, social protection, and access to services continue to affect more than one billion people worldwide. Within this broader context, the built environment plays a decisive role: architecture can either reinforce exclusion or open pathways toward autonomy, dignity, and participation in daily life.

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Infrastructure has long defined the backbone of cities by linking people, landscapes, and economies through systems that often go unnoticed until they fail. Today, as global challenges demand more adaptive and human-centered responses, architects are rethinking what infrastructure can be: not just a framework for movement and utility, but a catalyst for ecological restoration, cultural continuity, and civic imagination. The following unbuilt projects, submitted by the ArchDaily community, explore this expanded role of infrastructure, where airports, bridges, industrial parks, and pedestrian networks become architectural expressions of connection and care.

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Welcome to Passages
International Conference at Politecnico di Milano,
Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU).

As cities and infrastructures evolve to meet shifting cultural, environmental, and social demands, new architectural projects are redefining how public spaces and civic institutions operate. This edition of Architecture Now brings together proposals spanning different contexts and scales: on Yakushima Island, Jean Nouvel embeds a boutique retreat for NOT A HOTEL into a UNESCO-listed forest landscape; in New York City, Rossetti and WSP are preparing a major renovation of Arthur Ashe Stadium to expand capacity and enhance the visitor experience; in Toronto, Diamond Schmitt and gh3* have broken ground on a mass-timber, net-zero paramedic station; and across the English Channel, Hollaway Studio is leading a transformation of LeShuttle's UK and French terminals into more seamless and sustainable gateways. Together, these projects reflect how design is being used to adapt existing systems and landscapes to new forms of public life.

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From greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution to deforestation, one of the leading contributors to global warming today is emissions from the transportation sector. Exploring its origins and evolution, as well as the major challenges it faces, the development of electric mobility in urban environments represents a global transition that requires a coordinated mix of policies and actions to achieve cleaner and more sustainable transportation systems. Designing safe and comfortable infrastructure for walking and cycling, promoting public transit and shared mobility, and designing more efficient streets that include electric vehicles, among other actions, are part of a growing worldwide effort to reduce carbon emissions.

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The gas station is an architectural typology that has undergone significant transformations since its inception. Initially, these structures were simple roadside refueling points designed for functionality rather than aesthetics. As automobile culture expanded, gas stations evolved to accommodate new technologies, shifting urban landscapes and changing consumer behaviors. Over time, they became more than just utilitarian stops — they developed into service hubs, integrating restaurants, motels, and leisure spaces, responding to contemporary transportation increasing demands.

By the late 20th century, however, the widespread standardization of gas stations led them to be perceived as "non-places", a concept defined by anthropologist Marc Augé to describe transient spaces that lack social or cultural significance. With uniform designs and a focus on efficiency, gas stations became interchangeable, reinforcing their role as purely functional infrastructure rather than meaningful architectural interventions. This standardization also departed from the era when fuel stations served as recognizable landmarks, contributing to a homogenized landscape devoid of local identity.

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Gallaudet University was established in 1864, becoming the first American educational institution for the deaf and hard of hearing. The university is officially bilingual, with American Sign Language (ASL) and written English used throughout the educational programs. Over the years, the university has grown, adapting both its teaching methods and its spaces to the needs of its students, in turn learning from them how to counter the challenges they face and create a safer and more comfortable environment. These lessons turned into design guidelines, created to educate the architectural community about the strategies they can employ to create more accessible spaces for all.

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21st Europe, a new design-led think tank founded by former SPACE10 creative director Kaave Pour focused on shaping the future of the continent, has just unveiled Starline: a blueprint for a high-speed rail system that aims to connect Europe as seamlessly as a city metro. Revealed at the think tank's inaugural summit in Barcelona and developed in collaboration with creative technology studio Bakken & Bæck, Starline combines infrastructure, digital tools, and visual identity into one integrated vision for movement across the continent.

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