Cities: The Latest Architecture and News

Understanding what drives economic, social, and educational disparities between communities is one of urbanism’s most critical and highly-discussed topics. It’s an increasingly complex issue, with many factors at play- one of them being the design and location of desirable urban green spaces. While sometimes they are a tool that helps to bolster underserved communities in terms of health and economic benefits, safety, and climate resistance, other times they can actually drive out the residents that they are created to serve. Now, the challenge lies in how to design these recreational sites to create better futures for all.

As long as cities have been around, there’s been one pressing question central to their future: “What makes urban areas desirable?” Over half of the world’s inhabitants live in cities and that number is projected to climb over the next decade with more than 5 billion people inhabiting urban cores globally. To prepare for this demand, cities are finding ways to be more desirable, draw in talent, and entice both big and small businesses, all while finding more ways to create equitable living opportunities for all.

Almost 6 months ago, on August 4^th, 2020, the city of Beirut was shaken by one of the biggest non-nuclear blasts in history. Leaving the northern side of the capital in ruins, the explosion damaged around 40,000 buildings. New contemporary structures completed recently by local international architects are now facing reconstruction dilemmas, raising existential questions such as: How should reconstruction efforts of “new” damaged buildings look like? Should architects rebuild them as they were before the blast, erasing what has happened or should they leave scars and portray new realities?

In order to explore ideas and highlight different perspectives, ArchDaily had the chance to sit with three architects whose buildings were impacted by the blast. Bernard Khoury, Paul Kaloustian, and Lina Ghotmeh talked about their projects and their vision of the reconstruction of Beirut with ArchDaily's Managing Editor, Christele Harrouk, alongside Architectural Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu, who documented in a featured photo series the extent of the destruction.

+ 15

Think about the city or town where you live. How long does it take you to get to the grocery store on foot? Is your school or work close enough to walk to? What about a public park, a doctor’s office, a daycare, or any other places that you visit on a daily basis? While some cities have already considered what it means to live near all of these necessities, others are revamping their urban planning strategies and designing their neighborhoods to be more pedestrian-friendly with the concept of a “15-Minute City”.

The Un-Habitat or the United Nations agency for human settlements and sustainable urban development, whose primary focus is to deal with the challenges of rapid urbanization, has been developing innovative approaches in the urban design field, centered on the active participation of the community. ArchDaily has teamed up with UN-Habitat to bring you weekly news, article, and interviews that highlight this work, with content straight from the source, developed by our editors.

Around 440 fast-growing cities in emerging economies will contribute by 2025, to nearly half of global economic growth. If given the right planning and management tools, this urbanization “can be transformative, creating jobs, reducing poverty, and improving citizens’ quality of life”. As a matter of fact, the Global Future Cities Programme (GFCP) aims to deliver this required support. Based on urban planning, transport, and resilience principles, the program provides “technical assistance for a set of targeted interventions to encourage sustainable development and increase prosperity while alleviating high levels of urban poverty”.

+ 8

Suburbs as we know them are changing forever. Partially exacerbated by the effects of the pandemic, residents are leaving cities in droves in search of more favorable living conditions where more space, privacy, and affordability offers what some consider to be a more comfortable lifestyle. But as time goes on, and development sprawls, it’s harder to tell where cities end and suburbs begin.

Cities would be nothing without the sense of experimentation and the future-forward push to always break the status quo in demand of a better urban life. As many successful urban designs and strategies as there have been, the world has also seen some not-so-successful ones, that have been pushed to the sidelines becoming a forgotten memory over time. While we look ahead and speculate about what the future of cities could and should be, maybe it’s time to take the lessons learned from these failed projects and pay homage to their misfortunes, so that history’s mistakes aren’t repeated in the present day.

The pandemic provided a unique circumstance for city-scale experiments regarding mobility, while immediate responses showed the transformative power of tactical urbanism. In many cities, the measures meant to ensure social distancing are to be kept in place post-pandemic, paving the path towards recovery with less traffic and more outdoor activities. How did the pressure of rethinking streets, functions, and transportation systems transform public space in 2020?

+ 5

Before the pandemic, the world was already facing a series of global transformations in the field of construction, where emerging countries were at the forefront of a powerful economic shift. As the world's population is expected to reach the 10-billion milestone before 2100, the construction sector should be able to understand and adapt to the megatrends that are reshaping the globe.