The acclaimed studio Miró Rivera Architects has published a 448-page monograph, entitled Miró Rivera Architects: Building a New Arcadia. Designed by the award-winning architects, the book features 20 of the firm’s most remarkable projects brought to life through 230 color photographs and 95 drawings. Featuring essays by notable thinkers and cutting-edge practitioners in the fields of architecture and urban design, Building a New Arcadia situates the firm’s diverse portfolio in a global context related to concepts of nature, sustainability, history, and urban design.
I spent four glorious days in Copenhagen in 2017 and left with an acute case of urban envy. (I kept thinking: It’s like..an American Portland—except better.) Why can’t we do cities like this in the United States? That’s the question an urban nerd like me asks while strolling the famously pedestrian-friendly streets, as hordes of impossibly blond and fit Danes bicycle briskly past.
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.
Associated with crime, waste, and garbage, Dandora in Nairobi’s Eastlands is home to 140,000 or so residents. In an on-going collaboration, between local residents and youth groups, UN-Habitat, Making Cities Together Coalition, and the Dandora Transformation League, the Model Street project has been transforming the garbage-filled community spaces into waste-free, attractive, and engaging places. Focusing on improving the shared courtyard spaces of residential compounds, an annual competition led by the youth of the neighborhood, the Changing Faces Challenge, became an initiative mobilizing citizens across Nairobi.
The COVID-19 Pandemic is a disruptive moment for our world, and it’s poised to spur transformative shifts in design, from how we experience our homes and offices to the plans of our cities. The webcast series Design Disruption explores these shifts—and addresses issues like climate change, inequality, and the housing crisis— through chats with visionaries like architects, designers, planners, and thinkers; putting forward creative solutions and reimagining the future of the built environment.
https://www.archdaily.com/951210/design-disruption-episode-6-design-and-the-just-city-with-toni-griffinArchDaily Team
In cities across the United States, an address is more than just a street name or a building number- but a brand that translates directly into a symbol of wealth and prestige. Take the tallest residential tower in the country, 432 Park Avenue in New York City, which doesn't actually sit quite on park avenue. Instead, it’s neighboring lot to the east sits on Park Avenue, and this mega structure actually faces 56th avenue- a significantly less iconic street. However, this inflated valuation doesn’t happen everywhere. Cities in other countries don't place the same weight on an address and refer to buildings or locations as landmarks or by their appearances, which doesn't force a high monetary value based on an address or a marketing scheme alone. How do places in the world differ in how they brand buildings and streets in cities, and what does that tell us about their urban culture?
For the past two weeks, cities across Nigeria were hit by protests against the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a police unit setup in 1992 to fight armed robberies. The anti-SARS protesters are calling for the unit’s disbandment, due to its high-handedness, extra-judicial killings, extortion, and numerous human rights abuses.
Tragically, the protests came to a brutal climax on October 20, with the shooting of protesters at the Lekki Tollgate by gunmen believed to be agents of the Nigerian state. This led to casualties, which are currently a subject of controversy: the Lagos State government concedes that two persons lost their lives; groups like Amnesty International insist the figures are much higher.
https://www.archdaily.com/950764/public-protests-and-the-urban-legacies-of-colonialism-and-military-dictatorship-in-nigeriaMathias Agbo, Jr.
Resilience seems to be the topic of much discussion within circles of urbanism today. Though, there is a slight problem. We can’t quite agree on what the term means.
Two definitions seem to be floating about. The first rooted in material science. The second, in ecology.
Bangladesh, Dhaka, Korail slum settlement in city centre. Image Courtesy of UN-Habitat
Across the globe, ever since 2014, every year on the 31st of October, World Cities Day is celebrated. To mark this event, UN-Habitat has released its World Cities Report 2020 on the value of sustainable urbanization, focusing on the most up-to-date and pressing topics. Analyzing the intrinsic value of cities in generating economic prosperity, mitigating environmental degradation, reducing social inequality, and building stronger institutions, the report highlights how together these can drive transformative change.
More than 55% of the world’s population lives in cities, with that number only expected to increase in the coming decades. Despite the rising population in urban areas, local governments continue to raise flags about inadequate infrastructure and the declining quality of life that cities are facing. Perhaps the large scale problems that we typically categorize as urban innovation, inclusion, and infrastructure, can be solved if we get to the root of the smaller troubles, that we may not even know existed. It’s time to take urban issues off the back burner and improve cities not just for today, but for the long term future.
Over the past week, I’ve seen at least two largemainstream press articles on climate migration, and as more people seem to be tossing around their next move locale—something between North Dakota and anywhere else with the word “north” it. Often, in a simplified, single-issue flattening of the full-range of shifts happening around us.
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Gary Chang in his Domestic Transformer. Image Courtesy of Edge Design Institute
Compact living units have become the norm in most big cities across the globe. High density and the value of land in urban areas has made it mandatory for most developments to take full advantage of the buildable area. The result is homes that are increasingly smaller. Hong Kong is probably the most extreme case – with roughly three-quarters of the land preserved, the portion left for housing accommodates more than 7 million people in one of the densest urban environments on Earth.
We recently had the opportunity to talk with architect Gary Chang, founder of the Hong Kong-based Edge Design Institute, about his vision of compact living, small-scale architecture, flexibility, and the future of our cities.
A re-wilded park. Illustration by Sarah Welch. Image Courtesy of SWA Group
As the pandemic has worn on, the American public has adopted parks and neighborhood streets as safe spaces. This will not be a short-lived phenomenon –bikes have been repaired, running shoes purchased, and puppies adopted. People are growing accustomed to spending time in the outdoors to exercise, spend time with family, enjoy nature –and take that growing puppy for walks.
Elche, Spain. Created by @dailyoverview, source imagery: @maxartechnologies
There is evidence that the orthogonal grid plan, which is one of the most common types of urban planning today, dates back to antiquity. Streets intersect at right angles to each other, resulting in a grid composed of streets, avenues, blocks, squares, parks, among other urban spaces.
In the mid-1990s, when I was an editor at Progressive Architecture, jurors for the magazine’s awards program gave an Urban Design Award to Peterson Littenberg Architects for a plan the small New York firm had devised for then-stagnant Lower Manhattan.
At the time, the southern tip of Manhattan ranked as the third-largest downtown business district in the United States. The tightly packed 1 square mile contained a bevy of venerable buildings, among them the New York Stock Exchange, the former headquarters of J.P. Morgan, and the fortress-like, neo-Renaissance Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Though the vast majority of Americans regarded the district as a powerful financial hub, people close to the scene saw it as a place with grim prospects. More than a quarter of its commercial space stood vacant. Companies were leaving Lower Manhattan for Midtown and more distant locales. Many of the office buildings were regarded as obsolete.
World Architecture Day, celebrated on the first Monday of every October, was set up by the Union International des Architects (UIA) back in 2005 to “remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of the human habitat”, coinciding with UN-Habitat's World Habitat Day.
https://www.archdaily.com/277569/happy-world-architecture-dayArchDaily Team
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.
“People all over the world are increasingly demanding a say in the way that their cities are planned and designed”.For our third collaboration, discover UN-HABITAT’s guideline on achieving quality public spaces, a site-specific assessment consisting of a series of activities and tools that help understand the quality of the selected area and plan future design and planning solutions on the site through participatory approaches. Focusing on open public space, within a five minutes walking distance, the guide helps users gather and analyze information, creating a logical transition from needs to design.
The Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) has launched the new virtual series Architecture & Urbanism for Justice to foster more equitable approaches to architecture and urbanism. These free courses are presented by the museum and intended for teen and adult designers, non-designers, activists and organizers. Participants will get the chance to learn about the Design Justice movement, discussing case studies and exploring resources to help respond to injustices within their own communities.
Aerial view of the Hanford Construction camp. Image Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration
In 1942, less than a year after the United States was pulled into World War II, the U.S Army Corps of Engineers quickly and quietly began acquiring large parcels of land in remote areas in three states. Soon after, thousands of young designers, engineers, planners, scientists, and their families, began arriving at these sites that were heavily shielded from public view. Workers there constructed hundreds of buildings including houses, industrial structures, research labs, and testing facilities at unprecedented speed and scale.
