City Design: The Latest Architecture and News

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

One of the principles of comedy is that you “punch up.” If you have to make fun of someone or something, make sure it’s more prominent than you, and deserving. You can’t get much higher than Santa Clara, California, and you can’t get much more deserving. Santa Clara is, arguably, the city at the heart of Silicon Valley, a globally famous urban region that is so ill-defined as to deny its own existence. Those ranch houses and corporate headquarters represent a distinctly 21st-century brand of power. And a distinctly 20th-century brand of urbanism.

Danish design studio CEBRA won the planning competition to develop the business district at Hannemanns Allé, in Ørestad Syd, Copenhagen, Denmark. With a project emphasizing urban quality, urban life, and area identity, the 150,000 square meters plan will define the framework for future design and completion of the area between the Royal Arena and the Øresund motorway. Expected for completion in 2024, the project is commissioned by Copenhagen Municipality and By&Havn, an organization tasked with developing Ørestad and the city's port.

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URB has unveiled plans to develop Africa's most sustainable city, a development that can host 150,000 residents. Known as The Parks, the city plans to produce 100% of its energy, water & food on-site through biodomes, solar-powered air-to-water generators, and biogas production. The 1,700-hectare project will feature residential, medical, ecotourism, and educational hubs to become one of the significant contributors to the growing green and tech economy in South Africa.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

There are few more powerful questions than “Where are you from?” People feel intensely connected to cities as places and to other people who feel that same kind of connection. In other words, we tend to understand and experience places in a very personal way.

Yet to understand place—indeed, to understand human settlements in general—it’s important to recognize that places are not created by accident. They are created on purpose to further a political or economic agenda. Better cities emerge when the people who shape them think more broadly and consciously about the places they are creating. 

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a series of critiques of the modern city appeared. Jane Jacobs’s attack on those intent on redeveloping New York City was the most immediately impactful, loosening the grip of Robert Moses and his followers, but others had a broader influence on practicing architects and planners. As an observer of San Francisco Bay Region’s cities, I wondered if their books from this period would shed light on current issues of adding density in urban contexts.

If you have ever walked around the center of London you will have seen those yellow and dark blue panels featuring maps, local attractions, and walking times dotted along the streets and near bus and tube stops. Credited with redefining city wayfinding, Legible London, as the system is called, is now seen as the benchmark for making cities accessible and legible to residents, commuters, and visitors alike. And now Seattle has launched its own version of the London system, and Madrid will do so next year. Giovanna Dunmall asks Tim Fendley, the founder and CEO of Applied, the spatial experience design practice behind all these projects, why analog is often still so superior to digital, and what makes for good wayfinding.

Cities are universes in themselves; furiously spawning, spewing, hissing through time and space. They are cudgeled, raked, plastered, worshipped, fought over, set on fire; they are slippery wombs that cradle wars, victories, blood and brilliant storms. The built environment has always been indicative of its inhabitants’ fears, desires, and ideals. As such, it is one of the earliest, most powerful forms of human expression. For World Cities Day 2017, the new BBC Designed section of the BBC Culture website commissioned motion graphics designer Al Boardman to create The Perfect City, an animated video covering a brief history of humankind’s quest for the "ideal" and the "perfect" in urban design. With a voiceover and script by renowned architecture critic and writer Jonathan Glancey, the video is a remarkable 2-minute overview of some prominent examples in city planning, both old and new, successful and unsuccessful.