Religion is a uniquely human reality. As are cities. As we emerge from our burrows of sequestration, the silent cities and places of worship will become human again, versus the present sad memory of what they once were.
We will recover from another human reality, the pandemic and when we do we will be forced to address some questions. Before this century, the automobile was once seen as the way Americans could create a new reality: a huge middle class that could control its life by using the freedom that cars gave them to go where they wanted, when they wanted, and to live where they wanted. Before this latest change of sequestration, that vision of what cars meant to our culture was changing —especially in cities.
An extensive urban regeneration project is slated to take place in the town of Stockton in the United Kingdom. A 37-million-pound project, the proposal - drawn up by Ryder Architecture and backed by the Stockton Borough Council - will demolish half the high street in Stockton’s town centre and replace it with a riverside park.
Almost one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, life is starting to feel like it might regain its sense of normalcy. With promising vaccines being slowly rolled around the globe, the focus is shifting away from the immediate, and into what the future looks like- including where people want to live. At the beginning of the pandemic, stories all across the media claimed that cities were dead, people were leaving as a permanent measure of safety and well-being, and that the real estate market would experience a long and slow recovery to the boom it had experienced in the pre-pandemic world. But there’s been a shift, and it’s happening fast- people are returning to cities almost as suddenly as they once left them.
Mobile playground in Vietnam. Image Courtesy of UN-Habitat, Global Public Space Programme
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.
“During this pandemic, public spaces have played a vital role in the health and sustainability of urban communities around the world” states James Delaney, Block by Block chair. In fact, people need to go outside, now more than ever. In order to equip these public spaces to face the challenges of Covid-19, UN-Habitat with the Block by Block Foundation has been supporting ten cities, throughout this past year. With the help of local governments and the community, the initiatives helped covid-proof open urban entities, especially in poor neighborhoods, where there are few shared and green spaces. From creating mobile pop-up playgrounds for children in Hanoi, Vietnam, improving livelihood for street vendors in Dhaka and Khulna, Bangladesh to Covid Proofing of Public Spaces in Bhopalinformal settlements, India, these responses have provided help to those who need it the most.
You might be surprised by this, but the days of shopping in stores are long from over-, in fact, they’re experiencing a renaissance, and are creating a whole new type of design and experience to bring consumers back through the doors. The rise of e-commerce and the pause caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have served as a perfect catalyst for creating a whole new type of experience through unique design features, technological advancements, and customization that will revitalize physical stores in the future.
When looking at the population of the world's metropolises, in this case Mexico City, the reality is that the majority of the people living there have migrated from other regions of the country and, sometimes, from other countries as well. Of course, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, companies and schools have gone virtual, and, with their work and studies no longer tied to urban centers, people have left in masse for the coast and other less populated areas in search of space and lower living costs.
FOUN’TA’SY. Image Courtesy of Public Housing Enterprise J.S.C
Looking at the urban environment, this week’s curated selection of the Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights interventions in public spaces, submitted by the ArchDaily Community. Suitable for this monthly topic, the article underlines worldwide approaches that tackle the challenges of these areas through the introduction of innovative solutions.
Exploring a multitude of methods fitting for different contexts, this feature presents a tactical urban strategy implemented in a neighborhood in Kosovo and micro-mobility measures in Italy. Other projects evoke public approaches in private developments and enhanced historical and cultural connections between parks, buildings, and cities. In addition, this roundup showcases conceptual interventions that tackle social distancing and the challenges of the pandemic, in order to allow people to move freely and safely across space.
Restaurant/retail expansion structure in NYC. Image Courtesy of Fantastica & Hollaender Mfg. Co.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to adapt quickly to new ways of living: new ways of working, communicating, buying groceries, and so much more. That adaptability is the key to navigating our changing world. Modular and flexible building systems can help us adapt our physical spaces to the new realities of social distancing or even to the need for rapidly deploying field hospitals.
Public art is an innate cultural privilege for New Yorkers. Top-notch art can be found across the city’s boroughs everywhere from parks, squares, alleys, and rooftops—sometimes to the jaded disdain of passerby. While permanent staples, such as Robert Indiana’s Love on 6th Avenue or George Segal’s Gay Liberation at the Stonewall National Monument are ingrained in the urban texture, others are more ephemeral. Public art has the power to swiftly take over Instagram feeds but also has a history of sparking polarizing interpretations at town hall hearings.
https://www.archdaily.com/956185/has-the-pandemic-changed-the-experience-of-encountering-art-in-publicOsman Can Yerebakan
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.
It’s a given that the coronavirus pandemic has had wide-ranging impacts on construction projects large and small over the past 10 months. So, what about the construction of new buildings that share the defining characteristic of being superlatively tall?
As detailed in an annual report published earlier this month by the Chicago-headquartered Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), newly completed skyscrapers experienced a global decline of 20 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year due, both directly and indirectly, to the COVID-19 crisis.
Imagine having a blank canvas on which to master-plan a brand new city; drawing its roads, homes, commerces, and public spaces on a fresh slate and crafting its unique urban identity. Every urban planner has fantasized about designing a city from scratch and luckily for some, this dream is morphing into concrete opportunities.
Over the last two decades, new, master-planned cities have emerged from the ground up at an unprecedented scale, the majority of which have been created in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, with currently over 150 new cities in the making. This new type of urban development has shown to be particularly seductive in emerging markets, where they are sold as key parts of the strategy to leapfrog from agriculture and resource-based systems to knowledge economies by attracting foreign capital and boosting economic growth.
As we are entering 2021 after a year of anxiety and uncertainties, what are your expectation for our future? The UN75 survey reports that most people around the world hold greater optimism for the future: “Globally, many more respondents believe people will be better off in 2045 than today (49%) compared to those who believe people will be worse off (32%).”
In dystopian films, it is a common trope to depict the sky as filled with a thick fog, blocking the sun's rays and bringing a dark atmosphere to the scenes. Whether in Blade Runner or in a Black Mirror episode, the lack of sun commonly represents a future we would rather not live in. The sun provides heat to planet Earth and is a great source of light energy, essential for the survival of many living creatures. We can generate electricity from the sun and still use only a fraction of the energy it provides. Sunlight also regulates our circadian cycle, which affects our mood. But recent forest fires and industrial pollution in some large cities have already made the dystopian blockage of sun a relatively common phenomenon, depriving hours of sunshine from many inhabitants. Concurrently, with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are living a plot that few science fiction writers could have predicted, and new technologies and solutions have emerged to try to contain the spread of this invisible enemy. Can the sun, or specifically ultraviolet radiation, kill viruses and bacteria? Could it kill the coronavirus?
A new film by OMA / Reinier de Graaf titled “The Hospital of the Future” has been released as a part of the exhibition, Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales at Matadero Madrid Centre for Contemporary Creation. Dubbed a “visual manifesto”, the 12-minute short film questions the long-standing conventions in the field of healthcare architecture in terms of the methodology behind how hospitals are built and also why they are built in certain ways. Through an exploration of the role that disease has played in shaping cities, the film offers a lens into the future of what we might expect for healthcare design, especially as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dublin Bridge Park in Columbus, Ohio. Image via Dublin Bridge Park
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.
For the newest installment of the NGV Triennial, architect Kengo Kuma and Melbourne artist Geoff Nees realized the Botanical Pavillion. Image Courtesy of Tom Ross
What might be called the Art Fair Industrial Complex has been an ambivalent force on both art markets and art itself in recent years: in one view, fairs offer their attendees chances to see international work they wouldn’t otherwise have access to; in another, the vast mall of it all dulls context into commerce.
Every December talking heads (or screens) trumpet “Everything Has Changed”. But this year it is true. Imminent inoculations may bring back human contact, but the Coronavirus Year has changed us.
I think 2020 ended the 20th Century in architecture. Architecture never leads in pivotal periods. Modernism was birthed by a Western World leaving monarchies and diving into the Industrial Revolution: it caused neither.
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.jpg?1614161736 "Mobile playground in Vietnam. Image Courtesy of UN-Habitat, Global Public Space Programme")
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.jpg?1611548432 "Santa Fe, Mexico City. Image © Johny Miller")
_22.43.53_(1).jpg?1611548822 "Mexico City During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Image © Santiago Arau")
(%C2%A9minorormajor).jpg?1612954566 "Oasis-Playground. Image Courtesy of Studio Minorormajor")
.jpg?1611288061 "The Line project in Saudi Arabia. Image © NEOM")
