BIG unveiled its latest intervention, the Toyota Woven City, the company's first venture in Japan. Nestled at the foothills of Mt. Fuji, the project, in collaboration with Toyota Motor Corporation, is the world’s first urban incubator pushing forward the development and progress of mobility.
City of the Future is a bi-weekly podcast from Sidewalk Labs that explores ideas and innovations that will transform cities.
In the third episode from season 2, hosts Eric Jaffe and Vanessa Quirk discuss the future of mobility in cities and share ideas that would make it way easier to get around without owning a car. In the podcast, author Horace Dediu talks about micro-mobility; TriMet's Bibiana McHugh tells the story behind GTFS and the OpenTrip Planner; MaaS Global CEO Sampo Hietanen explains the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS); and Sidewalk Labs' Corinna Li explains what Mobility on Demand could be like in the city of the future.
Accessibility and mobility. When perceived through the architectural lens, these terms often evoke a range capped by two extremes. On the one end, the flexibility of circulation systems; the universality of egress networks; and the technicalities of minimums and maximums. On the other end, a project’s capacity to support broad ranges of socioeconomic narratives; its malleability in the face of rapid fluctuations of program and function; and its reactivity in maintaining a productive role amidst the ebbs and flows of societal dynamics.
Advances in technology have changed the way people work and move around congested cities. Since free space in these urban areas has become scarce, people have shifted their perspective upwards and are now looking to the sky for new means of mobility, transporting their goods via cargo drones and flying ‘taxis’.
The implementation of a Complete Street is something to be celebrated. A Complete Street initiative is a clear indication that a city is striving for urban mobility and seeking a more democratic and safer use of space. Nevertheless, it is vital to measure the impact of these interventions when implementing future actions.
Joel Carlos Borges Street, the first Complete Street in São Paulo, underwent an evaluation two months after it was completed. The study revealed that 92% of its users approved of the project and believed that the changes were beneficial.
Florian Marquet, an architect based in Shanghai, recently released a proposal to rethink urban life through autonomous mobile living spaces. Dubbed 'the org’, his project aims to reconsider the housing market's status quo and provide a more balanced model for urban living across ages. The modular system would respond to user needs with a range of programs, from green farming and kitchen units to flexible work areas and sleeping quarters. Made for easy fabrication, the units could be ordered instantly via an app.
The Norman Foster Foundation is awarding scholarships to take part in the upcoming Urban Mobility workshop to be held at the Norman Foster Foundation headquarters in Madrid, Spain, 17–21 September 2018.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, and for most of the twentieth, monorails have captured the imagination and consistently featured in science fiction visions of the urban future. Aside from their Space Age imagery they are relatively inexpensive and quick to install when compared with the cost, time and disruption of making underground tunnels for subway systems. Surprisingly, there are relatively few examples in operation and those that do
Clay Cockrell, a psychotherapist from New York (where there are so many psychotherapists that they could have their own neighborhood) takes her sessions outdoors. These sessions specifically entail walking, in places like Central Park or Battery Park, or wherever else the client prefers to go, as the location of the consultation is totally flexible. Though her method and fees are relatively similar to any other psychotherapist, the one marked difference is the environment in which the doctor-patient interaction takes place. The typical sofa, leather chair, Persian rug and prop library are all replaced with the street´s pavement, gravel or the park where the patient chooses to go.
Walking is much more than covering a certain distance by foot. It is also one of the most basic tools to achieve what is commonly referred to as “clearing the mind.” Walking is a free resource, easily accessible and almost always available, and facilitates the return to a calmer world where the mind can make connections free of interferences with the body, and the body, in turn, can connect with the ground that it walks on and the environment it is surrounded by.
The geometric design from Lab for Planning and Architecture for the Municipality of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain is a morphological response that conditions Julio Navarro's and Roque Díaz's swimming pools allowing adequate movement of people with reduced mobility.
The project is a path of stairs and ramps with a triangular design that integrates with the surrounding landscape; the materiality and the constructive details are adapted to the different needs and natural conditions of the land.
This month, in the city of Xiamen, China's first elevated cycling path was inaugurated. At nearly 8 kilometers long, the structure is now the world's longest elevated cycling path.
The construction of this exclusive cycling path was promoted by the Xiamen City Government to provide inhabitants with a new sustainable transportation alternative that could significantly reduce vehicular traffic on the city's already congested highways.
Over the last few years, the way Americans move around has changed remarkably, especially among young people. Previously the automobile was people’s preferred, if not the only, option. Now they are choosing to walk, bike, or use public transport according to recent studies.
This difference in preferred transportation methods has generated many benefits not only for residents but also for cities, in both economic and social terms.
London-based Weston Williamson+Partners (WW+P) has won the “Route 2020” competition for the Expo 2020 Dubai rail link, a 15-kilometer, £2.2 billion metro Expolink in the United Arab Emirates.
Working in collaboration with global engineer CH2M, Alstom, and Acciona and Gulermack, the firm was selected ahead of ten rival bids for the high-profile project, which will connect Nakheel Harbor & Tower with the World’s Fair site.
