Cities with disabilities are those that present spaces and environments that impede or make it difficult for citizens to access, participate and interact, regardless of any loss or abnormality related to their psychological, physiological or anatomical structure or function. I invite readers to, with me, change the focus of the approach on disabilities, transferring to cities and built environments the inability to meet in a dignified and effective way the diversity of abilities and capacities inherent to human beings.
"Growing up queer means experiencing the destabilizing absence of a broad and accessible queer history, most notably, in our case, in relation to spatial design". This account is what intrigued artist Adam Nathaniel Furman and architectural historian Joshua Mardell to bring together a community of contributors who bring new perspectives to the field of architecture and share stories of spaces that challenge cis-heteronormative morals, sheltering lives that seek to live their own truths. The result of this quest is a book titled Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories, which explores stories about distinct social, political, and geographical contexts within the community.
Sundance Square, a new central place for the city of Fort Worth, TX, USA. Image Courtesy of PPS
Public spaces play a significant role in organizing the life of every community but defining what differentiates them from other spaces within the city is not an easy task. Once these spaces start to settle into the collective memory of the local communities, they become key elements that concentrate the mental image of a city. While this process usually happens with urban spaces, monuments and isolated architectural elements can also become markers for the urban life of an area. So, what happens when dramatic events like fires, war, or even the pandemic alter that image?
Looking ahead to the future of our built environment, a one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t do. Issues like rising sea levels, temperatures, and water scarcity in urban communities need localized solutions that take into account questions of sustainability, culture, and public health. Having investigated vernacular infrastructure across indigenous communities for her book Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism, designer Julia Watson is an expert in local, nature-based technologies that are inherently adaptable and resilient. We talk to her about the future of our cities, building materials, and her latest project for Our Time on Earth – a five year, world-touring exhibition that just opened at London's Barbican Centre to investigate how radical, collaborative ideas for the way we live can get us to a much improved place by 2040.
Ennead Architects has unveiled the Shanghai Lingang Special Area master plan, a new hub for global commerce. Designed around the central axis that defines the Dishui Lake district in Shanghai, the master plan establishes the identity of a new business district. Designed as a free trade zone, this is planned to attract prominent international companies. The site's design proposes functional areas where multinational corporations can optimize business operations while creating open spaces for the surrounding communities. Ennead’s large-scale plan includes four commercial buildings, retail, civic and open spaces.
Improving people's quality of life is one of the biggest goals of professionals in Architecture and Urbanism. When planning cities, creating housing or carrying out a simple refurbishment, we seek to improve the built space regardless of scale. The Urban Rehabilitation of Alto de Bomba, carried out in the city of Mindelo, Cape Verde, arose from the need to combat the precariousness found previously in the place. A project that required the immersion of the team in the daily life of the city and resulted in an inspiring proof of how much architecture can reveal better ways of living the city and acting directly in society. No wonder it received the Work of the Year Award in 2022, chosen by our readers as the winner among hundreds of competing projects.
Transformação de Estacionamentos em Fazendas Urbanas. Image via Studio NAB
On March 31st, the Health and Nutrition Day is celebrated in Brazil, factors that are gaining more and more notoriety in the society in which we live. After more than two years living through the ups and downs of the Covid-19 pandemic and facing the evident need for a healthier, more active and community reality, it is important to reflect on how architecture and urbanism can become tools for accessing healthier daily lives.
A new kind of architecture distinguished by unique regional characteristics emerged in the mid-1990s when in China, architects started practicing independently from government-run design institutes. The leading Chinese architects of this time succeeded collectively in producing a unique architectural body of work when so many buildings built around the world were no longer rooted in their place and culture.
In China Dialogues, Vladimir Belogolovsky charts a panorama of Chinese architecture through the words of its main participants, lifting the veil on a prolific new generation of designers, each sharing a highly intellectualized and conceptual understanding of architecture. Following the course of 21 interviews accompanied by over 120 photographs and drawings of beautifully executed projects uprooted throughout the country since the early 2000s, China Dialogues opens up the thinking process of the country's top architects, providing an insight into their ideas, intentions, and visions in unusually revealing and candid ways.
In 1854, the American writer Henry David Thoreau wrote the classic work “Walden”, recounting his experience of life in the woods and extolling the advantages of simple and self-sufficient life. Right at the beginning of the book, the author comments that, if someone wants to travel 48 km to visit the countryside, it would be faster to walk than to opt for a locomotive.
The climate crisis has accentuated changes in the amount of rainfall, causing droughts or storms with large volumes of water, which result in floods that can cause great damage to urban infrastructure. To combat this, the sponge city is a solution that has a green infrastructure to operate the infiltration, absorption, storage and even purification of these surface waters.
Map design and the significance of built environments continue to be inherently integral to gameplay within the realm of virtual worlds and video games, specifically in the genre of first-person shooters, and Riot Games’ VALORANT is no exception to this. Defying former expectations of its predecessors within the tactical shooter genre, Riot continually endeavors to make fundamental changes to decades of old formulas that have been implemented in practice all these years.
In the early 1980s, when I first saw the film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and then read the book, both by William H. Whyte, I was enthralled. I had met Holly, as he was affectionately known, while I was still a reporter at the New York Post in the 1970s, and we had great discussions about New York City, what planners got wrong, what developers didn’t care about. By the 1980s I was at work on my first book, The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way, and having conversations with Jane Jacobs, who would become my good friend and mentor. Jacobs had validated the small, bottom-up community efforts around New York City that I was observing and that would be the too-often-unacknowledged sparks to jumpstart the slow, steady rebirth of the city. My observations were resoundingly dismissed—even laughed at—by professional planners and urban designers, but they were cheered and encouraged by both Whyte and Jacobs, and today they are mainstream.
Paris has been making headlines for years with its aggressive steps to anti-car, pro-pedestrian urban improvements. Faced with increasing issues around air pollution and an attempt to reclaim streets for alternate modes of transit, as outlined in their proposed plan for a 15-minute city, the French capital is seen as a leader in future-forward urbanist strategies. Recently, their department of transportation set a deadline for their lofty goals of eliminating traffic from its roads. In just two years from now, in time for the French capital to host the Olympics, Paris plans to ban non-essential traffic from its city center, effectively eliminating around 50% of vehicular mobility. What does this plan look like? And how might other cities use this strategy to eliminate their own urban issues?
In different parts of the world, women are transforming cities and taking up spaces in urban planning and management as never before. Paris, Barcelona and Rome, for example, in addition to being cities where almost anyone would like to live, are now cities managed by women for the first time in their history, all in their second term. Major changes and currently celebrated plans, such as the “15-minute city” in Paris, the opening of Times Square to the people in New York, and the urban digitization of Barcelona as a smart city, were led by women.
'Future Cites' exhibition was recently inaugurated at the Future Design Arts Centre in Chengdu, examining how the work of Zaha Hadid Architects has redefined urban landscapes around the world. The monographic show highlights the trends and innovations shaping contemporary urbanism and traces the ideas and concepts that defined ZHA's body of work. The exhibition displays the office's ongoing research and various urban design approaches, presented through visualizations, architectural models and video projections.
In urban design, suburbs can be a contentious topic. That is in part because the term lends itself to nebulous and ever-changing definitions. In its simplest form, the suburbs are residential communities within commuting distance, located a fair bit away from the heart of metropolitan areas. The American context sees suburbs viewed with some hostility, with racist ‘redlining’ practices a dark legacy to particular suburbs in the country. In a more superficial sense, American suburbs have often been criticised for their uniformity in appearance – portrayed as soulless dwellings absent of a sense of community.
While circular economy is often discussed in relation to the architectural object through the lens of material recycling, design for disassembly, and material passports, the framework is most fully enacted at the neighbourhood and city scale. Whether it is visions of circular communities that hint at some level of self-sufficiency or policies set in motion by cities, urban-scale projects exemplify the guiding principles of the circular economy, providing a glimpse into what a fully-fledged version of it might look like. The following explores the strategies used in circular urban environments, from architecture and construction materials to energy production, waste management and food production, as well as the processes and operations that govern these designs, providing insights into the conditions that inform circularity.
Parque Manancial de Águas Pluviais / Turenscape. Imagem cortesia de Turenscape
According to the architect and researcher Patrícia Akinaga, ecological urbanism emerged at the end of the 20th century as a strategy to create a paradigm shift with regard to the design of cities. With this, urban projects should be designed from the potential and limitations of existing natural resources. Unlike other previous movements, in ecological urbanism architecture is not the structuring element of the city — the landscape itself is. In other words, green areas should not only exist to beautify spaces, but as true engineering artifacts with the potential to dampen, retain and treat rainwater, for example. With ecological urbanism, urban design becomes defined by the natural elements intrinsic to its fabric.
._Image_by_Zupagrafika.jpg?1653259487 "Orła Białego prefab panel estate in Poznań (Brutal Poland). . Image © Zupagrafika")
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Adam_Mork.jpg?1650549635 "MAD Architects, Harbin Opera House, Harbin, China, 2015. Image © Adam Mork")
_schranimage.jpg?1650549533 "Studio Zhu Pei, Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, China, 2020. Image © schranimage")
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.jpg?1645660187 "Cidade colombiana transformou 18 ruas e 12 hidrovias em paraísos verdes. Imagem cortesia de CicloVivo")
