Architecture has treated water either as a backdrop or a problem: a view to be framed, a hazard to be drained, or a utility to be connected. In contemporary India, a more consequential relationship takes shape. Water remains a shared ecological resource, yet the land and infrastructure around it are increasingly financed and defended as economic assets. Coastlines are extended to carry traffic and lake edges become lucrative development zones. The decision to do so passes through multiple institutions with different vocabularies, thereby challenging who determines how water and its surroundings are used, and who faces the consequences.
In 2016, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan first expressed the intention to pedestrianize Oxford Street, located in the City of Westminster in central London. The original plan was to complete the project in 2020, but after two public consultations, the project was blocked in 2018. Resumed in 2024, it was followed by two public consultations that showed majority support among respondents. Final approval was granted in February 2026, and on Monday, October 26, almost a kilometer, from Orchard Street to Great Portland Street, became traffic-free. This milestone marks the first phase of the program: the section is now closed to private motorized vehicles, buses, taxis and private hire vehicles, cycles, scooters and pedicabs.
Balsa Crosetto Piazzi is an architecture practice founded in 2015, based in Córdoba, Argentina, and Boston, USA. Led by architects Juan Manuel Balsa, Rocío Crosetto Brizzio, and Leandro Piazzi, the core of their work is the material side of architecture. For them, a building is not just a finished object, but rather a way to organize everything that goes into making it. Their work is shaped by a slow process; during the construction and design stages, they pay attention to where the materials come from, who does the work, what skills those people already have, and what's actually available nearby. This allows their built work to become a platform that serves as a starting point, bringing all of these pieces together. In that sense, they also describe their projects as opportunities to "deconstruct entrenched conditions."
At Bishan–Ang Mo Kio Park in Singapore, a river does not occupy a fixed boundary. Under ordinary conditions, water moves through a naturalized channel bordered by grass, planting, and paths that bring visitors close to the river. During heavy rainfall, water spreads into the surrounding park, which is designed to accommodate flows beyond the capacity of the narrower channel. What appears to be a public landscape is also working infrastructure. Singapore's approach retains drainage engineering while assigning a wider role to the land around it.
For decades, Singapore's network of concrete canals has been central to managing stormwater in a densely developed city exposed to intense tropical rainfall. Their hard surfaces and defined channels were designed to convey water efficiently. These channels moved stormwater efficiently, but offered limited space for public access, planting, or other uses along the water's edge. Through its Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters (ABC Waters) Programme, launched in 2006, Singapore began integrating waterways with parks, ecological systems, and public spaces. The programme links stormwater management with the design of parks, waterways, and public spaces.
Loco Park masterplan project in Tbilisi, Georgia, 2026. Image Courtesy of Stefano Boeri Architetti
The LOCO Alliance architectural competition in Tbilisi, Georgia, was organized to transform a 73,600 m² brownfield site, the former Soviet-era Tbilisi Electric Locomotive Manufacturing Plant in the "Temka" residential area, into a new green neighborhood and cultural destination called Loco Park. On October 18, 2026, LOCO Alliance officially announced Stefano Boeri Architetti's design as the selected project for the site's transformation, with the official masterplan images unveiled on October 23. The selected masterplan is designed to integrate the industrial heritage of the factory with contemporary architecture, dense green public spaces and community recreation hubs. The site is already hosting large-scale cultural events, organized in parallel with the formal masterplan competition.
Industrial activity can end long before its effects disappear from the land. Factories close, buildings are demolished, and former industrial districts gradually become part of new residential developments. Yet the soil beneath them may still contain traces of their previous use, sometimes requiring extensive intervention before construction can begin.
Redeveloping these sites raises a question about how much of the existing ground can remain and what it takes to build housing above it. The extent of contamination affects what must happen before construction begins, while the cost of preparing the land can influence the development itself. Much of this work eventually disappears beneath the completed buildings, leaving little indication of the site's previous condition.
Created by California surfers who wanted to bring the lines of surfing onto asphalt, skateboarding soon outgrew its role as a simple alternative for flat days. It established itself as a practice that reads the city through a different logic, reinterpreting steps, handrails, walls, and interstitial spaces as possible lines, challenges, and opportunities. Over time, it evolved into a global urban culture, a way of inhabiting and transforming public space through movement. What was once marginal has become a catalyst for community building and new uses for overlooked spaces. At its core, skateboarding reveals how many cities coexist within the same city, depending on who moves through them and how each person is able to reinterpret their surroundings.
The second part of the Utopian Hours 2026 international city-making festival will be held in Turin on October 16 and 17. After a first chapter in Rotterdam, the festival is marking its tenth anniversary edition by returning to its hometown in Italy. The event's lineup and cultural program are designed to explore how cities can respond creatively to the social, environmental, and political challenges of the 21st century. The Utopian Hours festival has been organized since 2017 by Stratosferica, a nonprofit cultural association dedicated to producing and sharing urban knowledge through content on the evolution of cities, urban communication strategies, events, community building and placemaking.
In 1948, Robert Moses established the Fresh Kills Landfill on the western shore of Staten Island. The site, chosen for its remote marshland and cheap land value, was meant to be temporary, but by 1955 it was the largest landfill in the world, receiving up to 29,000 tons of refuse per day at its 1991 peak. By 2001, after more than fifty years of continuous operation, Fresh Kills covered 2,200 acres, roughly three times the area of Central Park, and was, unspectacularly, visible from space. When it started, Moses didn't expect to design a dump but, without calling it that, a new landform with four artificial hills rising up to sixty meters above sea level built entirely from the accumulated residue of eight million daily lives.
That landform is now, slowly, becoming a park. James Corner Field Operations won the international design competition launched by the city in 2001, producing a master plan calledLifescape that will take thirty years to complete. The landfill's four mounds are being capped, planted, and gradually opened to the public. Methane from decomposing waste is captured and fed into an energy system as the wetlands are being restored around the engineered hills. Evidence of New York's consumption transformed into a feat of ecological engineering and an act of institutional memory management (a way of making a city's most embarrassing landscape slowly look like something it was always meant to be).
The most innovative and impactful design projects arise from the intersection of different fields. The architecture community has always borrowed from, or been inspired by, other forms of cultural production such as film, photography, literature, and theatre. In the theatricality of Baroque churches and the cinematic sequences of contemporary museums, architects have looked beyond the building itself to understand how space can shape a story and construct an experience.
Worldbuilding takes this one step further. Instead of designing only the architecture of a place, it asks architects to establish the social rules, narratives, technologies, economies, atmospheres, behaviors, and relationships that make that place believable. Rather than beginning with, "What should this building look like?", worldbuilding suggests beginning with, "In what kind of world would this building make sense?"
UN-Habitat and Oceanix Reveal Prototype for the World's First Sustainable Floating City. Image Courtesy of Oceanix and BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group
Cities depend on systems that already exist around them. When architects design on water or beyond Earth, those systems are no longer available. Without fixed ground or nearby networks for energy, water, transport, and waste, architecture has to take on functions the larger city would normally provide.
The reason for moving beyond familiar ground also changes from one project to another. In the Maldives, building on water responds to the vulnerability of existing land. In Busan, floating development creates another direction for urban expansion. On the Moon, the challenge is more absolute: there is no existing infrastructure to connect to at all.
Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, sits at over 2,300 meters above sea level on a plateau at the edge of the Great Rift Valley escarpment. Although situated in a country not known for large visitor numbers, the city has gained fame for its unique architecture. In July 2017, it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed as "Asmara: A Modernist African City," the first modernist urban site anywhere to be listed in its entirety, and Africa's first explicitly modernist World Heritage Site. Its heritage value came about as a result of a complex convergence of two aspects of Eritrea's history: an intense period of colonial construction as Italy pursued its imperial ambitions in Africa, and a long period of relative isolation that insulated the city from redevelopment.
Benghazi 2050: Vision and Digital Planning Hub. Old Town. Image Courtesy of ZHA
A team composed of ZHA, A&O TEC, Prior + Partners, Homa, Buro Happold, Systematica, and Fichtner recently unveiled its concept proposal for the "Next Generation City Plan" for Benghazi, Libya. The project aims to bring together the historic port city's identity-defining features with the planning technologies required to guide its development toward 2050, in a context of rapid urbanization. The proposal, developed for A&O TEC, includes a Vision and Spatial Strategy, which consists of an interpretation of the city's character and collective memory translated into an adaptable framework for development, and a Digital Planning Hub, an evidence-based model mapping the city to identify its potential and the phenomena shaping its growth.
