https://www.ud-id.com/reaction daily 0.75 2019-01-17 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/8/11/ism9rnphdi06okvc1z3s1jrq9q89d6-88bxa monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1534034579180-UGYX0779DYZ4XWDNQ58O/ver+1.png Reactions - Image by Veronica Cardenas Sustainable development is a global concern and a major challenge for many nations, especially for developing countries. At the same time, urbanization has become a crucial factor to consider when considering sustainable development due to the fact that in recent decades, the world has experienced unprecedented urban growth (from 2.8 billion to 4.2 billion in the past 20 years) [1]. Currently, 55% of the world’s population live in cities or urban centers [2], and by the middle of this century, that figure is estimated to rise to 68%. [3] Additionally, cities contribute to 70% of global GDP, about 60% to global energy consumption and 70% to global carbon emissions. [4] Therefore, during my fellowship this summer, it was vital for me to acknowledge the macroeconomic potentials of urbanization, principally across spatial density and economies of agglomeration, given that it interlinks vital issues of economy, energy, environment, science, technology, and social aspects all within a physical setting. Hence, it is essential to consider multisector linkages and the interactions between financial flows and urban dynamics to formulate integrated policies needed to achieve sustainable development. The official mandate of the United Nations’ Regional Economic Commissions is to promote the economic and social advancement of its member States, foster regional integration, and encourage international cooperation for sustainable advancement.[5] At the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), significant actions are being taken to plan and structure frameworks at multinational and sub-regional levels to promote adequate development. In addition, urbanization and industrialization are jointly being presented as a vehicle for structural transformation in Africa. Due to rapid urban population growth and the increasing rural-urban migratory patterns in the continent, urbanization has become a pivotal opportunity to both alleviate demand and boost economic development. Moreover, it is essential to acknowledge the fiscal revenue potentials of cities that face the infrastructure, service delivery, and amenity provision financial gap. Therefore, the underlying economic opportunities coming from urbanization has led governments and international agencies to assess planning and policy interventions across urban systems in order to attain collective and inclusive progress. In “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”[6], “The New Urban Agenda [7], and “Economic Report on Africa”, the role of urbanization is significantly recognized and featured via frameworks for development. Altogether they are useful guidelines to meet global and continental visions that, in my view, should be addressed holistically: integrating them into the national priorities of each member State. Developing countries face many challenges that require diverse actions and demand special attention within their own country-vision plans. Therefore, the first step should be to consider ways to promote better national planning and management that can capture the urban dimension as a platform for inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable development. In my opinion, this can only be done when political leaders follow global recommendations with a critical position that considers their nation’s urban context and macroeconomic trends. Finally, it remains essential to align and adapt frameworks for an effective management of a country’s multi-level planning that could mainstream positive context-related activities. These frameworks for development effectively inform policymakers on how to capture the spatial and economic potentials of urbanization for sustainable progress, and therefore should be seen as an adaptable means rather than a fixed end. In other words, there is a need to be analytical about exogenous and macro frameworks given that they should not be implemented without adequate coordination with each country’s plans and priorities to consciously achieve a sustainable spatial, social, and economic development. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/8/11/3h6cwlqnpmcf2cowwivvx4oxoptk67 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1534033560220-3EQIAQNAY5NJPQ3A0UYG/Collage+-+AD.jpg Reactions - Collage by Kahira Ngige 1. Abu Dhabi and Dubai are twin cities. Like twins, casual observers are shocked when they display divergent personalities. Dubai is ‘bling’, Abu Dhabi ‘underrated’. Both cities are notable for being casually obliterated by David Harvey. 2. I treated coming to the Gulf with a mix of Denise Scott Brown’s bemused snobbery (Vegas!) and Mike Davis’ “arch sensibility” (LA!). In the preface to the second edition of Learning from Las Vegas, Scott Brown argues that the whole point of the book “reassesses the role of signs in architecture.” In essence, she demands that architects take a back seat to pop culture. 3. Abu Dhabi is neither Vegas nor LA. As a national capital, it is self-aware (in a way Dubai is not). Here, symbolism is important, represend by Jean Nouvel’s world in miniature under a sublime dome at the Louvre, Ferrari World in Ferrari Red, and Foster’s mendacious World Trade Centre. In Abu Dhabi, architecture is ‘dumbed down’, meaning it can be literal. However, it can also escape that symbolism. Downtown Abu Dhabi is gridded with pastel colored blocks, Gulf post-modernism built for oil. Beyond this core is the new Abu Dhabi comprising themed islands and hyper-speed technological determinism built for an age without oil. 4. Abu Dhabi isn’t merely an idea in the making (its overall vision to be determed). Rather, it is the constant rewriting of history. Downtown, demolitions of the candy colored old (built circa 1970) and the banal (souks) is common. The Gulf is after all, America - built to British standards. 20th century sins are magnified here and so is constant reinvention. Unsurprisingly, fast food is the glue that binds together this two-tiered nation of citizens (those that belong) and expatriates (those that never will). 5. Unlike LA, freeways in Abu Dhabi offer no pop cultural insights. Driving on a freeway does not make one more at ease with the local vernacular or even attempts to capture that local vernacular. Metaphors in Abu Dhabi are plain in that they are not metaphors at all. A shopping mall is a public space. 6. Abu Dhabi may not be a complete living theme park. However, like one it offers timed entry. 7. Unlike most nations, the UAE does not demand assimilation. There is no test of Emirati values. Yet, bar tourists, all of us are here in the service of the nation. Renier de Graaf, in jest, captured the spirit of the expat lifestyle with the mantra: “invoice early and invoice often.” What he meant to say was “take the money and run” [my translation]. 8. Abu Dhabi is a city of memories without ruins. Like all cities, it is this forgetting that allows for growth and further deepening of the city’s founding myth. The city flips the Clintonian logic “there is no them; there is only us”. ‘Them’ denotes: the army of architects, consultants and experts that appear to outnumber citizens 10 to 1, while ‘Us’ designates: Emirati nationals. This is urbanism at a vast scale – a global scale, which demand that all architectural symbols be viewed at a distance as you fly out. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/7/28/8kjk8c3dq0ezs957jyyxm0o1qicvls monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812627617-GM79697EAA2YHFLE3BJG/Yeo_Street+Level+Perspective+01.jpg Reactions https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812789483-39BGZN0UW8A1H1YQ646A/Yeo_Street+Level+Perspective+02.jpg Reactions https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532813150332-ZBRDLOQC7ED0JK7SROXO/Yeo_Street+Shadow+Study.jpg Reactions Street Shadow Study https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812984791-O1Z8Z25GA8ZHR6FBDKJ7/Yeo_Project+Diagram.jpg Reactions https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532813039372-YGOWPXODJVJ6UGJGWPQD/Yeo_Axonometric+View+of+the+Aggregate+Form.jpg Reactions Axonometric View of Aggregate Form https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812879093-0MRAHP31BBEYZE5PO6T5/Yeo_Study+on+Street+Component+Variability.jpg Reactions Study on Street Component Variability https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812918689-N7SUZZ9UA06PYGRPQLQM/Yeo_Model+Photo.jpg Reactions Street Forms https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812845244-SPGNM1STOBWV957YCIJI/Yeo_Street+Section+Variability.jpg Reactions Street Section Variability https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/7/28/d2vvpazp67xygl394duwsawx1jd9pm monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812218653-EZTXP9284EV9M6RYRIC9/rana.jpg Reactions - Image Credit / Bibliography: Kağıthane River - Sadabad (1880s) by Guillaume Berggren Proliferation of public parks is one of the key defining features of the changing urban fabric of 19th century Istanbul. Most scholarship has interpreted this proliferation merely as a symptom of the Western influenced modernization of the city. However, these public parks are also important to examine from a social lens because they are emblematic of shifts happening between the public and private spheres of an increasingly cosmopolitan Istanbul. The notion of public space in Istanbul is of course not confined to this current era of modernization. Courtyards of mosque complexes (kulliyes) functioned as gathering places for decades before the emergence of public parks. At this time, this notion of public space was confined to the mosque’s site where there was still a clear separation between the private (domestic) and public sphere. This separation started becoming less apparent in the 18th century with the opening of imperial gardens to the general public. Sadabad, the imperial garden constructed in 1721 by Ahmed III and reminiscent of Versailles with its winding paths around artificial pools and marble-paved river banks, allowed the public to pass freely from the public promenade of Kağıthane to the imperial palace grounds to entertain themselves in this space. This typology began blurring social spaces between the ruling elite and the public, making Kağıthane one of the most popular excursion spots in Istanbul. Countess de la Ferté-Meun visiting Istanbul in 1816 describes the Kağıthane scene as such: “[…] the sound of this cascade at your feet, these groups of Turkish, Greek, Armenian and Jewish women whose mores, customs and outfits are so varied and who delight, undaunted, in all sorts of divertissements the countryside [has to] offer, make this promenade a ravishing spectacle.” The spectacle of the diversity of visitors in these new parks evolved into a ‘see and be seen’ dynamic in the public sphere. The first of these modern public parks in Istanbul built in the 19th century was the Büyük Çamlıca Park created in 1870. Rumors alone of the park led “Istanbul’s young revelers and women [….] to start preparing and competing with one another on what to wear.” This modern park, built on the grounds of a former imperial garden, attracted such a crowd that the carriages circulating on the roads traversing the park caused it to be likened to a “bee hive”. The park had kiosks dispersed along the roads, where musicians would play, and food and drinks would be served. 19th century’s first garden parties and masquerade balls (first of which was organized by Sultan Abdulaziz) all took place here. It was à la mode in the evening for the aristocrats to walk around and watch the crowds. One can clearly see a shift from the interest of sightseeing (visiting the parks to see and enjoy nature), to seeing and being seen (becoming a spectacle of the social scene). As Hannah Arendt states in her essay “Public and the Private Realm” in The Human Condition, public and private space are greatly intertwined in the modern world. Modernization leads to the blurring of the public and the private sphere, and to the emergence of what she defines as “the social realm”. This realm, she claims, satisfies the modern need of public admiration. Istanbul’s public parks became this identified social realm that set the stage for a more modern, dynamic and diverse method of living, defining the social life of 19th century Istanbul. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/7/14/dajfcvttqy5r9azjediy94lvf1nt2s-mttyf monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/7/14/760cuc63r1hudqa03xhz6i4i4aw847 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/7/4/igoeaa8d5ad5gq9mnjgky7s0pt46v9 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530727582191-GUFP8QY1TZM2BAHTEFML/180510+Final+Presentation18.jpg Reactions https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530723420805-85783PKKN13IO2KVTC2E/180510+Final+Presentation101.jpg Reactions My thesis is the culmination of a year-long investigation into the parallel urban phenomena of Rust Belts and Innovation Hubs. The project proposes a new type of innovation development for a rust belt context by establishing a literal platform developed around the research and development of polymer science and engineering that takes advantage of Akron, Ohio’s geographic centrality as well as a growing desire for innovation industries to settle in non-coastal territories. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530727359606-QAGSFLGZE67P0R0UC7FL/image-asset.jpeg Reactions The design project posits that neither the isolated headquarters campus nor acupunctural situated incubator can adequately resolve the spatial or contextual requirements of the modern innovation hub or the cities that are home to them. Sited in the former tire manufacturing hub of Akron, Ohio, the project is positioned as modular, flexible, and adaptable, in direct contrast to the static and iconic high-tech campuses currently in vogue. By puncturing the platform with towers and slabs, a secondary set of more programmatically specific building types establish a balance between working and production with living and leisure as well as establish a dialectical framework between integrated and isolated spaces necessary for an innovation development. The resulting platform then serves as an urban system that would attract both locals and any one of the many individuals or organizations who would seek to establish a presence in the world’s polymer capital. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530727193666-38BB07B5SI7ML3XQBLTF/p4.jpg Reactions Rust belts and innovation centers are in many ways indicative of America’s position within the broader global economy. The development and prosperity brought about by America’s industrial capabilities in the 19th and 20th century have led to a society whose standard of living and pay far exceeds that found in less developed nations. However, as poorer nations began to bridge the gap between themselves and developed nations (most notably by acquiring the manufacturing responsibilities that had given developed nations the opportunity to get ahead in the first place) the most apparent consequences for those developed nations were a decline in manufacturing output and emerging areas of economic balkanization. While regions of developed countries that maintained global relevance as centers of finance, entertainment, energy, or tech continued to benefit from their presence in a global market, traditional manufacturing in the West could not compete with the fractional labor costs of modernizing nations. This has led to the emergence of so-called ‘Rust Belts’ in former manufacturing zones. Existing on the other side of the economic spectrum from rust belts, ‘innovation centers’ are reaping the benefits of globalization. With high paying jobs, popular urban amenities, and dynamic lifestyle offerings, these regions are both economically successful and socially attractive. Characterized by a clustering of individuals, institutions, and enterprises around a particular focus, they represent the comparative advantage developing nations have over developing ones with regards to engendering and supporting R&D based ventures. Centered on the belief that progress is most effectively made collectively and that an open sharing of ideas, resources, and talent can lead to higher rates of innovation, these hubs are reconstructing how both private and public enterprises choose to operate. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/7/4/dxfpb7h8fi95yr3tmtsz5exp3mjn4g monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530719892215-OTDR5VG3LR09F5T49H40/just+city+2.jpg Reactions - Furlong, Ashleigh. “Three Years after the Khayelitsha Commission‚ Is There Any Progress?” Times LIVE, Sunday Times, www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-08-25-three-years-after-the-khayelitsha-commission-is-there-any-progress/. 2. Redefining Resiliency In searching for design case studies we toured a variety of urban projects. A local guide gave us a tour of Kliptown, the oldest township in Soweto. As we shuffled into a shack, not more than 60 ft2, our guide pointed out: “look at their pots, have you ever seen shinier pots anywhere else? In Kliptown, we may sleep on the floor and sleep 10 to a shack but you’ll never see a pot that isn’t shiny.” Resiliency is a buzzword that has become diluted by academics, cities, philanthropies and profit seekers. The meaning can often feel opaque. However, in a moment of clarity in Kliptown, resiliency was embodied by an unemployed women carefully washing buckets of laundry at one communal tap shared between hundreds. Resiliency revealed itself through the many hair salons embedded between shacks. Resiliency was defined by Black Pride. Defying the expectations of a hostile world, the self pride we observed in Kliptown demonstrated a deeper understanding of what it means to be resilient - often not measured or understood by our traditional design metrics - a challenge planners and designers should consider when we so frequently use the phrase “designing for resilience.” 3. Design matters, but who has a seat at the table matters more. As designers, we champion design as a remarkably powerful tool. However, design itself as an aesthetic endeavor can only achieve so much. During our trip we saw an array of socially driven design projects that had a clear social impact. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530719826921-17N0WGBR6K28MCLHV5X1/just+city+3.jpg Reactions - africanpopcultures, •. “Visiting African Barbershops and Hair Salons.” African Popular Cultures, 12 Oct. 2014, africanpopculture.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/visiting-african-barbershops-and-hair-salons/. This summer we had the opportunity to travel to South Africa on a whirlwind two-week research trip with the Just City Lab and the lab’s founder, Toni L. Griffin (Professor in Practice of Urban Planning). Our mission was twofold: to take the work of the lab global in a series of programs located in Tshwane, Johannesburg and Cape Town, and to seek design case studies to add to the lab’s database. During our two weeks in South Africa, we participated in over 20 different meetings, ranging from engagements with city planners, designers, organizations, entrepreneurs, professors, students and political leaders. The culmination of our trek left us with three key takeaways that resonate with our actions as planners and designers: 1. The importance of calling injustice, an injustice. Words matter. Words validate, recognize, and affirm. They also have the power to deny and erase. The diluted jargon used by some designers, planners, students and communities that we met act as a silent violence, an erasure of the trauma and injustices of the apartheid city. The call to choose words wisely evoked reflection on some of the terms that we have adopted, which often inflict unforeseen consequences. When we refer to townships, informal settlements and slums - we imply that they are a transient, temporary, inhuman problems that will soon vanish from our urban landscapes. Rather, generation after generation has sustained them, and thus they are definitely here to stay. While they are “make-shift” to some and “home” for others, in our view they deserve to be legitimized. It is time to humanize them, and we can start that process very simply by calling them neighborhoods. For us, this is where the Just City Lab’s work really came to life, and where we saw the power of the Just City Index. If we use our words with intention, perhaps our designs will strive to achieve a more humanized outcome. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530719988647-M68AP9P8QAJNIJTPN2F4/just+city.jpg Reactions - Image Credit: Nerali Patel Our trek left us with one overarching question: how do planners and designers orchestrate the right team? Design is certainly a catalyst for major change in society, yet designers cannot act alone. Half the battle is really about which individuals have a seat at the table. Having projects and clients that represent not just one actor or agent, but partnerships between all sectors will allow for a plan to belong to a collective in which everyone is invested. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/6/24/70cavo714zj9r21n8cz75fsdgnjjlf monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819054922-00MOPT5RZZFRWZL9AJMA/diagram12.jpg Reactions …Geographer Kanishka Goonewardena has made a powerful argument for the ideological nature of the capitalist city, claiming that the fully immersive sensory aesthetics of urban space make it a very powerful ideological tool. We simply cannot deny what we feel, and urban space is experienced with all our senses… - Adrian Blackwell, Tar and Clay: Public Space Is the Demonstration of a Paradox in the Physical World, 2017 In this regard, public spaces acted as the opium of the people. With commonly used terms like liveliness, beauty, livability, the effects of the state and market regulated public spaces on the society is covered. As urban theoretician Alvaro Sevilla - Buitrago points out, state driven public spaces, like parks, are suggesting a different form of enclosure in the urban setting. Sevilla mentions that the park, in this case Central Park, is understood as an early stage in the project of imposing new social relations through the enclosure of public conduct and he designates the park as a first effort to “tame the urban commons and prevent the subaltern appropriation of public space.” (Sevilla, 2013) On the other hand, public spaces have transformed into hubs of consumption. What can be seen in this period, is a restricting of spaces of public authority, from their Keynesian Fordist function as normalizing spaces designed to make all citizens into good capitalist consumers, to a new function of differentiation, in which certain segments of the population are more violently policed by the public authority, while others are lavish pseudo-public spaces, designed to encourage consumption practices. In the end,urban designs under neoliberalism, which claim to have produced more livable “public” spaces, have in fact produced geographies of inequality. (Blackwell, 2017) The traditional definitions of public spaces are not sufficient to untie the knots in democratically suppressed cities. Rather than seeking the public spaces “assigned” with top-down decisions, one can think of re-appropriating private spaces to form them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819008127-QA0RDZ2IM4OQY3A8OY4A/diagram1.jpg Reactions …Publicness is a performative and incremental condition embodied in the hybrid physical-virtual environments of evolving societies. Publicness happens, taking on a performative aspect that is often lost when we focus too heavily on architectural space alone. Public space is always an appropriation of an existing space, a layering of a political space over legal space… - Adrian Blackwell, Tar and Clay: Public Space Is the Demonstration of a Paradox in the Physical World, 2017 When architects and urban planners talk about creating democratic spaces, they fall into the trap of immediately talking about the spatial attributes of publicness. But the search for democracy in urban settings is not necessarily about the sole considerations of spatial phenomenona. In actuality, publicness goes beyond ownership and spatial attributes. When talking about public spaces and democracy, the architectural space is just the tip of an iceberg. Patrick Geddes points out “The hope of the city lies outside of itself.” Looking through the lens of democracy, the disappearance of the idea of the “public good” under neoliberalism has had concrete effects in the city. In the early and mid-20thcentury government-funded parks and squares were broadly provided for all citizens as a disciplinary strategy of social management. Political power often seeks to reorganize urban infrastructures and urban life with an eye on the control of restive populations. (Harvey, 2013) And while these reorganizations are clear in some cases, in other cases some numb the mind while others mesmerize the eyes of the people. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819098957-SS9Y34WQ1RG6LVNOOEEJ/diagram13.jpg Reactions Challenging the urbanistic trend of an “apolitical domesticity”, new ways to define public spaces and publicness can be traced to house environments. This exploration of the house environment would bring “political domesticity” where true publicness is located in the house, the traditional hub of “privateness”. In searching for new ways to define public spaces, this investigation would find new sites for the representation for its people. These sites will be helpful in “spatializating", maintaining, and strengthening public interaction, which would otherwise be floating around the city in a nomadic form. Moreover, these “hubs of privacy” can be perceived as a different form of cul-de-sacs and as an extension of a powerful non-space that denies any programmatic imposition, the street network. Rather than seeking state and market driven public spaces which are in most cases manipulative and alienating, masquerading behind beauty masks and not helpful in triggering positive change in the society, re-appropriation of the private spaces should be considered. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/6/24/0s1w47ylg8x3fngbgokrffshvv5f4h monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529817571085-ZOFIQSDHGMQSUB44JQIS/China-HSR-Update-16-Dec-2012.jpg Reactions - The Transport Politic, https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/01/12/high-speed-rail-in-china/ “Speed replaces distance”. Currently in China, High-Speed Rail is not only a new mode of transport that links cities and regions together but it is also catalyzing a new scope of urbanization and economic development. The Chinese High-Speed Rail system is unique given China’s huge land mass. Despite the vast distances between its North and South, East and West, the High-Speed Rail network covers almost the entire country. There are three major HSR systems in China: regional HSR connecting major metropoles, intercity HSR connecting regions within megalopolis’, and the future potential of HSR connecting Chinese to other countries across the border in line with its “One Belt One Road Initiative”. Jean Gottmann raised the idea of the “Megalopolis” as early as 1957 and since then, mega-regions have become a crucial identity in measuring the level of social and economic development of a country or region. According to the current definition, there are 10 such megacity clusters undergoing planning in China. Among them, the largest three accomplished ones are the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Jing-Jin-Ji megaregion which are connected by this regional High-Speed rail system. The development plan of the Jing-Jin-Ji Megaregion was expected first, largely because of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and was officially announced through Chinese Central Economic Work Conference in late 2014. The Jing-Jin-Ji megalopolis consists of a metropolitan area 6 times the size of New York’s and is going to be an experiment as a prototype of modern urban growth for China and possibly for the whole world. Its strategy was first conceived of and implemented through transportation and infrastructure networks. It is expected that by 2020, 9 projects and 1100 kilometer of new track will be laid, and that it will become a “one-hour commuting circle” in the area, interlinking multiple cities infrastructural-ly, economically, and politically. Three influential aspects are directly affecting Chinese cities by the HSR. First, it is improving the densification of population along the HSR lines. For Yangtze River Delta, there is an average population growth rate of 0.51% and a growth rate of 0.79% in the HSR cities. For cities at Wu-Guang Line, the average population growth rate is 0.60%, and is 0.96% for HSR cities. Secondly, it is improving the polarization of regional hub cities. These mega-cities have been overgrowing in population that spills out to contiguous cities, gradually releasing the pressure of its high density and increased industry. As such, due to its lower transportation cost and time, the HSR has expanded the influence of these cities, helping to improve the development of its surrounding regions. Therefore, capital cities can hold a higher concentration of population. Nanjing and Hangzhou, capital cities in Yangtze River Delta, have a relatively high growth rate, 0.74% and 9.53%. As the cities are already populated with relatively high attractions, thanks to the optimization of people and resource flow, it is easier for these capital cities to expand their radiation scope. These push and pull factors will bring out dynamic changes in Chinese cities within a few years. Lastly, it is important to note that the effects are not necessarily beneficial to the small cities along the HSR. Only cities along the HSR line and close to the major cities have higher growth rate. The development of Jing-Jin-Ji megaregion aims to decentralize Beijing. Intercity HSR lines help to disperse its non-capital functions more directly, and to create half-hour and one-hour economic zone. With the opening of some new Intercity HSR lines such as Jing-Zhang Line (Beijing to Zhangjiakou), Jing-Cheng Line (Beijing to Chengde) and Jing-Jiu Line (Beijing to Kowloon), Beijing could also expand its economic and political influence and disperse its population and functions to Zhangjiakou, a one-hour city to the west; Chengde, a one-hour city to the north-east; and Hengshui, a one-hour city to the south. In effect, the possibility of connecting to all four-axis directions from Beijing will help enable the establishment and realization of Jing-Jin-Ji Megalopolis. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/6/9/ippjnlnqbqjwjsk2cpwe5kg7wbjbnm monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1528558061292-UXTRK6HTU1U9T2O6K1I8/urban+water+cycle-01.png Reactions - Source: UNESCO, Urban Water Cycle Processes and Interactions. (Taylor and Francis) 4. The evolution of infrastructural networks often catalyzed the progress of modernization. The construction of the modern ideal of a networked city involves an array of integrated infrastructures in a variety of contexts and throughout different disciplines, promoting the “infrastructure ideal” as the central precept of an equitable future in the city. The modern ideals of the city and its infrastructures materialized historically through homebased consumption, is controlled through energy, water, transportation and communication grids, and perpetuates the aspirations of the modern nation states in providing public infrastructure monopolies throughout its territory (Graham and Marvin, 2001). This attempt to “equalize life conditions at a national scale” (Brenner, 1998a, 445) remains one of the main issues in countries in the global south, where the cost, time and bureaucratic implementation that these infrastructural grids require becomes endless.[i] In a Latin American context, the consequences of such long-term fixed infrastructure solutions forces people into resorting to informal solutions. Often, many of these ad-hoc solutions contribute to the unsustainable social, environmental and economic development of these cities. Paraguay, a land-locked country of 7 million in South America is blessed with abundant superficial and underground sweet water. It contains numerous underground reservoirs including the Patiño Aquifer, an unconfined aquifer[1] that lies underneath the capital Asuncion[2] and its metropolitan region. The Patiño aquifer is a crucial reservoir for the area, due to its extension which overlaps with 22 cities within the greater region. Its hydrological characteristics as an unconfined aquifer means that it has a higher risk of contamination due to its proximity and vulnerability to the surface (Monte Domecq and Baez, 2014). Growth in population as well as rural migration into the city has led to uncontrolled regional urban sprawl, where low density and lack of zoning has empowered citizens to occupy land with activities that encourage contamination and exploitation of the reservoir, like slaughterhouses, gas stations, bottled water companies, amongst others (Nogues and Villalba, 2014). In parallel, the government, led by a small political elite, rules with corruption, nepotism and prebendalism resulting in the lack of public services which instantly leads to the privatization of public infrastructure services limiting the access of services to only those who can afford them and fragmenting the region into areas of economic segregation (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Nevertheless, the Patiño aquifer plays a crucial role for the city, given that it provides water consumption through individual wells[3] for more than 60% of the population of the metropolitan region of Asuncion. Within this same area, 77% of the population lacks sewage infrastructure and uses latrines or discharge cesspools[4] as an alternative sewage method, emitting waste directly into the reservoir. The absence of infrastructural support in terms of water provision and sewage networks has led to the contamination, overconsumption and exploitation of this precious resource. These overlapping informal schemes generate a huge risk for its consumers, not only in terms of public health, but also in jeopardizing the future of the aquifer given it’s both the main source of water as well as the receptor of liquid discharge. The case of the Patiño aquifer highlights the importance of considering not only visible infrastructural grids, but also those vital systems that are invisible to our eyes yet extremely critical for a city’s vitality. This case also helps us distinguish how essential the agency of design is in the process of urbanization and how there is an urgent need to design systems that are feasible within the socio-political realities of a country. These design systems hold the capacity to create synergy between urban tissue and other geographies. There is an opportunity to imagine an alternative method of development, where the paradigms of urbanization are not dependent on fixed infrastructural systems, but rather on accessible, sustainable, and transitionary solutions (Mehrotra, 2008) that can mitigate and improve the present while we evolve into a permanent solution for the future. [1] Unconfined aquifer: meaning where there is no confining layer in between the aquifer and the surface 2 Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. Asuncion’s metropolitan region is composed by 22 cities with a population of 2.887.087 people (2012 census). The average density is 26.4 people per hectare. 3 Water extraction through wells refers to one well per household or for low income communities access to potable water through private water well distributors 4 Cesspools: underground reservoir for liquid waste. [1] Unconfined aquifer: meaning where there is no confining layer in between the aquifer and the surface [2] Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. Asuncion’s metropolitan region is composed by 22 cities with a population of 2.887.087 people (2012 census). The average density is 26.4 people per hectare. [3] Water extraction through wells refers to one well per household or for low income communities access to potable water through private water well distributors [4] Cesspools: underground reservoir for liquid waste. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/6/9/2ae1jwk0s33b0tvd1q9w4v24kxo5yd monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1528557144627-QSSLMUUXG6ZVSAFMAIG7/Educationtryptych-1.jpg Reactions - Source: Urban Omnibus. “Teaching Urban Design.” Urban Omnibus, 12 Dec. 2017, urbanomnibus.net/2011/03/teaching-urban-design-2/. What is the dependency of the discipline of urban design on architecture? Is there a necessity to distinguish urban design from architecture? For me, this is a vital question that arose as I reflect back on my first year of academia in the discipline and venture into its practice for the summer. It is a culmination of thoughts that manifested after attending a book talk at the MIT Press Bookstore followed by a conversation between Brent Ryan, Alex Krieger and Rahul Mehrotra. The Largest Art, written by Brent D. Ryan, is an effort to redefine the discipline as an art – an art that differentiates it distinctly from other building arts. The book seemed to have focused most of it energy in illuminating aspects which sets urban design apart from architecture – the incompleteness of form and the temporality of interventions. But before one can venture an answer to such a question, one must understand the foundational dependency these two disciplines share in their intertwined histories. As an academic discipline, urban design was founded at the Graduate School of Design in 1960. The very founding of the discipline was generated around a series of conferences by Jose Luis Sert during the years 1957-1965 to understand the need for and the responsibility of this discipline in the making of contemporary cities. In essence as I understand it, the foundation of the discipline of urban design grew out of an attempt to combine the disciplines of architecture, landscape and planning and emphasizing a need for a ‘bridge’ discipline. However, over the years, the attachment between architecture and urban design has only strengthened: urban design interventions are largely considered to be architectural interventions across scales. This dependency seems to have grown out of the need for the discipline of urban design to rely on that of architecture as a visual language and mode of representation. Cities have been designed long before any formal training in urban design was given. Indeed, the most exemplary urban designs were conceived by engineers, lawyers and socialists. The matters of contestation in the urban realm does not rise simply from spatial incongruencies but from an accumulation of socio-political circumstances. Intervening in the urban requires distinct forms of action arising from the specificity of its geopolitical context. So, the question then arises, how did urban design become so entangled and reliant on the field of architecture to define it? How do we start moving away from architectural design as the solution and start introducing multiple modes of engagement in the learning process? How should we learn urban design and therefore how should we teach it? Architecture is critical as a visual language and as a methodological tool which helps illuminate scalar and spatial relationships. However, we must not confuse architecture as a representational tool with architecture as a methodological solution to urban design problems. While understanding the need for architecture as a visual language, we must also understand its limitations in communicating essential aspects of urban design projects – among others, these embodying concepts of incompleteness and temporality. Furthermore, since urban design already expresses in-depth knowledge of design thinking processes, its education can and should explore how these processes apply to policy creation, advocacy initiatives, private-public partnerships and community collaborations that are so intrinsic to the forefront of the discipline, issues that recede when urban design is framed as ‘architecture’. Rather than defining (or re-defining) urban design, maybe we should start by re-evaluating the way we teach it. A methodological academic shift can have huge implications in the way we approach the practice of urban design today. In thinking of urban design as a way of intervening and critiquing the contemporary city, we must acknowledge the complexity that surrounds issues of urbanization. A focus on ‘design’ as the primary skillset has led to the extensive use of architecture as a solution, whereas the applied practice of urban design requires us to be much more versatile in incorporating research and contemporary issues into design, rather than resorting to default modes of ‘architectural design’ interventions. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/5/4/1sau83bb58bk4mr4f0mdhjqc4vqns6 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525480556543-Y2LHFTIY4KJR80QERGYH/rod1.jpg Reactions - Evolution of Lake Valencia, water consumption, and effects of sea level rise Image Credit/ Bibliography Trasvase de agua desde el Lago de Valencia, Venezuela | EJAtlas. (2016, May 8) Retrieved from https://ejatlas.org/conflict/el-trasvase-de-las-aguas-del-lago-de-valencia Cities are differentiated from their hinterlands by their density and access to work, services, products, entertainment, and personal development opportunities. In Venezuela, cities like Caracas are understood through a center versus periphery relationship that privileges cities over the rest of the country. This disproportionate distribution of resources can be defined as uneven development. This is important, because a development plan for Venezuela that focuses only on the main cities will tend to exacerbate the center-periphery divide, unless the forms of territorial, economic, and social relationships are re-imagined. The UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) has many studies that link urban and economic decentralization with higher levels of national development.That is why myself, Karen Mata (MAUD’18), and a group of students from the Simon Bolivar University are starting a research project on Lake Valencia, the second largest water body in Venezuela, to try to better understand the relationship between the city, environmental considerations, and economic activities. After the expropriation of more than 24,000 acres of Sugar Cane fields and its later abandonment by the government, Lake Valencia has been expanding and encroaching on surrounding working-class neighborhoods, endangering many industrial and institutional activities located at its borders over the last decade. Moreover, high levels of pollution in the lake as a consequence of receiving industrial and city waste waters, the expansion is not only compromising the safety of the nearby residents but also the regional water system. . To face this problem means to break the urban-rural cliché and re-imagine the system of relationships between different scales of populated centers, between agricultural and industrial activities, and between urban and environmental vulnerability. The economic limitations that Venezuela will face during its reconstruction will inevitably limit the type of infrastructure that can be implemented. Nevertheless, it is imperative that projects confront more than one issue at a time, integrating management of natural resources with economic productivity, housing, and public space. It will be fundamental to focus urban projects in promoting economic and social development, while building the infrastructure and services needed to face the urban and environmental challenges that we will are experiencing. This will only be possible if we manage to cultivate the technical, economic, social, and institutional capacities at a local scale. By transforming the highly centralized governance model in Venezuela, we could enable new forms of institutional collaboration across the territory. This text was written for one of the modules of the session Taller Ciudad Venezuela (Venezuela City Workshop) about the urban situation in Venezuela for an event organized by Venezuelan undergraduate students called Plan País (Country Plan) held in Boston University on March 30th and 31st. The session was moderated by Ignacio Cardona (DDes 19), with Andreina Seijas (DDes 20) as note taker. This is the first time that a session about the role of cities in the reconstruction Venezuela was introduced. It is an event that has taken place for more than eight years where groups of undergraduate students meet to study the future of the country. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/5/4/82hyrxgyg3b1w7h2zn1u97rd5ums7u monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525533215804-27UMQ9U3U9SHJQFIXI0T/kREN.jpg Reactions - ‘ReFLORESTAndo’ Project: Process to generate economic resources and strengthen social institutions Given the complex economic and political situation Venezuela is currently facing, it is critical to start questioning the scenarios produced by the duality of crisis and temporality while reflecting about the role of the city in overcoming crisis. This reflection is urgent for two reasons: firstly, because longstanding crises require long periods of recovery, especially when the social and institutional fabric has been damaged, generating a political trauma that has negative impacts on the execution of urban interventions. Secondly, because crisis that persist generate periods of normalization over social behaviors that modify space, institutions, and the focus and scope of urban interventions. Henri Lefebvre tells us that “there is a politics of space because space is political.” In Venezuela, this has been taken to both extremes. On the one hand, interactions in public space tend to be more conflictive because of various insecurities and the strong division of society in two opposing political groups. On the other hand, and stemming from this tension, some of the last urban interventions seek to depoliticize the purpose of the projects. Between these extremes, it is also well-known that the public space is what defines the character of cities. In this context, CCSCity450 emerges as a project for the reconstruction of the city, as part of the celebration of the 450 years since Caracas’s foundation and led by architects Aliz Mena, María Isabel Peña, and Franco Micucci. This project aims to create spaces for the discussion about the city, appropriation of space, and the urban memory while proposing alternative models for a possible reconstruction in Caracas. At the end of last year they called for a competition of temporary urban interventions to tackle the crisis, all within a budget of $2,000.[1] Proposals addresed issues such as enhancing accessibility routes to a hospital, tackling food provision, and addressing the challenge of generating resources and empower existing social institutions within the community[2]. In this context, and given the selected projects to be implemented, it is necessary to think about what gets prioritized and who is benefiting from them. How much public participation is really necessary and pertinent? What are the forms in which people can communicate and collaborate to the other public institutions? This could be a way to tie together solutions for an ongoing crisis that demands immediate responses and plans that allow us to rethink ephemeral interventions as structural project bases. This is different to thinking of them as temporal forms of appropriation that will eventually disappear. This is what we should expect from ephemeral interventions in context like in Venezuela. During any given crisis, the awareness of the urban realm’s trajectory over time is fundamental, both for finding new paths of opportunity and to lessen the difficulties of living in such a troubled city. In this sense, ephemeral interventions could have a leading role in the reconstruction of the state. Following an urban plan is essential, but more importantly this process must be visible to its citizens, because only then can it have the power to mold and influence future political projects associated with Venezuela’s reconstruction. To overcome a crisis is to rethink what the future could be, it is to discover and focus on the future we want, based on our own difficulties. That way the difficulties or byproducts of the crisis will be allowed to be incorporated into the process of recovery, which consist on proposing alternative models to foster development initiatives that go beyond a public space that is just a mirror image of other realities. This text was written as part of the Taller Ciudad Venezuela (Venezuela City Workshop) about the urban situation in Venezuela for an event organized by Venezuelan undergraduate students called Plan País (Country Plan) held in Boston University on March 30th and 31st. The session was moderated by Ignacio Cardona (DDes 19), with Andreina Seijas (DDes 20) as note taker. This is the first time that a session about the role of cities in the reconstruction Venezuela was introduced. It is an event that has taken place for more than eight years where groups of undergraduate students meet to study the future of the country. [1] Because of inflation now that budget is less than half of what it was when the winners were announced. [2] This last is a winner proposal called ReFLORESTAndo, by Rodrigo Guerra (MAUD’17) and Karen Mata (MAUD’18) in collaboration with Patricia Álvarez (MDES’18), Pablo Escudero (MDES’18) and Rudy Weissenberg (MDES’18). https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/5/4/l9eu9gtx9z0dgz46vfzjo0rlxvkzui monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525450513924-NCFC9MMC101421Z0GLM6/Collage.jpg Reactions - Image by Gina Ciancone On a clear spring morning in Taichung, Taiwan I rode with a team of researchers and scientists in a 20-seat bus through the campus streets of the world-renowned Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan. As a gold sedan suddenly merged into our lane, the bus came to a jolting stop to allow for a safe right-of-way passage, and I was reminded of the myriad of people who had anticipated this exact moment. Urban planners, designers, sci-fi enthusiasts, journalists, mechanics, and scientists have all awaited the era where a driverless vehicle will successfully react, in real-time, to the seemingly unpredictable high-speed ballet of cars, motorbikes, and pedestrians that all lay claim to the road. Two days later and more than 11,000 km away, a driverless car fatally struck a pedestrian in Phoenix, Arizona. And while the incident did not mark the first death in the world of autonomous vehicles, the pedestrian became the initial casualty in the new frontier of “off-track” driverless cars. When I learned of the event from an innocuous ping on my iPhone while commuting from Hong Kong to Taipei, my response was similar to predictions made by the New York Times less than six months prior. Was this “the one catastrophic accident that could imperil the whole experiment?”[1] Given the recent headlines, designing trust in autonomous vehicles has become all the more salient. Riders will need to be reassured beyond statistical data, which reveals that human-controlled vehicles pose a much greater risk to the public than driverless cars. But the question remains, how does trust become automatic, especially in the aftermath of a tragedy? And how can the ownership models pursued by the automotive industry be of benefit? The autonomous, mid-sized bus I rode in Taichung, Taiwan was not considered a Level 5 Automated Vehicle, which is defined as a “full-time performance by an Automated Driving System for all aspects of the dynamic driving task under all roadway and environmental conditions.” In other words, an automated vehicle with no human driver. The bus I rode in still had a nervous graduate student perched behind the wheel. Anticipating a manual override of any “mistakes” that the artificial intelligence system may have made, human feet were always within inches of the pedals, and other researchers were constantly monitoring the several screens positioned within the body of the bus. It felt like a beta-version of the future, hopefully with less cables. Though I had previously ridden in a Level 5 autonomous car in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, the scale of vehicle currently in development in Taiwan (mid-sized buses used for public transportation) re-frames the degrees to which vehicles should be considered autonomous. In fact, accepting vehicles as a type of urban infrastructure positions autonomous public transportation as a shared platform that could provide the same level of accessibility as a private car. Development in Taiwan encourages a shift in scale: no longer should the highest level of autonomous vehicles be designated solely by the sophistication of the artificial intelligence commanding the vehicle. The top benchmark of driverless vehicles should instead be classified by type and not by degrees of autonomy. In other words, vehicles designated for public transit, which have the capacity to reduce the number of private cars on the road and increase urban densification, should be granted the highest accolades. Perhaps a Level 6 should now be designated for completely autonomous vehicles that can transport more than 10 people per trip. Designing trust in the technology will come from re-framing the types of autonomous vehicles developed, rather than the degree of autonomy it performs. As Marshall Brown, founder of the Driverless City Project forecasts, because “society is cultural, and political, and aesthetic, and about desires — [autonomous developers] are going to need more than just software engineers working on it.” [2] https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/4/13/pk17siie0rpukbo9mbqga8ac9c01vd monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523646822153-3YQUCIX1M0AK9ARUQGLL/waiting+map.jpg Reactions - An imagined geography of waiting – the main spaces of contact between refugees and host community residents. A scale of embedded stress based on time, density, and program guide the level of discomfort that will be tolerated. (Image by Meaghan Pohl An imagined geography of waiting – the main spaces of contact between refugees and host community residents. A scale of embedded stress based on time, density, and program guide the level of discomfort that will be tolerated. (Image by Meaghan Pohl https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/4/13/m7rf4ku7pc0x1gtnzwj8rkh8l1c66u monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523646081684-GNTRLS63M9ZZPEEQWQON/zhuo+pang+1.jpg Reactions - IBTASEM playground in Lebanon Source: Catalytic Action http://www.catalyticaction.org/all-project-list/playground-syrian-refugees/ IBTASEM playground in Lebanon by Catalytic Action Source: http://www.catalyticaction.org/all-project-list/playground-syrian-refugees/ This time last year, I was reading a book called “Design like you give a damn: architectural responses to humanitarian crises[1].” by Architecture for Humanity (AFH). It was interesting to find out that although the phrase “humanitarian architect” were repeatedly used in the book, the title framed it as “architectural responses to humanitarian crises”, potentially in response to the debate that all architects wish to do good and separating humanitarian architects from the others is not very legitimate and may form further barriers. To me, the difference between what is humanitarian or not lies in the context of practice rather than the goal of practitioners. Architectural practice in the humanitarian field has only begun to be noticed in the last two decades, especially after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. In the context of intensified natural disaster, forced displacement and consistent global poverty, the crisis has been protracted and the boundary between temporary and permanent, between humanitarian and development have been blurred. In the old days when people were only going to be displaced shortly and a simple shelter (often in the form of a tent or an isobox) would do the work, it was engineers rather than architects whoprovided solutions. The most important evaluation criteria were efficiency and financial feasibility. Nowadays, however, when the average time of displacement of refugees are 17 years (according to UNHCR), people need more than that. The physical environment impacts people’s mindsets. Sharing room with 7 strangers deprives the right to privacy; Living in the repeatedly placed isoboxes deprives people of identity. Surviving in “minimalism” without amenities deprives the sense of community. In a word, people suffering from humanitarian crises are exactly those who aspire for normalcy, for all the simple things they could do before everything got messed up. And this is where designers and planners can contribute. This is not an easy path because of the almost intrinsic challenges in humanitarian practice. I want to point out a few based on my observation: 1. The challenge of building in conflict areas Humanitarian design often happens in an area without official governments, committed clients, competent contractors and formal tenure system. At the same time, humanitarian players on the ground often have their own agendas and are responsible to specific donors. Repetition of work is typical and pilot solutions get implemented everywhere. This brings many difficulties in terms of partnership, implementation and maintenance. 2. The challenge of forming community Many design efforts celebrate the idea of “creating a sense of community” through place-making; however, in the humanitarian field, people can come from very different income and ethnical groups and they have been packed in such high density. Without mutual trust, the community is simply non-existent. 3. The challenge between temporary and permanent. In the spectrum of temporary, transient and permanent, architects are more comfortable dealing with the last one; however, it is not rare to see what was designed to be used as transient housing become permanent in practice. On the other side, people may not welcome permanent architecture because they do not perceive this place as their final destinations (they may want to return to their home countries or seek asylum in another wealthier country) and any permanent gestures are perceived by people as consolidation of their current condition. Challenges remain. Those humanitarian practices that are successful must do well in architect first. As Shigeru Ban put in this way: “you need to be a good architect in the first place.” As cliché as it may sound, a good intention, an adaptive mindset and professionalism shall do the work. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/4/11/cerda monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523492171911-ESLEOBOU1DDL7DDM56KT/1803.jpg Reactions - Image source: [https://cartografic.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/barcelona-5-1841-1860-neix-leixample/ Last Wednesday, April 4th, 2018 the Harvard Graduate School of Design hosted the presentation of the very first translation into English of Ildefons Cerdà’s fundamental theoretical writing, his monumental General Theory of Urbanization. Originally published in 1867, and now edited by the Institut d’Arquitectura Avançada de Catalunya and ACTAR, Cerdà’s foundational book constituted the very first attempt to systematically define Urbanism as a new science and professional discipline. In this article, I would like to succinctly highlight three reasons why his legacy stands out as a seminal reference of the highest quality, as well as a source of inspiration for new generations of urban designers, eager to provide appropriate responses to the needs and pressing challenges our cities face today. Design Thinking | Urban Design as a form of Art Cerdà’s revolutionary vision led him to pursue highly idealistic goals by deploying extremely pragmatic and grounded design methodologies. His creative endeavor focused on responding to the urgent need, spurred by the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, for a systematic understanding of what modern cities were and could eventually become, by transforming a once unstructured and outdated set of minor disciplines into a cohesive, rigorous profession. He started by coining a set of concepts that would allow him to codify the fundamental elements and dynamic systems that constitute modern cities. Way before the words urbanism, Städtebau or City Planning started being used in city-related studies, he coined the word Urbanization (1). Cerdà was the very first City Designer to overcome the traditional planning routines inherited from pre-Industrial times, by proposing a set of rigorous methodologies to integrate all the techniques and design considerations that should be harmonized to successfully address the problems that modern cities necessarily face. Systems Engineering | Urban Design as a Science Cerdà understood that modern cities require the juxtaposition of complex systems to effectively deploy the multiple services enhanced by the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. His innovative vision allowed him to systematically address qualitative challenges by developing quantitative models. His ultimate goals addressed considerations such as eradicating early child and mother mortality, increasing the standard of living of working class families, merging social classes within the same neighborhoods and buildings to reduce social stratification, drawing specific street patterns to induce egalitarian power relationships, balancing the human need for isolation and privacy with the ability for people to socialize, prioritizing pedestrian mobility and sociability over alternative means, or establishing efficient mobility and energy systems able to adapt to further foreseen technological changes. To address such challenges, he designed a series of probabilistic, non- deterministic heuristic models, based on extensive avant la lettre Big Data analysis. Cerdà iteratively refined and sophisticated such methods, allowing him to come up with ranges for optimal building height, footprint, and density; street and sidewalk width; integrating all urban services in the very same way we still do to this day. His envisioning of a grid system became a reference for all grid models that came after his Barcelona Expansion plan, including Manhattan in NYC. Human-centered design | Urban Design as a Service Ildefons Cerdà developed his main book whilst designing the Barcelona Expansion Plan, completed in 1859. Not only did his plan accomplish all the fundamental goals it pursued in a masterful way, but it also represented a benchmark for high quality urban design practice. Today we can empirically contrast not only the lasting achievements that his plan brought for the city of Barcelona, but also the benefits of well thought design methodologies. By way of example, recent studies comparing the cities of Atlanta and Barcelona (2) show how metropolitan areas with a comparable population can embody massive differences in terms of environmental footprint or transportation efficiency (3). For all these reasons, Cerdà is a source of inspiration for new generations of city designers who want to contribute to the enormous technical and social challenges that the discipline of Urban Design needs to respond to in this age of rapid and often abrupt technological changes with a human-centered and rigorous approach. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/4/11/digitalspace monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523491033049-YR44U1JWQHEDXBG52SVX/unnamed.jpg Reactions - Image source: [ http://www.urbantransformations.ox.ac.uk/blog/2018/digital-and-spatial-governance-in-shaping-the-future-city-through-urban-living-lab-ull-working/] As a Master in Urban Planning student at the GSD I frequently wonder why our discipline pays so little attention to digital space. What occurs in digital space is rapidly changing the layout of cities, management capacity, how people organize, movement within it and how urban dwellers interact and socialize with one another. Users of applications, search engines, and social media platforms create digital data trails which have capacity, especially when spatialized to inform us in the decision-making process about how these people move around, what spaces are frequently visited - what is or is not working. In terms of infrastructure, should we as planners advocate that people have access to the same opportunities to exist in digital spaces? I argue that digital space should benefit from some planning, zoning, and place-based policy initiatives in both the physical and digital public realms. Digital space could benefit from the guiding principles of planning as a discipline. Digital space and the UX design practices that create it use many of the same principles of navigability that have been essentially standardized within the field. Many planners utilize urban sociology methodologies and theories to justify their proposals. In fact, neuroimaging of the brain has shown that the same areas of the brain that are employed while an individual navigates physical space are active in navigating digital platform or general web browsing. Similarly, within digital space there are different cultures, norms, and manners of social conduct that can be visible. Notions of Publicly Owned Public Space Vs. Privately-Owned Private Space in the Digital Realm When thinking about the rules that govern digital space, I think of differences between publicly owned, publicly managed and a privately owned, pseudo public space, and how the rights of the urban dweller and the manager of these spaces differs. In the US it assumed that when someone is in a privately owned public space they are subject to the rules of conduct as determined by the individual owner or entity, whose end goal in providing the space in the first place is to generate profit or provide the space as a type of amelioration of the social costs that went into developing other elements of their property. They determine hours of operation, the physical design, and surveillance. In turning back to digital space, users are subjected to the rules as determined by the platforms or applications that provide the “infrastructure” of digital spaces. Often, these spaces are privately owned by companies, the vast majority of which are providing the space in order to profit from it, which in the digital world equates to individual’s data. Wwhen it comes to digital space, the fact that the same standard’s regarding privately owned public physical space apply as a status quo is not only absurd, but extremely precarious. Unlike physical “public spaces” the digital is not restricted by factors such as which neighborhood it is located within and the physical limits of hosting only a certain amount of people at a given time. While I think that many planning solutions could easily be applicable to the digital realm, assuming that because a digital space is privately managed the individual should be subjected to the rules of the private jurisdiction is problematic in terms of the high user populations and the fact that digital space combines, fuses, and mixes with commonly agreed upon notions of the public and private in ways that until recently we have never fully experienced. In thinking of the digital public realm, theoretical models such of those of Hannah Ardent, Habermas, and Sennet can easily be applied. As Hannah Ardent distinguished in her political theory work, “The Public Realm and Public Self,” there lies a nexus between an individual when alone and in a public space, or the “space of appearance.” Additionally, the importance of public space for people to organize, gather, and protest has long been studied in western political urban sociology. Such spaces have been historically linked to many revolutions and political shifts. Such capacity is frequently associated with digital space. The term “social media justice worrier” or phenomena such as the social media organizing that led to the Arab Spring offer examples of such similarities between the digital and the physical public while also providing nuance. Planning Digital Space Digital space should be planned along standards that mix models of theory and practice while taking into account the interfusing of private and public that occur within it. I am eager to explore ideas of local governments playing more of an active role in governing digital space. Scalability is obviously an issue, with such platforms it can’t be ignored that digital space should be fit for local contexts. For example, China’s political relationship with information, data, and censorship have, as a nation, essentially planned digital space to fit the rules and policies of their “real-life” counterparts. Rather than allow Facebook, Amazon, Uber to dominate the nation, they made sure to block them from entering and instead encouraged domestic versions of similar technology. The way in which that captured and localized wealth created by such platforms, tailored the platforms to the culture of China, and maintained many of the principles that are governing China today. Regardless of the controversy surrounding its control and monitoring, this can be viewed as an impressive endeavor. For Now In the short term, I believe there could be huge benefits for local governments to digitally plan space as it applies to capital capture. One example is requiring apps such as Uber, Lyft, and Via to pay city taxes when users access their digital services from within the physical boundaries of their jurisdictions. In thinking about the dialogue regarding platforms and technology in the United States, it is seemingly almost always about “disruption”. How people move around or interact with others has often been in ways that are largely positive. However, the role of government has been significantly weakened in the process. Although only few cities have been able to do so, this may represent the beginning of digital planning practices. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522633071776-RV9VP8EX11429C8KSL6U/Phillip-Island-House-by-Denton-Corker-Marshall-002.jpg Reactions - Image by John Gollings. Phillip Island House, by Denton Corker Marshall The idea of limits is crucial to contemporary life. Limits bring order and understanding to space, they provide a frame for which to enter and exit. How else do we feel the excitement of moving through the chaos of one environment and into the sanctuary of our private rooms? Thresholds, portals and entrances provide the rhythm for our experiences and encounters on a daily basis. It is within this ideology I would argue that an urban-architectural project could exist. There is a tendency to celebrate the generic nature of the expansions of many contemporary cities. Sprawl and urbanization have been a result of many factors and forces, and the outcome a new form of territory. This new form of territory has blurred the boundary between the traditional center and the periphery, to a state where we really have no definition of the city anymore. In defining the city, or at least the idea of a city, we may be able to argue for the return of true urban design projects. These are projects which have value in either being part of, or against the city. The projects that sit on the fence are precisely that – they give up something to be a part of something else. Projects that stand for something take on a ratbag attitude, somewhat naively but at least they stand strongly in favor of something. To be clear, this is not an argument against the explosion of urbanization, but simply an approach to claim one side or the other. What would a project look like that argued for the return of the definition of the city? One answer could be that of limits. In other words, the new project could have no real interest in style or facade, but be purely concerned in defining itself against what it is not. It is a project that sets up boundaries between itself and the rest, which states clearly its political intention without blending in to the rest of the city. The urge to blend, to mix or to become hybrid has diluted the power of the urban-architectural project to make a statement. Once the ability for urban projects to comment on their position in the city is lost, they may no longer be urban at all. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/4/1/k3rsk9lgw5ixx4sven67ctj3j98ewf monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522619320787-QTO4FYB2A9BQ2QB1WT55/2018+1+29_WTP+LOGO+DESIGN-1+CROPPED.jpg Reactions Just 10 days ago, we released an Open Letter to the Harvard Graduate School of Design community with a simple message: that greater cross-disciplinary collaboration is desperately needed at the GSD if the designers and planners who study within its walls are to graduate with the skills and competencies necessary to truly make a difference in addressing the challenges of our built environments. We argued that the burden for achieving this goal falls on all parties - the administration, the faculty, and the students themselves - and that fundamental shifts in practice must take place in order to embed a culture of collaboration into an institution that is all too comfortable operating in disciplinary silos. The outpouring of support from all corners of the GSD has been beyond heart-warming. Over the course of the week, more than 100 students from across nearly every discipline read our letter, attended our events, wore our pins (inscribed with our campaign’s motto: “Let’s Work Hand-in-Hand”), and voiced enthusiasm for our initiative in casual conversations. Members of the administration and faculty reached out with words of encouragement, affirming that our goals were indeed critical and long overdue. Ideas on how to increase real collaboration flowed forth in abundance, with suggestions ranging from the highly-ambitious (the administration should hire more professors who have interdisciplinary backgrounds; faculty should create new courses on soft skills tailored to negotiation and collaboration for those working in the design disciplines) to the seemingly-obvious (students should talk more to peers from other disciplines in the trays; faculty should publish mid-semester review schedules). The energy around our initiative was palpable. Despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback, we can’t help but temper our optimism with a certain degree of caution. We know that this past week’s conversations are just the beginning and that a long road remains ahead before this work reaches a place where the true benefits of cross-disciplinary collaboration are realized. Culture shifts aren’t easy, and they certainly don’t happen overnight. They also don’t happen as the result of one week, one initiative, or one student group’s appeals. A culture of collaboration at the GSD will require nothing less than a sustained push for changes large and small - both inside and outside of the classroom - from all corners of the student body. To that end, we implore you to continue this effort in your classes, with your professors and department heads, and perhaps most importantly, with your peers. If you have ideas of your own on how to most effectively increase real collaboration at the GSD, we’d love to hear them (hupogsd@gmail.com). In a world with increasingly-complex, ever-evolving challenges, a culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration is critical for the continued success of our collective professions. That works starts here, with all of us, and we hope you’ll join us, hand-in-hand, as we strive for more a collaborative, understanding, and inclusive future. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/3/25/yg82lgcrqf8ego9yfnyawuh1barn7i monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521999662739-BW2TBL9AECNTCJI7EASA/Image+2.jpg Reactions - Image by Deni Lopez. The Tehuantepec Isthmus is a region in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco and Veracruz in Mexico. It is the narrowest area between the two oceans (Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean, in its section of the Gulf of Mexico).The center-right Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) controls the state of Oaxaca and the federal government. This facilitated a top-down takeover in the Tehuantepec Isthmus, in contrast with community-led responses in places like Morelos or Mexico City, governed by the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Army men and private developers took over reconstruction in Oaxaca, leaving local economies, knowledge, and workforces aside to demonstrate capacity to handle a crisis. How can design generate alternate anticipatory strategies that integrate debris reuse and community-led recovery tactics in disaster-prone rural areas? Mexico, like many other geographies, currently struggles with the aftermath of natural disasters that areis inherently tied toenhanced by its social and political instability. Facing a lack of preemptive planning and a misunderstanding of risk, different stakeholders struggle to find holistic recovery actions that do not exacerbate the rural-urban divide. Countryside areas such as the earthquake-prone Tehuantepec Isthmus in Oaxaca, for example, received attention only after an exceptional inter-plate earthquake hit Mexico City last year (even though the Isthmus suffered from a higher-magnitude earthquake just days before). Recovery currently focuses on government-financed rapid housing production led mainly by private developers and the army, while neglecting local needs, lifestyles, and knowledge. Therefore, the question is: how can design be of service when creating integrative tactics that go beyond short-term reconstruction and volatile political cycles? While essential for post-disaster or war recovery, the question of how to handle debris is usually not a primary concern. Dealing with debris is a complicated process that often results in unprotected landfill. Rubble composition varies from situation to situation, but typically contains a wide range of liquid and solid hazardous waste. Using such components as landfill or discarding them next to water sources creates serious environmental pollution concerns. Yet, due to their lack of planning for these issues, governments tend to make exceptions, opting for easy and quick fixes1. In the case of the Los Perros river in Oaxaca, the 2017 earthquakes causedproduced more than 10,000 tons of rubble (the equivalent to 50 blue whales) to accumulate. The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) was responsible for managing earthquake debris, and in Oaxaca, they made an exception to their no-discarding-next-to-a-waterbed rule2. This top-down impromptu plan received community backing because the area suffers from periodic floods - ranging from 0.20 to 2.70 meters3. Therefore, a complementary initiative (led by the federal government) hired workerslocals to remove rubble from their own houses for a one-time payment of nearly USD 1304. Locals hoped that rubble would act as a buffer for the next flood season and contain sewage ruptures caused by the 2017 (and future) earthquakes. Nonetheless, this action had little regard for the ultimate environmental impact at the riverside dumping location, and it worsened the effects of six pre-existing dump sites along Los Perros5. It is unacceptable to think that an earthquake-prone region like Tehuantepec still lacks an integrative plan to deal with natural disasters. Nonetheless, it is difficult to plan preemptively when collective information is insufficient. As a practical discipline able to synthesize other forms of knowledge and materialize it into tangible solutions, design brings a lesser-known alternative approach to the pressing issue of post-disaster recovery. While environmental disasters are nowhere near a new phenomenon, their systematic study is a fairly recent science. With support from the Penny White Project Fund and the Summer Research Travel Grant of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Nadyeli Quiroz (MLA 1 AP), Betzabe Valdés (MDes Critical Conservation), and I will conduct a site investigation over the summer to study the Los Perros riverbank. Following the devastating earthquakes of 2017, the riverbank became an improvised and unprotected rubble dumpsite to serve as a barrier against periodic floods. Our research will consist of a community needs survey, a thorough mapping and ecological study, and interviews with key actors within and outside the local population. In conjunction, these processes will help us find prospective rubble deposits, understand the towns on the riverbank along with their pre-and-post disaster underlying power structures, and synthesize a proposal that has the potential to strengthen itsthe local sense of place. We intend to develop an environmentally conscious project-based plan for incremental action that serves as a foundation to deal with inevitable upcoming disasters and one that has the ability to negotiate between the local community, institutions, and other development experts. In other words, we view this as the first step to create a comprehensive flood-control project and community-led public space along the river. We also aim to advance emerging expertise about urban, social, and geophysical conditions in similar global settings. The project will initiate our year-long thesis, set a precedent for a different kind of preemptive intervention in rural areas, and hopefully contribute to a community-led design project. We promise to get back to you with the results! https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/3/25/eu5nwgsc5yhdrmz1ymaed219ed50x6 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521998646305-Q8G6XZS340YERNBRHO7Q/Image+02.jpg Reactions - Image Source: Washington, D.C., February 2017. [Ted Eytan] In the concluding remarks of Michael Murphy & Alan Ricks paper Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity the authors make a definitive plea that the profession of architecture needs to re-focus its values and practices in order to address the current and future needs of the societies it serves. They argue that if not, we will lose our agency as designers. If we take seriously this plea, how and where do we begin to make strides in re-focusing these efforts? Here are three places to start. Language Far too often, our language as designers is inaccessible, irresponsibly insular, and more concerned about constructing a language of own aesthetic. Here I mean this visually, whenthen we use verbal and written language in support of our aesthetic agendas. We debate work using language and syntax that is largely academic in nature and use platforms for communication of work and ideas that are primarily sourced by designers for other designers, becoming trapped in disciplinary jargon as so many other professions do. We must ask ourselves, is this a responsible or even productive practice? If language is principally about communication, and we only ever communicate to ourselves as an audience, how are we ever to be effective in understanding or addressing the current and future needs of the communities in which we work? We would do well as designers, and as students of our respective disciplines to develop new practices of language, to communicate with a broader audience as a way to understand and respond to their most critical needs. Language becomes the bridge by which we as designers can exchange and relate ideas to a diverse and broad collective. We must use language as a means to communicate our ideas outward, not just inwardly to ourselves. Audience Who is our audience? To put it in a different way than for whom do we, design, the question is an easy one to ask, but perhaps one of the more difficult to answer. Urban design for me, even more so than architecture, situates itself as a design of the public realm. As champions of projects of-and-for the people, the greatest challenge is that we are never designing for a single individual or group. There is always a friction a ltension of a greater diverse collective in our work, and I don’t see this as a negative. I see this diversity as being the source of great exchange and possibility. However, what I believe therefore results in our practice is that this complexity leads to complacency and broad generality in our practice, and in our language. We generalize ideas and language as a broad brush, over-simplifsimplification ofying complex problems rather than pressing into the tensions and challenges to give language and resolution to more nuanced readings and solutions for our cities and their citizens. We as urban designers cannot become complacent in accepting broad generalities and in proliferating them as universal ideals globally. There is too much at stake. We must be able to use our agency as designers in reading the city, the communities, the places in which we work, leveraging the skills we possess, in order to construct and articulate new narratives through design in support of the people and locales in which we practice. Values I believe this all leads to values, and this is perhaps where we have the most work to do. I was recently in a studio review in which a critic asked this very question. “What are you bringing to this, what set of values are driving you?” At the time, the question seemed so natural and central to defining the work, but I later realized how abnormal that question was in the context of the academy. We often are more concerned with big ideas than big values. What if this were reversed? What if we as urban designers focused more on listening to our communities and forming values in the stewardship of those communities as a way to generate new ideas, rather than the reverse? Developing values as designers allows us to see clearly the audience of our work, and to articulate through language, the problems and potential solutions to the multitude of challenges we face. This work is no small task, but the earlier we start this practice, the better equipped we are to serve our cities and their citizens. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/3/19/8i2c0x0f1rsdankbkgxcayn45x83do monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521474401230-5U2P3G55Q1LYOXZ9YIGK/home7.jpg Reactions - Image by Claudia Tomateo Bigness does not have history Bigness does not have theory Bigness operates without context Bigness competes with context Bigness aims to eliminate context In “Bigness, or the problem of the large”[1] Koolhaas (1995) foresees what would be an important discussion of contemporary architecture. Whether it is a feature evident to the observer or not, somehow it managed to hide from practitioners and historians in order to theorize and understand its origin and possibilities. Was Bigness a natural outcome for architecture? In the absence of a clear social mission for contemporary designers, does Bigness represent an experiment to see how far we can get? Here I aim to analyze what triggered Koolhaas to have such a radical view and also point out its weaknesses and inconsistencies. Understanding that the current narrative canon is oscillating between liquid and iconic architecture, what is the role of bigness and where is it positioned under this spectrum?[2] Bigness does not have history “Beyond a certain scale, architecture acquires the properties of Bigness. The best reason to broach Bigness is the one given by climbers of Mount Everest; “because it is there”. Bigness is the ultimate architecture.” In the first explanation of Bigness, a simple analogy is made to understand the feeling of something that is big, yet passes unnoticed. Mount Everest is used as a natural example for Bigness which is later introduced as the “ultimate architecture”. It is in a sense funny that after all the pre-Columbian history of incredibly large-scale interventions on the landscape, bigness is presented as something “ultimate” for the discipline. The effort to bring the discipline to the limits of one of its most important elements (scale) is valuable. However, this definition fails to recognize its historic references, even if they were not intended for the same purpose.[3] Bigness does not have theory “Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a singular architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures. The impossibility triggers the autonomy of its parts which is different from fragmentation: the parts committed to the whole…. Issues of composition, scale, proportion, detail are now moot. The art of architecture is useless in Bigness.” This is critical for the theory of buildings and cities, because there is a definition of the form of bigness as something diffuse but that is composed by parts.[4] Koolhaas makes a distinction between what he calls “Frankenstein buildings” and Bigness. Bigness is an aggregation of architectural gestures that are independent, but at the same time part of the whole (i.e. Hagia Sofia). Frankenstein buildings are neither one nor the other, and therefore only half successful (i.e. Steven Holl MIT dorms). Bigness operates without context Bigness is not about program, it is about complexity. In “S,M,L,XL” the authors argue for the birth of Bigness as a consequence of current technologies that allow the buildings to be thicker and taller, resulting in artificial interiors, electricity, air conditioning, elevators, among others. Under these circumstances, the interior and exterior become detached. It could be possible that to a certain extent the building does not need a specific context to function, because Bigness is a concept that can be deployed all over the world, even outside cities. The façade does not have to reveal what is happening inside in order to have a conversation with the city, and I find it simplistic to argue that buildings and cities must have direct physical connections. Yes, the building is enclosed, but that doesn’t mean that an attitude towards the exterior is absent. Bigness competes with context There is no global intention for architecture, and that is why we have returned to Bigness; it is the exit door to escape artistic movements and modernism. Koolhaas makes a clear distinction between modernism and modernization. He refers to modernism as the formal language, the style, while modernization is the pioneer attitude. We need modernization, not modernism. Consequently, I will argue that for Koolhaas, the idea of Bigness competing with the context is less a race for the prize, but instead is an agent of change, an “urban condenser”.[5] Bigness regulates the intensities of programmatic coexistence, an unexpected programmatic alchemy. Bigness aims to eliminate context I will use this last statement as a way to understand Bigness in context; historically, theoretically and physically. Many reflections have been made on Bigness as an artifact. But I find it crucial to identify its vision for the city and its influence in the world to reflect about its canon under the contemporary spectrum. “In such a model of urban solid and metropolitan void, the desire for stability and the need of instability are no longer incompatible. They can be pursued as two separate enterprises with invisible connections. Through the parallel actions of reconstruction and destruction, such a city becomes an archipelago of architectural islands floating in a post-architectural landscape of erasure where once was a city is now a highly charged nothingness” (Koolhaas 1995, 201) In this statement, context is reduced to “nothingness”, a figurative argument for the devouring of urban tissue. We can see this sort of dystopian attitude throughout Koolhaas’ life. One of his most famous manifestos “The Green Archipelago” argues for the recovery of strategic urban fragments while Berlin is consumed by a big forest as the ocean of this archipelago of iconic buildings. It was a resilient strategy both in planning and socially. A strategy to recover and to erase the trace of the bombing after World War II. I appreciate Bigness as a space for the minds to float above reality and to free themselves to imagination. And that is precisely where I think Bigness belongs in the contemporary canon of narratives. Today’s architecture is partially about materials, iconicity, liquidity… But it is mainly about the story that the building wants to tell. No problem to be solved, no revolutionary vision of life (in comparison with World War II). That is why architects should narrate their own stories; the issues are plural and we do not share any overarching narrative. There is a need to create our own alternative universes and test our ideas there. During modernism, the future was the goal. Today we accept the future as it is, it escapes us. The intentions of Bigness as buildings to resurrect the city and as laboratories for new theories and new architectural thinking is valuable. Yes, Bigness can build up a city, yet many other elements can do so as well. Context is inevitable, by denying it we accept its existence. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/3/19/w8td8huf50mbbysfp8ihfk54zd88k6 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521473922158-F757Z8HF8V5NZ0W7FMDA/cover.jpg Reactions - Image by Hayden White Let me take a moment to contextualise the terms of preservation and temporality, and position them as an apparatus that contains both the best and the worst of humanity. Within the historical lineage of events leading to our dominance over the planet, we began to draw and reproduce the environment around us, a form of communication and recording, albeit primitive in nature. We then began to form sounds and words, associating meaning to those noises and thus allowing a transference of knowledge. When beings were able to transfer and accumulate knowledge on a societal scale they discovered history. Generations of hunters and thinkers were able to transfer wisdom down generations that may have otherwise stopped at the grave. Our eldest ancestors stumbled upon the first form of preservation by marrying language and the recording of it. Temporality was encountered at the dawn of agriculture, when man became non-nomadic and first encountered the brutality of seasons. That seasonal registration of time forced society to plan and prepare to store goods for oncoming winters. Society discovered time and its passing. In architecture the term preservation is used for the “aesthetic, historic, scientific or social value” (Mehotra, emergent urbanism in Mumbai, Pg 221), something that provides for generations, and is defined by its “authenticity, ancientness, and beauty” (Koolhaas, Pg 2). However, conservation typically favours the structure and aesthetic of a thing or building. If we are to believe Victor Hugo’s attestation to the king of France that architecture does indeed contain the literature and cultural history of the city, then we might believe that preservation of buildings is in some way a modern preservation of knowledge - but we don’t. The internet allows for an epidemic in storage and dissemination of knowledge that is unbounded. Hugo thought that the history and culture of the city was imbedded in its architecture, and although we might believe that the structure of the city once reflected the movement of people, or even an age – such as Edinburgh’s transition from old town to enlightened new town – we cannot help but find that city building of past decades did not reflect societal temporalities, but rather framed and even attempted to mould them. One might recall Paris’s widening of its streets in order to prevent the establishment of blockades. Thus, we must ask ourselves, what are we preserving? A picture? Some stone? An idea? Oppression? In Rem Koolhaas’s lecture transcript Preservation is Overtaking Us, he describes the emergence of conservation being at a time where anaesthesia, photography, and the blueprint were invented. However, I would argue that conservation does no more than capture an object in time (photography), placing it in a state of suspended animation (anaesthetic). The object is preserved in the city as an artifice of the ancient, suspended within an evolving apparatus of movement and dynamism that no longer has need for it. The true form of preservation, stemming from its roots as storage of information for learning would be to capture it digitally – projects by the UK team ScanLAB capture landscapes and buildings three-dimensionally for use as flythrough tools for learning and analysing. However, Koolhaas pushes an entirely different agenda, honing in on his ideal for an architectural abstinence; architecture that has neither purpose nor intention. From any other perspective than architectural theory, one could not define a more abominable carbuncle for the city as a reflection of the ego. From a strictly ecological viewpoint the preservation of objects and aesthetic values in states of cryogenesis is as useful as hammering nails into a river and asking it to stay put. All that can be accomplished is the mild disruption to the processes surrounding it. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/3/12/upya1iz3nreet41f8gcxjq7444fg58 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520910198697-XTOS8YUP6RD7HAEPHT11/Balkrishna_Doshi_courtesy-of-VSF.jpg Reactions About ten days ago, for our studio, we were driving toward MassMoca. With research focused on museum campuses, the purpose of the trip was to visit this one-of-a-kind museum typology. While on the drive up, we were playing the very timely Pritzker Game where we rated Pritzker’s recipients from A to C (let's see where we are in sixty years) and speculating on the imminent question: which architect would receive the honorary 2018 crown? A few days later, on Wednesday March 7th, Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi was bestowed the laureate of architecture’s highest honor. None of us in the car had brought up his candidacy as a possibility to the discussion. Upon hearing the news, both his proponents and critics have proliferated all forms of media, from the most general to the most specific. It is particularly relevant to examine this year’s announcement through the lens of our field, urban design. In the past ten years, we have seen the word « urban » only once in a Pritzker announcement: in 2011, when Eduardo Souto de Moura received the award. We read that the Burgo Tower was creating a dialogue with « the urban landscape. » Before that, the word urban appeared in 2007 for Richard Rogers’ announcement. With this year’s award, many declensions are aligned in Doshi’s announcement: urban planner, urbanization and urban design. Should we understand here a shift in the role and discourse of the prize? Are we witnessing the rise of a celebrated urban consciousness? We will be able to answer those questions more clearly in the coming years, but it is evident that through Doshi’s projects, such as the Co-Operative Middle Income Housing in Ahmedabad (1982) or the Aranya Low-Cost Housing (1989), a few kilometers away from Indore, that we see a pressing interest towards issues of the contemporary metropolis. Selecting Balkrishna Doshi as recipient of the Pritzker Prize not only recognizes an accomplished figure of both the 20th and 21th centuries in the field of architecture (and honors the legacy of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn), but it also showcases to the public sphere design solutions which address critical concerns of affordability, culture, and integrity, all of which promote the universal right to public enjoyment of a place. When Alejandro Aravena received the Hyatt Foundation’s prestigious medal, there was already speculation on the Pritzker’s ideological agenda at the time. In 2016, with the awarding of the work of his firm ELEMENTAL, the Pritzker highlighted the pressing challenges of the 21st century city: resilience, sustainability and collective space as a key element of the built environment. Therefore, the move to give exposure to those questions today with Doshi seems to confirm an objective for the Pritzker Prize, that being to reveal the role design has in serving the city and its larger society. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/3/12/oqg1bu65h5so16aqjqpjtybtovjp08 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523284897967-IYBVAWQYIRHDP7UD8DU8/64_WilsonFS5050Barrier_uncropped.jpg Reactions - Image by Allen Ying The increasing privatization of public space has become one of the leading topics of debate in contemporary cities. The adoption of neoliberal economic policies has left many city governments with shrinking budgets, and even global finance centers such as New York have found themselves strapped for cash. Austerity measures meant to reduce public spending have been compensated for by an increased dependency on the private market to provide civic amenities that residents have come to expect. Many have welcomed this new era of public-private partnerships, some going as far as advocating for the complete privatization of all public spaces. Proponents argue that the private market offers the optimal framework for the provision of services, and that left to its own devices, will lead to more efficiently run public spaces while also allowing for innovative approaches that can produce exciting and novel situations. Their detractors argue that the private market will, by the very nature of capitalism, inevitably exclude more vulnerable social groups (without political or financial power) from these spaces, leading to increased inequality in how different people experience their city. However, both sides of this argument miss how inclusionary practices regarding public space can be used not just to facilitate equal opportunity, but also to encourage equalizing outcomes. Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago’s 2013 analysis Central Park Against the Streets counterintuitively suggests that one of the most iconic ‘commons’ in the world was in fact conceived as one of its greatest enclosures. “The case of Central Park shows that institutional orderings of space can incorporate subtle, often unnoticed strategies of dispossession without privatization, using certain assemblages of public space to eradicate the practices underpinning autonomous appropriations thereof.” Rather than simply exclude increasingly unruly working-class visitors from their park, Vaux and Olmstead aimed to transform their behavior so that they would become worthy patrons of this elite urban amenity through assimilation. For behavioral transformation to occur at the scale they envisioned, the park had to be free of charge and as inclusive as possible, with plentiful access points that lured users in from the surrounding streets. Today, the desire to dictate the terms on which expression occurs in public spaces is most clearly illustrated when we examine how municipalities treat some of these more extreme appropriations of their city. After what Sevilla calls “the extinction of the everyday cultures of autonomous street use,” non-violent illegal activities such as street skateboarding and graffiti writing remain as some of the last, lingering, unauthorized uses of the public realm. While these activities arguably spawned from dissatisfied youths in the city, municipal governments have again turned to enclosure as a means to quell this rebellious behavior. Instead of imposing fines or even jail sentences for these offences, especially prevalent during the ‘broken-windows’ era of policing, a more sophisticated approach has since been adopted that replicates these activities, albeit in controlled environments. Skateparks are becoming more prevalent than ever, providing safe designated spaces for skateboarding. While almost universally praised by city officials and many skaters themselves, these paternalistic spaces have the double-edged effect of preventing full interaction with the city for the skateboarders. Furthermore, by moving the skaters off of the streets and into designated parks, the urban experience for city dwellers is further sterilized. Similarly, illegal graffiti has been increasingly stamped out while legally permitted murals and ‘street art’ take over. Small expressions of disaffected youth have given way to more easily digestible ‘safe’ images, now seen to increase property values in a neighborhood rather than blighting it. The same planners and designers that will invite internationally renowned street artists to brighten up their newly commissioned ‘arts district’ will simultaneously punish their own constituents for trying to do the same. Unsurprisingly, these sanctioned murals tend to offer combinations of pop imagery and colorful platitudes such as LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL or ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, rather than addressing rampant social inequity, depression or dissatisfaction. Public spaces have rarely been neutral grounds for diverse classes to come together; instead they are highly contested and are renegotiated daily. As former professional skateboarder Ocean Howell suggests in his 2001 essay The Poetics of Security, these unsanctioned appropriations “challenge observers to examine their preconceptions of what or who a city is for” and reintroduce conflict to increasingly sterile urban environments. Municipal governments have aligned their interests too closely with those of the private sector in homogenizing cultural and consumption patterns. We need to more closely examine the motives behind public spaces and be more open and flexible to different types of appropriation to ensure healthy, sustainable cities in the future. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/3/4/narrative monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520216647485-3L9G862LIR4EF05PIHZF/narrative.jpg Reactions - Image by Daphen Binder and Teddy Kofman In preparation for a class presentation about New Urbanism, it was suggested to me to watch a conversation, moderated and organized by Alex Krieger. This confrontation of two distinct ideologies and architectural schools of thought took place in Piper auditorium in 1999. Andres Duany, the co-author and propagator of the New Urbanism movement debated Rem Koolhaas, for whom the city is where the globe is held captive. The conversation is captivating. Both speakers have parallel world views on professional operation: while Koolhaas chooses to “reflect, understand and manifest the culture of our time” in his architecture, Duany is looking towards its reform. Duany argued that people desired the suburb, and New Urbanism was an attempt to make it better and “fix” its inherent problems. In response Koolhaas questioned the cultural and social implications of Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s movement. “The relentless commitment to changing things,” Koolhaas retorted, “is unbearable in terms of the immaturity of the profession as it is currently constituted.” The relevance of this conversation has not subsided in the 19 years that have passed since, yet it is hard to imagine it happening today. It stems, in my view, from a lack of a dominant contemporary narrative in urban design or architecture. It is not that pertinent issues relating to design are not discussed and addressed. The influence of technology on design, the integration of ecological infrastructure, walkability, housing and equality, to name a few, are all ‘of our time’. Rather, these issues are dealt with in isolation and as a result do not aggregate to become a larger framework of operation; there is no clear sense of direction of where this is all going. Having a narrative, some would even say ideology, could mean having a path or goal which can be achieved through design. While it has formal consequences, a narrative is not solely formal. It can provide a broad holistic reasoning and purpose to our work as designers. It may offer an alternative to following the most current technological advancement or responding to the recent ecological crises, important as they are. On the other hand, a collective narrative could be considered dogmatic and confining. Can a single ideology adequately capture the broad and complex nature of design? New Urbanists have defined their own narrative and are following it, but for the rest of us, what is our story? While we constantly try to come to terms with the natural environment and technology, what is the vision we put forth for the spatial environment we would like to live in, and the culture it both represents and generates? It seems like we are operating in a multiplicity of individual narratives, which cross paths at moments while implementing the latest trend. Design trends come and go, and as influential and important as they may be, they don’t yet come together to become a movement. As architects and urban designers, we don’t have a collective professional vision to align with, or to push against. Will the lack of narrative, or the search for one, define our time? Have we reached a mature state as a profession in which we don’t need a narrative, or is this simply a loss of direction? Whose role is it to define our narrative? And most importantly, do we need one? Link to the conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlPZNrzY_t8 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/3/4/urbanlandjustice monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520199304793-CJ5E1P4ZFR9YSPFQGGAH/helicopter-1218974_1920_1140_760_85_s.jpg Reactions - Unknown (2017) Cape Town Aerial View. Available at:https://www.citysightseeing.co.za/cape-town/news/entry/explore-the-mother-citys-top-attractions-and-save-with-the-cape-town-city-p Within the capitalist milieu that has come to define the 21st century, what agency do young designers have, if any, to affect change towards greater urban social justice? In an era of globalization and multi-national corporations, national and city governments have abandoned their mandate of placing the needs of citizens as a top priority. The race to become a desirable investment destination for global capital has had a profound impact on how our cities prioritize their development. Nowhere is this disturbing phenomenon more pronounced than in the Global South, where colonialism and oppressive regimes have already negatively affected urban environments. Within such a context, what role can young design professionals play in challenging the status quo? One important emerging arena would be the design competition, which not only gives a platform that would otherwise be unavailable to young designers, but also acts as a laboratory to test out ideas and solutions to issues that affect our urban environment. Competitions pose unique opportunities for grassroots activism by communities in collaboration with designers to challenge powerful groups and organizations. An example of this was the Tafelberg Challenge in Cape Town, South Africa. The competition was an open call to architects, urban designers and planners to submit alternative proposals to the sale of well-located state-owned land by the provincial government to the private sector to generate revenue for affordable housing on the periphery of the city. Cape Town, current water crisis notwithstanding, has been experiencing a property boom, with some of the highest property price increases in the world. The city and provincial government has seen this trend as an opportunity to sell off valuable, under-utilized state land to developers and private organizations, rather than use it for affordable housing and additional public amenities. In a city that is extremely segregated, both racially and economically, such a move would be a positive step towards a much more just city and could be used as a tool for racial reconciliation within a deeply divided city. Many of the design teams proposed a mixed-use scheme , where a smaller number of market-rate housing units and commercial spaces would help subsidize affordable housing, which would make up the majority of the development, made possible by the extremely high value of the land. This extra revenue would be used to supplement the subsidy from national government, resulting in higher quality affordable housing than what is typically built. The rationale was that this model could be applied to similar sites across the city. Unfortunately, after a lengthy court case the sale of the land went through, which resulted in major protest action and national news coverage. The resistance to the sale coincided with the political party running the City of Cape Town having a greater influence within national politics and threatening the power of the county’s ruling party. They realized that such negative coverage would severely hurt their national political ambitions. In 2017, the city’s Transport and Urban Development Authority was formed to facilitate transit-oriented development. The idea that public transportation and social housing should feed off each other is not new in the city; what was new is that this type of development happened in the highly valuable inner city and adjacent neighborhoods. Such a move would result in a much more integrated city, where working class citizens, who are mostly black, are not all relegated to the peripheries of our cities. It is clear that the Tafelberg Challenge alone did not bring about this change in housing policy within the City of Cape Town, but it does highlight the power of design competitions as a form of grassroots activism against powerful forces within our cities. Additionally, they give design professionals agency to engage with local communities and other experts within a time where there has been an increasing realization of the limits of design as a tool for change. The case study highlights the need for design to align itself with other forces, in order to have any influence within society and its urban environments https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/2/24/pyeongchang monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520199460846-88TZEA4PU2T3AJOA49ZG/pyeongchang_main.jpg Reactions - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/0/winter-olympics-2018-best-pictures-south-koreas-pyeongchang/aerial-view-pyeongchang-olympic-stadium-venue-opening-closing/ As the 2018 Winter Olympics come to a close, the watching world will quickly retreat to more routine affairs both at home and abroad, and Pyeongchang will likely fade in our collective memory. However, as urban designers, perhaps now is precisely when we should start paying attention to what is happening there. The sustainability of purpose-built sporting facilities and their associated infrastructures after the Olympics have ended has been a major topic of debate for host countries trying to justify the immense expense of their initial construction. These Olympic facilities have historically been extremely vulnerable to underuse in a city’s post-Olympic period. With their original functions vanished, many of these facilities remain today only as faded monuments to bygone glory. However, successful examples of post-Olympic integration of facilities can be found in cities like Barcelona, which hosted the Olympics in 1992. Barcelona’s strategy was the first attempt to consider the Olympics as ‘a catalyst for the redevelopment of its waterfront’ and subsequently designed a series of public spaces including parks, fountains and public arts in order to give something more permanent for the Barcelona residents, as well as retain tourist interest after the ending of the Games. 4 years later, the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 transformed athletes’ housing into dormitories for Georgia Tech University students, reflecting the Olympic event’s role as an impetus for civic improvements of the city. However, unlike cities that had to construct new facilities from scratch, Paris and Los Angeles won bids for the 2024 and 2028 Games respectively by planning to use their extensive network of existing facilities. This myriad of examples show us the varying needs and approaches that face Olympic host cities with respect to scale and status. Learning from both the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul and the 2002 FIFA World Cup, the Korean government anticipated the burdens associated with hosting such major events, and therefore examined Pyeongchang critically. Since the city is located in a relatively remote area, the needs of its infrastructure needed to be resolved first in order to become a successful sustainable city beyond the Winter Games. Therefore, facilities other than major infrastructure or facilities with explicit future demands will be demolished. Furthermore, the Olympic Village will be transformed into condos, and the express train line will remain to increase Pyeongchang’s proximity to Seoul. Distinct from many previous host countries, the Korean government intends to use the Olympics in Pyeongchang to catalyze infrastructure development between Seoul, the capital city, and Kangwon-do province located on the east side of Korea, which has historically not been considered a major development region. Venues that will only exist temporarily include the “roofless” Olympic Stadium, the Gangneung Hockey Center, the Olympic speed skating venue, and the downhill ski course in Jeongseon. In these cases, I’d like to ask what kind of architecture & aesthetics these ‘temporal ‘Olympic-related facilities should take the form of? Some articles say that the roofless Olympic Stadium embodies an extreme case of pop-up architecture in the contemporary context of the Olympic era. However, there are other more critical voices that claim that these facilities have not considered “the disappearance of the project” along with their physical characteristics. Certainly, it opens up new conversations regarding the ephemeral nature of architecture and its increasingly controversial role in event-oriented urban design & city-building. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/2018/2/24/whatisurbandesign monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520199685278-4MFASB21US70L76A97P5/c9.jpg Reactions At the beginning of our curriculum here in urban design at the GSD, we were asked as a collective group to voice our personal understandings of what constitutes its framework as a pedagogical discipline. Many answered with matters of scale, seeing urban design as negotiating a scalar gap between architecture and urban planning. Others answered with issues of the public, seeing urban design as serving the collective communal inhabitants of the city or state. My initial answer was one of mentality, where a project becomes urban when the designers & parties involved adopt attitudes that conceptualize the project in its broader urban context. However, by core semester’s end, it has become clear to me that urban design is in fact not about scales, not only about the public, and only partially about mindset. Scale-wise, architecture can (and should) absolutely be urban. Sculptural objects like monuments (or “counter-monuments” a la Daniel Bluestone) can be urban landmarks that orient the greater grids of the city (as it does in cities like D.C.) or serve as immediate scalar grounds for urban activities like protests and rallies. Small scale interventions can be as urban as large city planning projects (like the Big Dig), and urban design can even transcend the city toward regional megaprojects (like the CA High-Speed-Rail) or even blur national boundaries (as in the case of the Philippines call centers functioning on the time zones of the States). In addition, urban design is not only about serving the public good, but must negotiate between private forces and public governance structures. Urban design must work in the intersecting zone between the incentives of private market-driven capitalism versus more socially oriented ideals regarding the administration of a more Just city. This is true for all forms of governance & economic structures, not only in democratic republics (like the US) but even in more complex models of authoritarian developmentalism that have driven the rapid urban growth of cities in the East. What I’ve come to believe now is that urban design begins with a matter of discerning and critiquing the contemporary issues surrounding our cities today. Throughout the academic discourse at our time here in the UD program, the constant theme of contention in contemporary society has pervaded the plethora of readings, viewpoints, and lecturers we have encountered. These issues lie in the role of community advocacy groups for the administration of justice in the city, the role of historic preservation in accelerating (or mitigating) gentrification in the city, or the complicated paradigms between informal settlements and more regulatory planning apparatus’ that force us to confront the notion of “whose city is it anyways?”, among others. These myriads of issues all involve competing yet equally valid perspectives that entail contention and controversy in the city today. What is crucial is our role as designers (and our critiques of these issues) within the larger back and forth pendulum swing of these contemporary issues of contentions. The importance of our role as designers leads me to another crucial understanding of urban design, which is that while it begins with a critique of contentions, its ends with an intervention in the physical space of the city. One cannot overstate the importance of physically intervening in the urban condition, acts of interventions that accompany and go beyond intangible law or policy reform matters. To design is to intervene in these contemporary issues, and these interventions hold the capacity to project alternative and better futures aimed at changing existing contentions into preferred solutions of consensus. This is why I declared earlier that urban design is only partially about adopting a certain attitudinal mindset in conceptualizing a project in the broader urban context. Our discipline is both a form of intangible knowledge of a current urban condition in a particular moment in time, and simultaneously a proposition for how that condition may be shaped and sculpted in the evolution of the future metropolis. In this way, urban design can be understood truly as a bridge discipline, not only between political bodies, community members, advocacy groups, private and public entities, but also between the intangible issues of society and the tangible, physical design of the city. Therefore, urban design can be understood as a cog in the ‘solution’: the city needs both good design and accompanying policy reforms and governance mechanisms that will enable good design to become successfully integrated into the evolution and use of the city long-term. Coupled with both in hand, great accomplishments can be had in the contemporary metropolis today. To that end, while urban design might be understood as the history of contention and strife in the city, it should also be understood as a confluence of harmonistic endeavors that bring together multiple competing interests to impact a holistic positive change in the broader urban context. In essence, I propose that urban design can be defined as the bridging of ‘tangible’ physical interventions with ‘less-tangible’ contemporary issues of the city, critiquing their contention, intervening in their dialogues, and (if successful) is integrated by the collective public in a way that improves the broader livelihood of the city and beyond. https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/design+education monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/urban+design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/urban+planning monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/sustainability monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/public+space monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/interdisciplinary monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/just+city monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/conservation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/Koolhaas monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/category/design+practice 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monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/Globalization monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/jargon monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/center monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/Scale monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/neoliberalism monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/streetart monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/Just+City monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/akron monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/environment monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/urban monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/infrastructure monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/Collaboration monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/unauthorized monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/Mexico monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/Strategy monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/risk monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/General+Theory+of+urbanization monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/landscape monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/humanitarian monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/reaction/tag/megalopolis monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1 daily 0.75 2019-04-15 https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/muller monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574450401929-WW30NQXZA9BJDE9RXN2R/Postcard.jpg equity Postcard of Birmingham’s iconic “Magic City” sign, featuring the since demolished Terminal Station in the background. Photo: Birmingham Public Library Postcard Collection. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574450472672-5GG2UA4Q0DUVA3WQIVD1/Pizitz1.jpg equity Exterior (L) and interior (R) of the Pizitz building. The project combines residential, co-working, and food hall spaces. Photos: The Pizitz. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574450465850-D09H1FIG08GMMVQGSOYE/Pizitz2.jpg equity https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574450437663-KP3WJHRQ1UYHLQDVANSK/DSC_1544.JPG equity Southeastern view down 19th Street in Ensley, former home to U.S. Steel’s Ensley Works, which closed in the 1970s. Photo: Amelia Muller. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574450514622-VE41WQOX3CRH9MV2X2V9/Redlining+Map.jpg equity 1930s redlining map of Birmingham. Red and gray zones were labeled “Hazardous” and “Negro Concentrations” by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, signaling that banks should not lend in these areas. Photo: The National Archives via WBHM. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574450366872-KDG06Z3FSNZEF8S438XJ/police+dogs.jpg equity A 17-year-old civil rights demonstrator is attacked by a police dog on May 3, 1963, Birmingham, Alabama. Photo: Bill Hudson, Associated Press. https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/pilipovicwengler monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574449189604-L52R30KFRGWEZZOLHAEZ/CBI+Green+Bond+Market.jpg equity Figure 3: Global green bond market 2013-2019: Climate Bonds Initiative https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574449361735-1TDRTJVJFLNC45A6REXI/2017+Detroit+Protestor.jpg equity Figure 1 :Detroit protesters: Photographer: Rebecca Cook/Reuters, from the Daily Beast article “Detroit Shuts Off Water to Residents but Not to Businesses Who Owe Millions” (link here) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574449078107-TJ9RSOIO3Y766TEPZ1CQ/IFC+Green+Bond+Diagram.jpg equity Figure 2: Diagram of the Green Bond: International Finance Corporation World Bank Group https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/grasaloma monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574447133244-M8NAHMYP17EA3IBDPQ70/01.-+The+Atlas+of+Innovation+Districts+-+Aretian+Jeremy+Burke+Ramon+Gras.png equity https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574447210782-I9TH1FUEKZY7UWEJI0GV/02.-+Networks+-+Atlas+of+Innovation+Districts.png equity https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574447235493-A1SS4MPESDZVHIBXWMSV/09.-+Nonlinear+impact+of+Innovation+Districts.png equity The territorial analysis of the economic complexity model allows for the creation of new KPIs to evaluate the innovation intensity, performance and societal impact of innovation districts https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574447273653-NJ9RB2QEB1WO0J1ME8RO/01+Boston+Seaport+-+Atlas+of+Innovation+Districts+-+Harvard+Aretian+-+Ramon+Gras+Jeremy+Burke.png equity https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574447180145-ULVX7A7ZI9WIZS6G5JUB/03.-+The+Atlas+of+Innovation+Districts+-+United+States+of+America.png equity https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/howe-38whk monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1554939453251-3I7QPONDU97T97EVYOLC/Inaccesible+Kerb_Smithsonian.jpg equity - Inaccessible kerb, late 20th century. Division of Medicine and Science collections, Smithsonian. Within the capitalist milieu that has come to define the 21st century, what agency do young designers have, if any, to affect change towards greater urban social justice? In an era of globalization and multi-national corporations, national and city governments have abandoned their mandate of placing the needs of citizens as a top priority. The race to become a desirable investment destination for global capital has had a profound impact on how our cities prioritize their development. Nowhere is this disturbing phenomenon more pronounced than in the Global South, where colonialism and oppressive regimes have already negatively affected urban environments. Within such a context, what role can young design professionals play in challenging the status quo? One important emerging arena would be the design competition, which not only gives a platform that would otherwise be unavailable to young designers, but also acts as a laboratory to test out ideas and solutions to issues that affect our urban environment. Competitions pose unique opportunities for grassroots activism by communities in collaboration with designers to challenge powerful groups and organizations. An example of this was the Tafelberg Challenge in Cape Town, South Africa. The competition was an open call to architects, urban designers and planners to submit alternative proposals to the sale of well-located state-owned land by the provincial government to the private sector to generate revenue for affordable housing on the periphery of the city. Cape Town, current water crisis notwithstanding, has been experiencing a property boom, with some of the highest property price increases in the world. The city and provincial government has seen this trend as an opportunity to sell off valuable, under-utilized state land to developers and private organizations, rather than use it for affordable housing and additional public amenities. In a city that is extremely segregated, both racially and economically, such a move would be a positive step towards a much more just city and could be used as a tool for racial reconciliation within a deeply divided city. Many of the design teams proposed a mixed-use scheme , where a smaller number of market-rate housing units and commercial spaces would help subsidize affordable housing, which would make up the majority of the development, made possible by the extremely high value of the land. This extra revenue would be used to supplement the subsidy from national government, resulting in higher quality affordable housing than what is typically built. The rationale was that this model could be applied to similar sites across the city. Unfortunately, after a lengthy court case the sale of the land went through, which resulted in major protest action and national news coverage. The resistance to the sale coincided with the political party running the City of Cape Town having a greater influence within national politics and threatening the power of the county’s ruling party. They realized that such negative coverage would severely hurt their national political ambitions. In 2017, the city’s Transport and Urban Development Authority was formed to facilitate transit-oriented development. The idea that public transportation and social housing should feed off each other is not new in the city; what was new is that this type of development happened in the highly valuable inner city and adjacent neighborhoods. Such a move would result in a much more integrated city, where working class citizens, who are mostly black, are not all relegated to the peripheries of our cities. It is clear that the Tafelberg Challenge alone did not bring about this change in housing policy within the City of Cape Town, but it does highlight the power of design competitions as a form of grassroots activism against powerful forces within our cities. Additionally, they give design professionals agency to engage with local communities and other experts within a time where there has been an increasing realization of the limits of design as a tool for change. The case study highlights the need for design to align itself with other forces, in order to have any influence within society and its urban environments https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/toohey monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1555345021624-GG5LLY8UVAN4HM1DIZQK/National+Gun+Deaths+Data_Lincoln+Memorial_Bing+Maps_2019+Digital+Globe.jpg equity - Average Annual Gun Deaths: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Centers for Injury Prevention and Control. Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) Fatal Injury Reports. A yearly average was developed using five years of most recent available data: 2013 to 2017. While it is broadly considered to be the most comprehensive firearm fatal injury source, two of the intent categories – Shootings by law enforcement and Unintentional Deaths – are estimated to be greatly underreported. This underreporting is largely due to missing information on death certificates, which may result in misclassification of intent. Multiple media sources and nonprofit groups have tracked shootings by law enforcement, but no reliable public database captures unintentional shootings. Intent category averages may not total to yearly average due to rounding. See also: Fatal Force. The Washington Post. Fatal Force. Data reflects a 4-year average (2015 to 2018) of deaths attributed to police shootings. https://wapo.st/2QlEZOo. Bing Map of Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C. Gun deaths data and map combined by author, 13 April 2019. Within the capitalist milieu that has come to define the 21st century, what agency do young designers have, if any, to affect change towards greater urban social justice? In an era of globalization and multi-national corporations, national and city governments have abandoned their mandate of placing the needs of citizens as a top priority. The race to become a desirable investment destination for global capital has had a profound impact on how our cities prioritize their development. Nowhere is this disturbing phenomenon more pronounced than in the Global South, where colonialism and oppressive regimes have already negatively affected urban environments. Within such a context, what role can young design professionals play in challenging the status quo? One important emerging arena would be the design competition, which not only gives a platform that would otherwise be unavailable to young designers, but also acts as a laboratory to test out ideas and solutions to issues that affect our urban environment. Competitions pose unique opportunities for grassroots activism by communities in collaboration with designers to challenge powerful groups and organizations. An example of this was the Tafelberg Challenge in Cape Town, South Africa. The competition was an open call to architects, urban designers and planners to submit alternative proposals to the sale of well-located state-owned land by the provincial government to the private sector to generate revenue for affordable housing on the periphery of the city. Cape Town, current water crisis notwithstanding, has been experiencing a property boom, with some of the highest property price increases in the world. The city and provincial government has seen this trend as an opportunity to sell off valuable, under-utilized state land to developers and private organizations, rather than use it for affordable housing and additional public amenities. In a city that is extremely segregated, both racially and economically, such a move would be a positive step towards a much more just city and could be used as a tool for racial reconciliation within a deeply divided city. Many of the design teams proposed a mixed-use scheme , where a smaller number of market-rate housing units and commercial spaces would help subsidize affordable housing, which would make up the majority of the development, made possible by the extremely high value of the land. This extra revenue would be used to supplement the subsidy from national government, resulting in higher quality affordable housing than what is typically built. The rationale was that this model could be applied to similar sites across the city. Unfortunately, after a lengthy court case the sale of the land went through, which resulted in major protest action and national news coverage. The resistance to the sale coincided with the political party running the City of Cape Town having a greater influence within national politics and threatening the power of the county’s ruling party. They realized that such negative coverage would severely hurt their national political ambitions. In 2017, the city’s Transport and Urban Development Authority was formed to facilitate transit-oriented development. The idea that public transportation and social housing should feed off each other is not new in the city; what was new is that this type of development happened in the highly valuable inner city and adjacent neighborhoods. Such a move would result in a much more integrated city, where working class citizens, who are mostly black, are not all relegated to the peripheries of our cities. It is clear that the Tafelberg Challenge alone did not bring about this change in housing policy within the City of Cape Town, but it does highlight the power of design competitions as a form of grassroots activism against powerful forces within our cities. Additionally, they give design professionals agency to engage with local communities and other experts within a time where there has been an increasing realization of the limits of design as a tool for change. The case study highlights the need for design to align itself with other forces, in order to have any influence within society and its urban environments https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/shovanshah monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1553547218614-I0B2LF2UMUD8CF75SDW4/H+Day+1.jpg equity - Image: Sanjana Bhalerao for Hindustan Times Asian cities today are facing radical urbanization. They have been under relentless construction for many years and will remain so in the future. The influence of high-density, high-rise, and maybe mixed-use developments will define the future of cities. So, what will be our urban strength? For the purpose of this discussion, I am looking at my home-town of Mumbai. Mumbai is in the midst of transitioning from a mega-city to a global-city. The aesthetic of the obvious inequality and inequity in the city is in vogue these days, with photos of a $2 billion house next to a shanty, but the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening forever. With the current scale of acquisitions that we are seeing, the pattern of land ownership in cities will have significant implications for equity, democracy and rights.[1] In Mumbai, public investment primarily caters to the wealthy. The most recent evidence is the coastal road extension, which is the largest infrastructure project in India, and costs over $2.2 billion per mile. It will run 18 miles and serve less than 10% of the city’s population. Though the official claim is that this motorway will alleviate congestion issues, there is no scientific evidence to support this. In fact, experts have warned citizens of this fallacious thinking, claiming instead that the road would increase congestion. This increased congestion is attributed to an inherent design logic flaw: the new 8-lane coastal road is designed to converge onto a narrower 4-lane road through the colonial-planned south side of the city. Another controversy related to the proposed coastal road is the programming of the 200 acres of land that will be reclaimed in the process. The BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) “promises” gardens, promenades and open spaces on the 200 acres, but have only officially submitted 10% to be kept open to the Ministry of Environment & Forests so far. This suggests that 90% of the 200 acres would go to private developers, likely for luxury housing and not for public realm use. All these transactions are opaque: of the $127 billion construction cost, only $15 billion is said to be from reserve funds and the rest of the funding remains unknown. The lack of transparency is concerning.[2] Finally, there has been no Environmental Impact Assessment conducted even though the road is likely to damage sanitation infrastructure like natural drainage systems. This will increase the risk of flooding during the monsoons, “perpetuating three centuries of development agendas which have so extensively been filled in, diverted and built over” old waterways and natural sinks “to the point where they have lost most of their absorptive ability”.[3] The coastal road is going to lead to the destruction of many livelihoods, especially in traditional fishing communities, in the service of only the wealthiest 10% of the population. It will inevitably cost an exorbitant amount, though the lack of transparency makes it impossible to pinpoint the exact figure. Due to the lack of an EIA, the environmental cost is also unclear but undoubtedly will be massive. This all adds up to a truly wasteful project. It will become a precedent for urban design and the creation of urban form without any data driven analysis or community engagement, which will negatively affect our value as designers and city planners. If we let projects like these take place, we as designers and planners become no more than a commodity. I hope we are able to achieve successful implementation of public funds through unitary public involvement that can govern public sphere policies. This is a tool for the future growth of major cities like Mumbai that can help encourage economic growth of the city while saving us from future wasteful projects. https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/7/28/d2vvpazp67xygl394duwsawx1jd9pm-gmc8j-9x2yr-29kyg monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1550676433937-P25742AKPF0XQULKI8S1/Macrakis+%26+Angius+Image.jpg equity In the United States and globally, community land trusts (CLTs) are most often discussed as urban planning tools to expand and preserve perpetually affordable housing, but limited and shared equity land tenure models like those offered by CLTs also provide critical opportunities for innovative and community-responsive design interventions. These models interface with design at two key nexuses: they offer unique design opportunities to respond directly to community histories and needs, and they can be used together with the planning and implementation of large and small-scale urban design interventions.[1] It is imperative to more explicitly coordinate the practices of land tenure transformation and design to more fully recognize and realize design’s potential as an agent of social change and to combat real estate speculation that is often catalyzed by the planning and implementation of public and private sector projects. Two case studies in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively, provide insight into the design opportunities afforded by development on community-owned land, as well as the importance of considering land tenure in coordination with the development and implementation of urban planning and design projects in order to combat displacement and gentrification. Rondo Community Land Trust, St. Paul, Minnesota, United States Opportunities for design Throughout the 1960s, Rondo was St. Paul and Minneapolis’ largest African American neighborhood, functioning as an active residential and commercial area and cultural locus for African Americans in the Twin Cities region. After the passage of the 1956 Federal Highway Act, the federal government routed what is now Interstate 94 through Rondo, displacing thousands of residents, destroying more than 600 homes, and bulldozing the neighborhood’s central commercial strip of more than 300 small African-American owned businesses. After highway construction, Rondo’s once-active commercial corridor, Selby Avenue, became characterized by empty storefronts due to discriminatory lending practices that barred business owners from capital and divestment that led to rising crime that encouraged business owners to relocate downtown. In Rondo, shared equity land tenure has contributed to the revitalization of Selby Avenue as a commercial corridor, providing opportunities for development that specifically responds to community history and needs. The Rondo Community Land Trust (RCLT) was established in 1993 to increase access to affordable home ownership by African American neighborhood residents who were historically denied capital under redlining policies. Today, RCLT is leading the nation’s CLTs to expand development beyond single-family housing. Their Selby Mission Victoria (SMV) Project is a mixed-use affordable senior housing development with affordable spaces for small, minority-owned businesses and will open in 2019.[1] Through the SMV project, RCLT hopes to enhance its work catalyzing an “African American Cultural Corridor” in central Selby by “retain[ing], stabiliz[ing], and promot[ing] small, local, and minority owned businesses.”[2] In the case of Rondo, community land ownership has led to design interventions that directly respond to locally-specific community histories: RCLT’s commercial corridor development work incorporates affordable senior housing less viable in market-rate development, while also providing affordable commercial spaces in response the historic dispossession of majority African-American businesses owned and operated businesses in Rondo before urban renewal. Coordinating land tenure and design interventions Today, 1960s highway construction continues to reverberate through contemporary debates about neighborhood development and equity in Rondo. Plans spearheaded by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) propose a land bridge over Interstate 94 that would convert part of the highway through Rondo into a public amenity. The land bridge is designed to respond to the mid-century urban renewal policies that routed Interstate 94 through Rondo. However, it poses risks similar to those of original highway construction in which large-scale investment in valuable public amenities may further gentrify Rondo without sufficient anti-speculation mechanisms like those provided by shared equity land tenure through RCLT.[3] While ULI has proposed the land bridge itself be owned and operated by RCLT, there has been little discussion of broader removal of land from the speculative market in Rondo and other historically affordable areas nearby at risk of speculation in response to the anticipated land bridge. Large design interventions like the land bridge should be considered in tandem with funding/financing for acquisition of properties to expand shared equity land tenure in and near the land bridge to ensure the efforts made to address historic injustices of displacement do not replicate the historic dispossession to which they respond. Granby 4 Streets, Liverpool, United Kingdom Opportunities for design As in the United States, planning and design practitioners in the United Kingdom were responsible for the violent dispossession brought on by urban renewal and redevelopment in the mid-20th century that displaced vibrant, low-income communities. In Liverpool, the CLT affordable housing model and coordinated design interventions were used to redevelop an area in which the city had previously divested in order to create opportunities for community development without displacement. Before the formation of the CLT, the Granby neighborhood was made up of vacant houses and deserted streets as a result of years of public divestment in the area.[4] Residents took matters into their own hands and used small scale design interventions and tactical urbanism[5] to prove the existence of a community, painting boarded up windows with murals of curtains and vases full of flowers, guerilla gardening streetscape improvements, and establishing a weekly market in the previously-vacant street.[6]Community-led activation of the public realm in the Granby 4 Streets area reflected the shared notions of spatialized-identity among local residents. Eleanor Lee, a Granby resident, describes these efforts, “It completely turned the atmosphere around: now we had a pretty street that we could all be proud of.”[7] These actions combined with the collapse of government redevelopment plans post-recession led to the formation of the Granby 4 Streets Community Land Trust and the Liverpool City Council turning over the land and buildings to the CLT to redevelop. Today, the GCLT is lauded as a success - the renovation of ten homes won the coveted Turner Prize for co-operative design firm Assemble. Continued activation and beautification of Granby streets and city support has reignited housing association (private government-regulated non-profit organizations that maintain and finance social housing in the United Kingdom) interest in the neighborhood.[8] The GCLT is focused on expanding economic and social opportunities beyond housing with initiatives like job training and employment for young local residents by connecting them with construction contractors working in the neighborhood.[9] The street market continues to flourish as an economic and social space for local residents. Regeneration of the neighborhood is comprehensive and inclusive, one reporter writes, “[the GCLT has made] Granby that rare thing in Britain: an area shaped in the image of its community.”[10] Federal social housing in the area will help ensure that neighborhood improvements by the GCLT will not catalyze gentrification in the neighborhood. The use and evolution of shared equity land tenure in Rondo and Liverpool reveal design opportunities afforded by CLTs in addition to the importance of coordinated land tenure and design interventions to achieve community development without risk of displacement and gentrification. Acknowledging historical injustices through design and embracing intentional and equitable design for all is our responsibility as practitioners. These two cases demonstrate how CLTs and design, together, can be used as a tool to create beautiful and necessary spaces for low-income communities that respond to local histories while remaining affordable and desirable for many years to come. https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/7/28/d2vvpazp67xygl394duwsawx1jd9pm-gmc8j-9x2yr monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1549892540076-39HHJSI68EL7H7TMB9PO/Image+Option+2_incline.JPG equity Few city agencies are as fortunate as the Port Authority of Allegheny County (PAAC). As the public transit system authority for Pittsburgh, they are the stewards of two of the cites most iconic elements: the Duquesne and the Monongahela inclines. Built in the 1870s to enable steel workers to get from their houses atop the hill to the mills that once lined the rivers, the two inclines are still a part of the public transit system and are beloved by locals and visitors alike. More than just an utterly charming part of the city, the inclines are a physical reminder of the lengths we were once willing to go to get people to work. In the modern era, the projects undertaken by the PAAC indicate a massive shift in priorities. The biggest project in recent memory is the expansion of the T (that’s right Boston, you’re not the only ones with a T) from Downtown to the North Shore. The T is a light rail system that primarily brings in commuters from neighboring towns, and does not serve most of the residential neighborhoods in city limits. The 2012 project extended the T beneath the Allegheny River to the site of the football and baseball stadiums in an effort to spur development in the area and make it easier for fans to get to-and-from games. This effort took 6 years and cost $500 million to complete, at a time when the PAAC was in a full-blown budget crisis (Metro). The bus service that constitutes the primary mode of public transportation for the entire city was cut en masse, primarily to low-income neighborhoods that rely on them the most. To add insult to injury, in the midst of this budget crisis, rides to the shiny new North Shore T stop were completely subsidized by the Steelers and the North Shore Casino for the first three years upon completion in order to establish ridership, as there was so little demand (Schmitz). There is no end in sight: the current top mass transit priority is building a $200 million Bus Rapid Transit system between Downtown and Oakland, a neighborhood home to our top colleges and medical facilities (Clift). In the face of economic development priorities and flashy projects that attract federal funding, it seems to be difficult to justify spending money on bus route expansions and maintenance that would help the people who rely on it the most. What is the responsibility of the urban designer in all of this? I attended a symposium at Northeastern last semester on the topic of addressing Racial and Economic Inequalities through transit. This featured a wide range of speakers from the head of the BPDA to a local Reverend to former Governor Michael Dukakis (Closing the Gaps). Out of 20 speakers, there was not a single urban designer. I interpret this as a failure on our part to demonstrate our relevance in addressing a “planning” issue. As a first-year Urban Design student at the MAUD program here at GSD, I am cautious of overstating our field of influence, but in this case, it is vital there be a role for us. If our realm includes the physical experience of the public realm, then surely this includes creating dignified spaces for public transit riders to await their chariots. Surely this includes illustrating design scenarios that convey the benefits of creating a more robust transit system for lower income neighborhoods. And surely, this includes advocating for transit expansion that addresses social inequity, not simply real estate development desires. If we were once willing to conquer mountains to move the working class, couldn’t (and shouldn’t) we do it again? https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/3/4/urbanlandjustice-skcde monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520199304793-CJ5E1P4ZFR9YSPFQGGAH/helicopter-1218974_1920_1140_760_85_s.jpg equity - Unknown (2017) Cape Town Aerial View. Available at:https://www.citysightseeing.co.za/cape-town/news/entry/explore-the-mother-citys-top-attractions-and-save-with-the-cape-town-city-p Within the capitalist milieu that has come to define the 21st century, what agency do young designers have, if any, to affect change towards greater urban social justice? In an era of globalization and multi-national corporations, national and city governments have abandoned their mandate of placing the needs of citizens as a top priority. The race to become a desirable investment destination for global capital has had a profound impact on how our cities prioritize their development. Nowhere is this disturbing phenomenon more pronounced than in the Global South, where colonialism and oppressive regimes have already negatively affected urban environments. Within such a context, what role can young design professionals play in challenging the status quo? One important emerging arena would be the design competition, which not only gives a platform that would otherwise be unavailable to young designers, but also acts as a laboratory to test out ideas and solutions to issues that affect our urban environment. Competitions pose unique opportunities for grassroots activism by communities in collaboration with designers to challenge powerful groups and organizations. An example of this was the Tafelberg Challenge in Cape Town, South Africa. The competition was an open call to architects, urban designers and planners to submit alternative proposals to the sale of well-located state-owned land by the provincial government to the private sector to generate revenue for affordable housing on the periphery of the city. Cape Town, current water crisis notwithstanding, has been experiencing a property boom, with some of the highest property price increases in the world. The city and provincial government has seen this trend as an opportunity to sell off valuable, under-utilized state land to developers and private organizations, rather than use it for affordable housing and additional public amenities. In a city that is extremely segregated, both racially and economically, such a move would be a positive step towards a much more just city and could be used as a tool for racial reconciliation within a deeply divided city. Many of the design teams proposed a mixed-use scheme , where a smaller number of market-rate housing units and commercial spaces would help subsidize affordable housing, which would make up the majority of the development, made possible by the extremely high value of the land. This extra revenue would be used to supplement the subsidy from national government, resulting in higher quality affordable housing than what is typically built. The rationale was that this model could be applied to similar sites across the city. Unfortunately, after a lengthy court case the sale of the land went through, which resulted in major protest action and national news coverage. The resistance to the sale coincided with the political party running the City of Cape Town having a greater influence within national politics and threatening the power of the county’s ruling party. They realized that such negative coverage would severely hurt their national political ambitions. In 2017, the city’s Transport and Urban Development Authority was formed to facilitate transit-oriented development. The idea that public transportation and social housing should feed off each other is not new in the city; what was new is that this type of development happened in the highly valuable inner city and adjacent neighborhoods. Such a move would result in a much more integrated city, where working class citizens, who are mostly black, are not all relegated to the peripheries of our cities. It is clear that the Tafelberg Challenge alone did not bring about this change in housing policy within the City of Cape Town, but it does highlight the power of design competitions as a form of grassroots activism against powerful forces within our cities. Additionally, they give design professionals agency to engage with local communities and other experts within a time where there has been an increasing realization of the limits of design as a tool for change. The case study highlights the need for design to align itself with other forces, in order to have any influence within society and its urban environments https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/3/4/urbanlandjustice-567yw-p4x72 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547583675478-F0M9V96NQ1AKBA7DV1C1/UD%2BID%2B2.jpg equity - ImageImage Credit: Photo by Shannon Finney/Getty Images – March 24th 2018 - Accessed October 21st, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/3/19/17139654/march-for-our-lives-dc-march-24-protest Within the capitalist milieu that has come to define the 21st century, what agency do young designers have, if any, to affect change towards greater urban social justice? In an era of globalization and multi-national corporations, national and city governments have abandoned their mandate of placing the needs of citizens as a top priority. The race to become a desirable investment destination for global capital has had a profound impact on how our cities prioritize their development. Nowhere is this disturbing phenomenon more pronounced than in the Global South, where colonialism and oppressive regimes have already negatively affected urban environments. Within such a context, what role can young design professionals play in challenging the status quo? One important emerging arena would be the design competition, which not only gives a platform that would otherwise be unavailable to young designers, but also acts as a laboratory to test out ideas and solutions to issues that affect our urban environment. Competitions pose unique opportunities for grassroots activism by communities in collaboration with designers to challenge powerful groups and organizations. An example of this was the Tafelberg Challenge in Cape Town, South Africa. The competition was an open call to architects, urban designers and planners to submit alternative proposals to the sale of well-located state-owned land by the provincial government to the private sector to generate revenue for affordable housing on the periphery of the city. Cape Town, current water crisis notwithstanding, has been experiencing a property boom, with some of the highest property price increases in the world. The city and provincial government has seen this trend as an opportunity to sell off valuable, under-utilized state land to developers and private organizations, rather than use it for affordable housing and additional public amenities. In a city that is extremely segregated, both racially and economically, such a move would be a positive step towards a much more just city and could be used as a tool for racial reconciliation within a deeply divided city. Many of the design teams proposed a mixed-use scheme , where a smaller number of market-rate housing units and commercial spaces would help subsidize affordable housing, which would make up the majority of the development, made possible by the extremely high value of the land. This extra revenue would be used to supplement the subsidy from national government, resulting in higher quality affordable housing than what is typically built. The rationale was that this model could be applied to similar sites across the city. Unfortunately, after a lengthy court case the sale of the land went through, which resulted in major protest action and national news coverage. The resistance to the sale coincided with the political party running the City of Cape Town having a greater influence within national politics and threatening the power of the county’s ruling party. They realized that such negative coverage would severely hurt their national political ambitions. In 2017, the city’s Transport and Urban Development Authority was formed to facilitate transit-oriented development. The idea that public transportation and social housing should feed off each other is not new in the city; what was new is that this type of development happened in the highly valuable inner city and adjacent neighborhoods. Such a move would result in a much more integrated city, where working class citizens, who are mostly black, are not all relegated to the peripheries of our cities. It is clear that the Tafelberg Challenge alone did not bring about this change in housing policy within the City of Cape Town, but it does highlight the power of design competitions as a form of grassroots activism against powerful forces within our cities. Additionally, they give design professionals agency to engage with local communities and other experts within a time where there has been an increasing realization of the limits of design as a tool for change. The case study highlights the need for design to align itself with other forces, in order to have any influence within society and its urban environments https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/3/4/urbanlandjustice-567yw monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547583826968-P4ZKE6Z7KBWP01Q8JT66/image-asset.png equity - Image Credit: Audi’s Urban Futures. https://www.archdaily.com/583601/audi-urban-future-award-2014-team-berlin-s-flywheel-could-revolutionize-personal-mobility/54a6a677e58ecee15b0000af-award2014_berlin_urban_mobility_landscape2-jpg Within the capitalist milieu that has come to define the 21st century, what agency do young designers have, if any, to affect change towards greater urban social justice? In an era of globalization and multi-national corporations, national and city governments have abandoned their mandate of placing the needs of citizens as a top priority. The race to become a desirable investment destination for global capital has had a profound impact on how our cities prioritize their development. Nowhere is this disturbing phenomenon more pronounced than in the Global South, where colonialism and oppressive regimes have already negatively affected urban environments. Within such a context, what role can young design professionals play in challenging the status quo? One important emerging arena would be the design competition, which not only gives a platform that would otherwise be unavailable to young designers, but also acts as a laboratory to test out ideas and solutions to issues that affect our urban environment. Competitions pose unique opportunities for grassroots activism by communities in collaboration with designers to challenge powerful groups and organizations. An example of this was the Tafelberg Challenge in Cape Town, South Africa. The competition was an open call to architects, urban designers and planners to submit alternative proposals to the sale of well-located state-owned land by the provincial government to the private sector to generate revenue for affordable housing on the periphery of the city. Cape Town, current water crisis notwithstanding, has been experiencing a property boom, with some of the highest property price increases in the world. The city and provincial government has seen this trend as an opportunity to sell off valuable, under-utilized state land to developers and private organizations, rather than use it for affordable housing and additional public amenities. In a city that is extremely segregated, both racially and economically, such a move would be a positive step towards a much more just city and could be used as a tool for racial reconciliation within a deeply divided city. Many of the design teams proposed a mixed-use scheme , where a smaller number of market-rate housing units and commercial spaces would help subsidize affordable housing, which would make up the majority of the development, made possible by the extremely high value of the land. This extra revenue would be used to supplement the subsidy from national government, resulting in higher quality affordable housing than what is typically built. The rationale was that this model could be applied to similar sites across the city. Unfortunately, after a lengthy court case the sale of the land went through, which resulted in major protest action and national news coverage. The resistance to the sale coincided with the political party running the City of Cape Town having a greater influence within national politics and threatening the power of the county’s ruling party. They realized that such negative coverage would severely hurt their national political ambitions. In 2017, the city’s Transport and Urban Development Authority was formed to facilitate transit-oriented development. The idea that public transportation and social housing should feed off each other is not new in the city; what was new is that this type of development happened in the highly valuable inner city and adjacent neighborhoods. Such a move would result in a much more integrated city, where working class citizens, who are mostly black, are not all relegated to the peripheries of our cities. It is clear that the Tafelberg Challenge alone did not bring about this change in housing policy within the City of Cape Town, but it does highlight the power of design competitions as a form of grassroots activism against powerful forces within our cities. Additionally, they give design professionals agency to engage with local communities and other experts within a time where there has been an increasing realization of the limits of design as a tool for change. The case study highlights the need for design to align itself with other forces, in order to have any influence within society and its urban environments https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/3/12/schaefer monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523284897967-IYBVAWQYIRHDP7UD8DU8/64_WilsonFS5050Barrier_uncropped.jpg equity - Image by Allen Ying The increasing privatization of public space has become one of the leading topics of debate in contemporary cities. The adoption of neoliberal economic policies has left many city governments with shrinking budgets, and even global finance centers such as New York have found themselves strapped for cash. Austerity measures meant to reduce public spending have been compensated for by an increased dependency on the private market to provide civic amenities that residents have come to expect. Many have welcomed this new era of public-private partnerships, some going as far as advocating for the complete privatization of all public spaces. Proponents argue that the private market offers the optimal framework for the provision of services, and that left to its own devices, will lead to more efficiently run public spaces while also allowing for innovative approaches that can produce exciting and novel situations. Their detractors argue that the private market will, by the very nature of capitalism, inevitably exclude more vulnerable social groups (without political or financial power) from these spaces, leading to increased inequality in how different people experience their city. However, both sides of this argument miss how inclusionary practices regarding public space can be used not just to facilitate equal opportunity, but also to encourage equalizing outcomes. Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago’s 2013 analysis Central Park Against the Streets counterintuitively suggests that one of the most iconic ‘commons’ in the world was in fact conceived as one of its greatest enclosures. “The case of Central Park shows that institutional orderings of space can incorporate subtle, often unnoticed strategies of dispossession without privatization, using certain assemblages of public space to eradicate the practices underpinning autonomous appropriations thereof.” Rather than simply exclude increasingly unruly working-class visitors from their park, Vaux and Olmstead aimed to transform their behavior so that they would become worthy patrons of this elite urban amenity through assimilation. For behavioral transformation to occur at the scale they envisioned, the park had to be free of charge and as inclusive as possible, with plentiful access points that lured users in from the surrounding streets. Today, the desire to dictate the terms on which expression occurs in public spaces is most clearly illustrated when we examine how municipalities treat some of these more extreme appropriations of their city. After what Sevilla calls “the extinction of the everyday cultures of autonomous street use,” non-violent illegal activities such as street skateboarding and graffiti writing remain as some of the last, lingering, unauthorized uses of the public realm. While these activities arguably spawned from dissatisfied youths in the city, municipal governments have again turned to enclosure as a means to quell this rebellious behavior. Instead of imposing fines or even jail sentences for these offences, especially prevalent during the ‘broken-windows’ era of policing, a more sophisticated approach has since been adopted that replicates these activities, albeit in controlled environments. Skateparks are becoming more prevalent than ever, providing safe designated spaces for skateboarding. While almost universally praised by city officials and many skaters themselves, these paternalistic spaces have the double-edged effect of preventing full interaction with the city for the skateboarders. Furthermore, by moving the skaters off of the streets and into designated parks, the urban experience for city dwellers is further sterilized. Similarly, illegal graffiti has been increasingly stamped out while legally permitted murals and ‘street art’ take over. Small expressions of disaffected youth have given way to more easily digestible ‘safe’ images, now seen to increase property values in a neighborhood rather than blighting it. The same planners and designers that will invite internationally renowned street artists to brighten up their newly commissioned ‘arts district’ will simultaneously punish their own constituents for trying to do the same. Unsurprisingly, these sanctioned murals tend to offer combinations of pop imagery and colorful platitudes such as LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL or ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, rather than addressing rampant social inequity, depression or dissatisfaction. Public spaces have rarely been neutral grounds for diverse classes to come together; instead they are highly contested and are renegotiated daily. As former professional skateboarder Ocean Howell suggests in his 2001 essay The Poetics of Security, these unsanctioned appropriations “challenge observers to examine their preconceptions of what or who a city is for” and reintroduce conflict to increasingly sterile urban environments. Municipal governments have aligned their interests too closely with those of the private sector in homogenizing cultural and consumption patterns. We need to more closely examine the motives behind public spaces and be more open and flexible to different types of appropriation to ensure healthy, sustainable cities in the future. https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/3/25/yg82lgcrqf8ego9yfnyawuh1barn7i-mp6ph monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521999662739-BW2TBL9AECNTCJI7EASA/Image+2.jpg equity - Image by Deni Lopez. The Tehuantepec Isthmus is a region in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco and Veracruz in Mexico. It is the narrowest area between the two oceans (Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean, in its section of the Gulf of Mexico).The center-right Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) controls the state of Oaxaca and the federal government. This facilitated a top-down takeover in the Tehuantepec Isthmus, in contrast with community-led responses in places like Morelos or Mexico City, governed by the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Army men and private developers took over reconstruction in Oaxaca, leaving local economies, knowledge, and workforces aside to demonstrate capacity to handle a crisis. How can design generate alternate anticipatory strategies that integrate debris reuse and community-led recovery tactics in disaster-prone rural areas? Mexico, like many other geographies, currently struggles with the aftermath of natural disasters that areis inherently tied toenhanced by its social and political instability. Facing a lack of preemptive planning and a misunderstanding of risk, different stakeholders struggle to find holistic recovery actions that do not exacerbate the rural-urban divide. Countryside areas such as the earthquake-prone Tehuantepec Isthmus in Oaxaca, for example, received attention only after an exceptional inter-plate earthquake hit Mexico City last year (even though the Isthmus suffered from a higher-magnitude earthquake just days before). Recovery currently focuses on government-financed rapid housing production led mainly by private developers and the army, while neglecting local needs, lifestyles, and knowledge. Therefore, the question is: how can design be of service when creating integrative tactics that go beyond short-term reconstruction and volatile political cycles? While essential for post-disaster or war recovery, the question of how to handle debris is usually not a primary concern. Dealing with debris is a complicated process that often results in unprotected landfill. Rubble composition varies from situation to situation, but typically contains a wide range of liquid and solid hazardous waste. Using such components as landfill or discarding them next to water sources creates serious environmental pollution concerns. Yet, due to their lack of planning for these issues, governments tend to make exceptions, opting for easy and quick fixes1. In the case of the Los Perros river in Oaxaca, the 2017 earthquakes causedproduced more than 10,000 tons of rubble (the equivalent to 50 blue whales) to accumulate. The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) was responsible for managing earthquake debris, and in Oaxaca, they made an exception to their no-discarding-next-to-a-waterbed rule2. This top-down impromptu plan received community backing because the area suffers from periodic floods - ranging from 0.20 to 2.70 meters3. Therefore, a complementary initiative (led by the federal government) hired workerslocals to remove rubble from their own houses for a one-time payment of nearly USD 1304. Locals hoped that rubble would act as a buffer for the next flood season and contain sewage ruptures caused by the 2017 (and future) earthquakes. Nonetheless, this action had little regard for the ultimate environmental impact at the riverside dumping location, and it worsened the effects of six pre-existing dump sites along Los Perros5. It is unacceptable to think that an earthquake-prone region like Tehuantepec still lacks an integrative plan to deal with natural disasters. Nonetheless, it is difficult to plan preemptively when collective information is insufficient. As a practical discipline able to synthesize other forms of knowledge and materialize it into tangible solutions, design brings a lesser-known alternative approach to the pressing issue of post-disaster recovery. While environmental disasters are nowhere near a new phenomenon, their systematic study is a fairly recent science. With support from the Penny White Project Fund and the Summer Research Travel Grant of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Nadyeli Quiroz (MLA 1 AP), Betzabe Valdés (MDes Critical Conservation), and I will conduct a site investigation over the summer to study the Los Perros riverbank. Following the devastating earthquakes of 2017, the riverbank became an improvised and unprotected rubble dumpsite to serve as a barrier against periodic floods. Our research will consist of a community needs survey, a thorough mapping and ecological study, and interviews with key actors within and outside the local population. In conjunction, these processes will help us find prospective rubble deposits, understand the towns on the riverbank along with their pre-and-post disaster underlying power structures, and synthesize a proposal that has the potential to strengthen itsthe local sense of place. We intend to develop an environmentally conscious project-based plan for incremental action that serves as a foundation to deal with inevitable upcoming disasters and one that has the ability to negotiate between the local community, institutions, and other development experts. In other words, we view this as the first step to create a comprehensive flood-control project and community-led public space along the river. We also aim to advance emerging expertise about urban, social, and geophysical conditions in similar global settings. The project will initiate our year-long thesis, set a precedent for a different kind of preemptive intervention in rural areas, and hopefully contribute to a community-led design project. We promise to get back to you with the results! https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/4/13/m7rf4ku7pc0x1gtnzwj8rkh8l1c66u-aftbj monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523646081684-GNTRLS63M9ZZPEEQWQON/zhuo+pang+1.jpg equity - IBTASEM playground in Lebanon Source: Catalytic Action http://www.catalyticaction.org/all-project-list/playground-syrian-refugees/ IBTASEM playground in Lebanon by Catalytic Action Source: http://www.catalyticaction.org/all-project-list/playground-syrian-refugees/ This time last year, I was reading a book called “Design like you give a damn: architectural responses to humanitarian crises[1].” by Architecture for Humanity (AFH). It was interesting to find out that although the phrase “humanitarian architect” were repeatedly used in the book, the title framed it as “architectural responses to humanitarian crises”, potentially in response to the debate that all architects wish to do good and separating humanitarian architects from the others is not very legitimate and may form further barriers. To me, the difference between what is humanitarian or not lies in the context of practice rather than the goal of practitioners. Architectural practice in the humanitarian field has only begun to be noticed in the last two decades, especially after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. In the context of intensified natural disaster, forced displacement and consistent global poverty, the crisis has been protracted and the boundary between temporary and permanent, between humanitarian and development have been blurred. In the old days when people were only going to be displaced shortly and a simple shelter (often in the form of a tent or an isobox) would do the work, it was engineers rather than architects whoprovided solutions. The most important evaluation criteria were efficiency and financial feasibility. Nowadays, however, when the average time of displacement of refugees are 17 years (according to UNHCR), people need more than that. The physical environment impacts people’s mindsets. Sharing room with 7 strangers deprives the right to privacy; Living in the repeatedly placed isoboxes deprives people of identity. Surviving in “minimalism” without amenities deprives the sense of community. In a word, people suffering from humanitarian crises are exactly those who aspire for normalcy, for all the simple things they could do before everything got messed up. And this is where designers and planners can contribute. This is not an easy path because of the almost intrinsic challenges in humanitarian practice. I want to point out a few based on my observation: 1. The challenge of building in conflict areas Humanitarian design often happens in an area without official governments, committed clients, competent contractors and formal tenure system. At the same time, humanitarian players on the ground often have their own agendas and are responsible to specific donors. Repetition of work is typical and pilot solutions get implemented everywhere. This brings many difficulties in terms of partnership, implementation and maintenance. 2. The challenge of forming community Many design efforts celebrate the idea of “creating a sense of community” through place-making; however, in the humanitarian field, people can come from very different income and ethnical groups and they have been packed in such high density. Without mutual trust, the community is simply non-existent. 3. The challenge between temporary and permanent. In the spectrum of temporary, transient and permanent, architects are more comfortable dealing with the last one; however, it is not rare to see what was designed to be used as transient housing become permanent in practice. On the other side, people may not welcome permanent architecture because they do not perceive this place as their final destinations (they may want to return to their home countries or seek asylum in another wealthier country) and any permanent gestures are perceived by people as consolidation of their current condition. Challenges remain. Those humanitarian practices that are successful must do well in architect first. As Shigeru Ban put in this way: “you need to be a good architect in the first place.” As cliché as it may sound, a good intention, an adaptive mindset and professionalism shall do the work. https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/4/13/pk17siie0rpukbo9mbqga8ac9c01vd-w6ajb monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523646822153-3YQUCIX1M0AK9ARUQGLL/waiting+map.jpg equity - An imagined geography of waiting – the main spaces of contact between refugees and host community residents. A scale of embedded stress based on time, density, and program guide the level of discomfort that will be tolerated. (Image by Meaghan Pohl An imagined geography of waiting – the main spaces of contact between refugees and host community residents. A scale of embedded stress based on time, density, and program guide the level of discomfort that will be tolerated. (Image by Meaghan Pohl https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/7/4/dxfpb7h8fi95yr3tmtsz5exp3mjn4g-mppr5 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530719988647-M68AP9P8QAJNIJTPN2F4/just+city.jpg equity - Image Credit: Nerali Patel Our trek left us with one overarching question: how do planners and designers orchestrate the right team? Design is certainly a catalyst for major change in society, yet designers cannot act alone. Half the battle is really about which individuals have a seat at the table. Having projects and clients that represent not just one actor or agent, but partnerships between all sectors will allow for a plan to belong to a collective in which everyone is invested. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530719892215-OTDR5VG3LR09F5T49H40/just+city+2.jpg equity - Furlong, Ashleigh. “Three Years after the Khayelitsha Commission‚ Is There Any Progress?” Times LIVE, Sunday Times, www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-08-25-three-years-after-the-khayelitsha-commission-is-there-any-progress/. 2. Redefining Resiliency In searching for design case studies we toured a variety of urban projects. A local guide gave us a tour of Kliptown, the oldest township in Soweto. As we shuffled into a shack, not more than 60 ft2, our guide pointed out: “look at their pots, have you ever seen shinier pots anywhere else? In Kliptown, we may sleep on the floor and sleep 10 to a shack but you’ll never see a pot that isn’t shiny.” Resiliency is a buzzword that has become diluted by academics, cities, philanthropies and profit seekers. The meaning can often feel opaque. However, in a moment of clarity in Kliptown, resiliency was embodied by an unemployed women carefully washing buckets of laundry at one communal tap shared between hundreds. Resiliency revealed itself through the many hair salons embedded between shacks. Resiliency was defined by Black Pride. Defying the expectations of a hostile world, the self pride we observed in Kliptown demonstrated a deeper understanding of what it means to be resilient - often not measured or understood by our traditional design metrics - a challenge planners and designers should consider when we so frequently use the phrase “designing for resilience.” 3. Design matters, but who has a seat at the table matters more. As designers, we champion design as a remarkably powerful tool. However, design itself as an aesthetic endeavor can only achieve so much. During our trip we saw an array of socially driven design projects that had a clear social impact. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530719826921-17N0WGBR6K28MCLHV5X1/just+city+3.jpg equity - africanpopcultures, •. “Visiting African Barbershops and Hair Salons.” African Popular Cultures, 12 Oct. 2014, africanpopculture.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/visiting-african-barbershops-and-hair-salons/. This summer we had the opportunity to travel to South Africa on a whirlwind two-week research trip with the Just City Lab and the lab’s founder, Toni L. Griffin (Professor in Practice of Urban Planning). Our mission was twofold: to take the work of the lab global in a series of programs located in Tshwane, Johannesburg and Cape Town, and to seek design case studies to add to the lab’s database. During our two weeks in South Africa, we participated in over 20 different meetings, ranging from engagements with city planners, designers, organizations, entrepreneurs, professors, students and political leaders. The culmination of our trek left us with three key takeaways that resonate with our actions as planners and designers: 1. The importance of calling injustice, an injustice. Words matter. Words validate, recognize, and affirm. They also have the power to deny and erase. The diluted jargon used by some designers, planners, students and communities that we met act as a silent violence, an erasure of the trauma and injustices of the apartheid city. The call to choose words wisely evoked reflection on some of the terms that we have adopted, which often inflict unforeseen consequences. When we refer to townships, informal settlements and slums - we imply that they are a transient, temporary, inhuman problems that will soon vanish from our urban landscapes. Rather, generation after generation has sustained them, and thus they are definitely here to stay. While they are “make-shift” to some and “home” for others, in our view they deserve to be legitimized. It is time to humanize them, and we can start that process very simply by calling them neighborhoods. For us, this is where the Just City Lab’s work really came to life, and where we saw the power of the Just City Index. If we use our words with intention, perhaps our designs will strive to achieve a more humanized outcome. https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/7/28/d2vvpazp67xygl394duwsawx1jd9pm-gmc8j monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812218653-EZTXP9284EV9M6RYRIC9/rana.jpg equity - Image Credit / Bibliography: Kağıthane River - Sadabad (1880s) by Guillaume Berggren Proliferation of public parks is one of the key defining features of the changing urban fabric of 19th century Istanbul. Most scholarship has interpreted this proliferation merely as a symptom of the Western influenced modernization of the city. However, these public parks are also important to examine from a social lens because they are emblematic of shifts happening between the public and private spheres of an increasingly cosmopolitan Istanbul. The notion of public space in Istanbul is of course not confined to this current era of modernization. Courtyards of mosque complexes (kulliyes) functioned as gathering places for decades before the emergence of public parks. At this time, this notion of public space was confined to the mosque’s site where there was still a clear separation between the private (domestic) and public sphere. This separation started becoming less apparent in the 18th century with the opening of imperial gardens to the general public. Sadabad, the imperial garden constructed in 1721 by Ahmed III and reminiscent of Versailles with its winding paths around artificial pools and marble-paved river banks, allowed the public to pass freely from the public promenade of Kağıthane to the imperial palace grounds to entertain themselves in this space. This typology began blurring social spaces between the ruling elite and the public, making Kağıthane one of the most popular excursion spots in Istanbul. Countess de la Ferté-Meun visiting Istanbul in 1816 describes the Kağıthane scene as such: “[…] the sound of this cascade at your feet, these groups of Turkish, Greek, Armenian and Jewish women whose mores, customs and outfits are so varied and who delight, undaunted, in all sorts of divertissements the countryside [has to] offer, make this promenade a ravishing spectacle.” The spectacle of the diversity of visitors in these new parks evolved into a ‘see and be seen’ dynamic in the public sphere. The first of these modern public parks in Istanbul built in the 19th century was the Büyük Çamlıca Park created in 1870. Rumors alone of the park led “Istanbul’s young revelers and women [….] to start preparing and competing with one another on what to wear.” This modern park, built on the grounds of a former imperial garden, attracted such a crowd that the carriages circulating on the roads traversing the park caused it to be likened to a “bee hive”. The park had kiosks dispersed along the roads, where musicians would play, and food and drinks would be served. 19th century’s first garden parties and masquerade balls (first of which was organized by Sultan Abdulaziz) all took place here. It was à la mode in the evening for the aristocrats to walk around and watch the crowds. One can clearly see a shift from the interest of sightseeing (visiting the parks to see and enjoy nature), to seeing and being seen (becoming a spectacle of the social scene). As Hannah Arendt states in her essay “Public and the Private Realm” in The Human Condition, public and private space are greatly intertwined in the modern world. Modernization leads to the blurring of the public and the private sphere, and to the emergence of what she defines as “the social realm”. This realm, she claims, satisfies the modern need of public admiration. Istanbul’s public parks became this identified social realm that set the stage for a more modern, dynamic and diverse method of living, defining the social life of 19th century Istanbul. https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/2018/7/28/8kjk8c3dq0ezs957jyyxm0o1qicvls-7z23d monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812627617-GM79697EAA2YHFLE3BJG/Yeo_Street+Level+Perspective+01.jpg equity https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812789483-39BGZN0UW8A1H1YQ646A/Yeo_Street+Level+Perspective+02.jpg equity https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532813150332-ZBRDLOQC7ED0JK7SROXO/Yeo_Street+Shadow+Study.jpg equity Street Shadow Study https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532812984791-O1Z8Z25GA8ZHR6FBDKJ7/Yeo_Project+Diagram.jpg equity 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https://www.ud-id.com/equity-1/tag/humanitarian monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1 daily 0.75 2019-11-08 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/2018/3/12/upya1iz3nreet41f8gcxjq7444fg58-e4ddh-xdsm6-njrs8-3baf5-p88tc-ykhmh-b93fd monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573184364757-Y2WJWAE5FROYUQKVTK3J/02.+ZHA_WangjingSOHO_VSB.jpg image Image 2: Zaha Hadid’s Wangjing SOHO in Beijing.(Photograph by Virgile Simon Bertrand, used with permission of Zaha Hadid Architects) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573184387474-6QVBSP4YWYCC08QXXH09/Wakanda+AD+2.jpg image Image 3: Wakanda’s Golden City (© Marvel Studios) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573184340658-U1RXVW9YJNZVNYXONK63/Wakanda+AD.jpg image Image 1: Streets of the Golden City bustling with new-age trotros as shops display traditional African baskets. (© Marvel Studios) https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/2018/3/12/upya1iz3nreet41f8gcxjq7444fg58-e4ddh-xdsm6-njrs8-3baf5-p88tc-ykhmh monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547581983991-MF4MQ06VR98RUHG5BPXP/frontispiece%2Bopt%2BA.jpg image - https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/2262937/2012/11/T800x600/580a73b08c13b4f18c22acb1d4339e87.jpg?width=720. If you plan on buying a Christmas tree this year, you should probably consider lowering your expectations and raising your budget. Just last year, Christmas trees were not only harder to find, they were also the most expensive that they had been in a decade. The average price of these trees has more than doubled since 2008. This precipitous rise in the market value of the Christmas tree was—and continues this year to be—a lingering effect of the Great Recession.1 After 2008, tree sales were so bad that Oregon, the largest supplier of Christmas trees in the US, saw over one third of its growers leave the business between 2010 and 2015, resulting in a decrease in newly planted trees from 6.4 to 4.7 million, a loss of more than 26%.2 Even though national economic tides have seemingly now turned, Christmas consumers are only just now feeling the effects of this almost decade-old economic decline due to the eight-to-twelve-year growth cycle of the tree.3 The delayed market impact of this seasonal commodity’s scarcity reveals the oft-taken-for-granted Christmas tree as more than mere decoration but as a contemporary representation of the socioecological dynamics that lie at the very origin of western holiday practices, ideas like when to sow, when to harvest, and when to save. This urban metabolic reading of the Christmas tree serves as an entrée to problematizing the seasonally ubiquitous tree as a multivalent symbol not only subject to the fluctuations of markets but also with more discreet, hegemonic cultural constructs. Through a historical semiotic analysis of the Christmas tree (hereafter, “the Tree”), interrogating it as Saussurean signifier, the tree can be broken down and understand afresh as not just a holiday decoration but as a tool, designed and redesigned for control.4 The Tree exists at different periods in time as index, symbol, and icon. In its earliest iterations, the Tree was perhaps not even yet a true tree but instead the mere presence of evergreen plant matter at the Roman feasts of Saturnalia and Kalends as well as the Germanic festival of Yule. In these earliest of instances, the presence of the proto-Tree as evergreen in midst of deep, dark winter was an indexical signification that Spring would return.5 After the advance of Christianity in Europe and the widescale cooptation of pagan ritual, the Tree began to become a symbol by signifying religious, national, and familial ideologies.6 From its modern origins as the centerpiece in the Christian “mystery plays” of medieval Germany, the Tree eventually made its way into Victorian England in 1848 through the British royal family. Introduced by Prince Albert, a German himself, the image of the family gathered about the tree was published and widely disseminated throughout Britain.7 This domestic identity of the Tree was of particular importance in the early to mid-1800’s when the effects of the fully-matured English Industrial Revolution were finally being widely felt, resulting in economic instability from labor strikes on the one hand and the simultaneous emergence of a consumer-based, middleclass economy on the other.8 The Tree, therefore, was an important symbol, not only of family, but of a bygone era of handcraftsmanship, childish folklore, and darkness enshrouded mystery typical of the heavily-forested and fairytale-rich land of Germany, a region that wouldn’t see its own industrial wave for another twenty years.9 Of course, the Tree in the context of the US has been no less an instrument of capitalist ideology than its European predecessors. The last form of signification—and one we are all too familiar with—is the icon, the image of the thing as itself.10 The Tree as icon is perhaps best observed today in advertising. One need only think of the seasonal aisle lined with sugary, prepackaged snacks emblazoned with the Tree or even manufactured (usually very poorly) in its shape. The iconographic nature of the Tree is the cheaper, simpler employment of the Tree as signifier to boost sales through a basely nostalgic appeal. The Tree not only means a change of season is coming when it makes its appearance each year at Christmas tree stands and in homes, malls, and plazas almost indexically, but it marks time on a grander scale representing where we’ve been societally, how we’ve changed, and where were going. The Tree is a canary in a coalmine as it is constantly reconstructed and made in the image of the moment through the lens of the past. Think of the almost space-age silver trees of the middle of the 20th century or the presumably ecologically-friendly rentable potted Trees of today. There is constraint in the form and image of the tree, but there is also immense creativity and thus invention and agency. The tree comes to represent the underlying consciousness of the maker—as a symbol of not only the collective but the individual, the tree has become a conduit of identity and consensus.11 It is all of these identities, fluctuating and changing as a sign of time passing. The Tree does work. It is a kind of infrastructure that embodies, microcosmically, the environments we create and those we contend with and symbolizes the ideals we value. The question going forward is how to move beyond reading the Christmas tree as it exists now—as a simulacral representation—and deploy it, hack it, or even re-represent it to facilitate the futures we most need. https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/2018/3/12/upya1iz3nreet41f8gcxjq7444fg58-e4ddh-xdsm6-njrs8-3baf5 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547581913150-9B5CHUUP8L2433FOA194/Balkrishna_Doshi_courtesy-of-VSF.jpg image - Paglen, T. (2010). They watch the moon. The NSA is listening. To you, to me, to entire countries at a time. Through its tapping, intercepting, recording, and querying, the NSA is eroding our capacity to freely search, communicate, and even move throughout space. It is through these mediums we signal our curiosities, fears, hopes, and passions – the very sentiments that make us human. At risk, under a government with limitless power to surveil, is our humanity. Recent revelations regarding illegal, warrantless NSA spying programs such as ECHELON, PRISM, and BOUNDLESSINFORMANT have made unambiguous this bleak phenomenon. And while the ubiquity and omniscience of the United States’ surveillance state is indisputable, disconnected to our understanding are the built infrastructures enabling these programs, and how our physical and digital trails relate spatially to these satellites, listening stations, switch operators, and fiberoptic cables. To effectively protest or disrupt the NSA’s capabilities, and to protect ourselves from a government body whose stated mission is to “collect it all,” we must first deconstruct and draw these networks. A shadow organization’s undoing is illumination. Enter the designer. We wait not for irresolute legislative nudges, but instead weaponize our knowledge of multispectral sensors, satellite orbit paths, and radio wave attenuation through vegetative and building materials to confound these infrastructures of mass surveillance. The systems-oriented representational agenda of landscape architects and urban designers positions us to disentangle the NSA’s highly secretive and convoluted networks, and in doing so exploit technological gaps so as to proffer moments of anonymity and reprieve. Despite the U.S. government’s prowess in tapping fiberoptic cables, intercepting satellite transmissions, and imaging the Earth at sub-one-meter resolution, our ability to protect ourselves nevertheless returns to factors within designers’ purview, such as radio wave transmission and imaging techniques. To the former, before our data is transmitted to compromised fiberoptic cables, it takes the forms of radio waves, which can be attenuated via specific building materials, such as metal, concrete, and ceramic, as well as water. Certain vegetative species carry more water, which combined with high canopy density, can serve to sufficiently weaken radio signals. GPS is a product of 24 roving U.S. Air Force satellites, and direct access to four at any given moment is required to locate one’s position. Targeted landforming and the aforementioned use of materials can strategically shelter our location from these satellites. With respect to imaging, we are well-versed in the knowledge the Earth is not being photographed, but rather sensed along particular wavelengths with multispectral sensors and then processed and composited computationally. We can thus employ highly specific forms of camouflage given the understanding that heat and other refractive elements can be crucial in obfuscating our form and activities. In the pursuit for privacy, we need not construct a Faraday cage to encompass the whole earth or hide away in the farthest reaches of the civilization. We can, however, deconstruct the very methods being used against us in service of what designers have always done: amplify the elements of a societal or administrative failure and ameliorate through grounded intervention. Relying on this process is the key to protecting our civil liberties and, ultimately, maintaining our humanity. https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/2018/3/12/upya1iz3nreet41f8gcxjq7444fg58-e4ddh-xdsm6-njrs8 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547581954676-R5HFIBSETW8W3UXR0C6T/Balkrishna_Doshi_courtesy-of-VSF.jpg image - Richard Weinstein, Director of the Office of Planning and Development for Lower Manhattan within New York City’s Department of City Planning, presenting a new development project in Manhattan, 1972; “The planner is not a tastemaker,” asserted Sara Myerson, Boston’s Director of Planning, in a roundtable discussion at the GSD’s Big City Planners program this past October 2018. In one concise and precise statement, Myerson diplomatically, yet vehemently rebutted the planner’s interference with the sensitive question of what the city ‘should’ physically look like. In an interview in 2012, Amanda Burden, then Director of New York City’s Department of City Planning, was asked about the inclusion of the syntagm ‘superior design’ in its East Midtown Study, (wording discretely removed since the interview). She denied the use of the term ‘design’ in the Study and retorted: “It really can’t be subjective according to somebody’s taste or whim. This is too important to the city’s future, too important to the skyline.”[1] In the context, developments deemed of a ‘superior design’ would have been rewarded with an FAR bonus. Implicit in Burden’s and Myerson’s blunt statements are a total renunciation of any possible association with the values and beliefs of the City Beautiful movement that transformed America’s urban skylines and physical plans over the turn of the nineteenth century. In the name of ‘urban beautification,’ architect-planners, organized in private associations, proposed and implemented visions for the city which bore distinctively European-inspired architectural styles, notably of the Italian Renaissance and Greco-Roman Antiquity, in size, form and ornament for modern America’s civic centers. While it is understandable why a disassociation with the City Beautiful movement and its undemocratic planning and stylistic preference is necessary, it is also difficult for zoning codes and resolutions to escape prescribing what the physical environment they are supposed to plan should look like. The glossary of planning terms used by New York City’s Department of City Planning includes definitions that govern super-specific aspects of the city, including street wall, street line, building height, parapet, sky exposure plane, building bulk, building envelope.[2] In this sense, while the glossary of terms presents a seemingly ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ and ‘technical’ position vis-à-vis urban design, many assumptions about what the city should look-like are implicit and by no means absolute. For example, New York City’s planning concept of the street wall as a continuous surface aligned with avenues and streets has produced an urban environment with accentuated deep perspectives. But who took ownership of this particular physical vision of the city? What if the assumption were of a setback in the street wall, not every 200- or 600-feet respectively (the dimensions of a standard Manhattan block), but, say, every 25-feet (the dimension of a standard Manhattan lot)? What if the deep perspectives of street walls were replaced by crenelated surfaces of street curtains? Would they constitute an equally valid assumption? Another example is that of building height restrictions, often in the name of “character preservation,” an undefined term in the planning department’s glossary. In the Department of City Planning’s 2010 rezoning of Manhattan’s West and East Villages, building heights of 8- and 12-stories respectively were put in place. Burden stated that the rezoning would “ensure that the historic building stock along these streets is protected and that the residential community is no longer threatened by out-of- character commercial development.”[3] However, building height is not a universal feature of neighborhood character and oftentimes parameters such as building materiality, the way a building meets the ground or its architectural style may be more defining of character. A more extreme, yet illustrative example is New York City’s City Planning Commission’s evaluation of Jean Nouvel’s Tower Verre in 2009: “[…] the Commission believes that the applicant has not made a convincing argument that the design of the tower’s top, with the uppermost 200 feet of the building, merits being in the zone of the Empire State Building’s iconic spire, making the building the second tallest building in New York City. […] It appears that less attention has been paid to this portion of the building. In particular the commission is not satisfied with attempts at incorporating mechanical equipment into the tower top, which results in a tower top with a highly visible mechanical equipment.”[4] This evaluation was followed by a building height limit that reduced Nouvel’s tower by 200 feet, a direct design restriction by the City’s planning bodies that would control the form of New York City’s skyline. In this context, planning is inherently visionary, but without claiming authorship of this vision. Perhaps, authorship is impossible in the greater administration of urban governance in the US, which fashions planners into public functionaries. However, given the profession’s nature to prescribe formal aspects of cities, planners are, even without necessarily wanting to be, tastemakers. In this sense, planners must take a position. They must either take ownership of their tastemaking powers or concede to ‘professional’ design bodies. The middle-ground planners currently occupy, forced to regulate physical environments, yet hesitant to admit to it, reflects the inherent hypocrisy of the profession while doing it disservice altogether. Therefore, I end with a crucial question facing the profession today: in accepting their inherent tastemaking powers, should planning departments be democratized to more publicly and wilfully plan for ‘superior design’ in cities? https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/2018/3/12/upya1iz3nreet41f8gcxjq7444fg58-e4ddh-xdsm6 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547581766500-2IWRRF8W5QPYTT9HOQPR/Balkrishna_Doshi_courtesy-of-VSF.jpg image About 200 miles northeast of San Francisco, Redding, California is a small, relatively unknown city nestled away in the rural, conservative hills of Shasta County. It has always been ideologically and geographically separate from the rest of the state, content in its isolation. For decades it has been reliant upon its logging industry to carry the economy. However, as the industry began to decline in the 1970’s and the city’s unemployment rate soared to over 20 percent, Redding has had to diversify its economic base, opening it up to the rest of the state in order to attract tourism and commerce¹. Over the past few decades, Redding has seen a drastic increase in population, rising from under 17,000 in 1970 to nearly 90,000 in 2010. This influx of people has coincided with a series of public projects mostly in the 90’s and early 2000’s, ranging from parks to a new city hall and library. Among this string of structures was the Sundial Bridge. Built in 2004, the bridge spans the Sacramento River, which bisects the city, to connect two disparate parts of a large city park. This link could have easily been provided by a modest footbridge designed by a local architect, but the city alongside the McConnell Foundation, a very wealthy independent foundation that funds local nonprofits and public projects, used the opportunity to brand the city, with the foundation offering to cover the majority of the cost in order to create a signature bridge¹. After being “impressed by designs he saw in a book,”² the Vice President of the McConnell Foundation called Santiago Calatrava’s office and asked him to design the bridge. $23.5 million later and two years behind schedule¹, the Sundial opened in July of 2004 to become the architect’s only bridge in North America. The vast majority of the residents in Redding had no idea who Calatrava was and were both perplexed and excited by the giant white structure. In a city whose only escalator arrived in 2001, a 216-foot long spire sticking up at a 42 degree angle could be perceived as somewhat alien. Over the past 14 years however, the bridge has largely been embraced by the population who regularly uses it for both its intended recreational purposes and as a backdrop for family and prom pictures. The Sundial has become an icon for Redding, quite literally as it has been incorporated into the city’s official symbol, but also in a more figurative way— demonstrated by the heavy presence of the bridge in a quick google image search of “Redding, CA.” Redding has now become inextricably linked with the image of the Sundial Bridge, yet an image of the Sundial certainly doesn’t automatically signify Redding. The sort of symbiosis that would usually happen between iconic structure and geographic place is stunted here by the presence of “starchitecture”. The initial, seemingly rash choice of the architect in many ways countered the city’s aspirations for a signature bridge because of Calatrava’s repetition of his signature design form onto yet another locale. Redding (and the McConnell Foundation) wanted a standout bridge that was unlike any other, which they got to an extent, but they also got what is essentially just another Calatrava bridge, easily replaceable with his designs for Sevilla and Manchester amongst many others. Apart from the generic-ness of the bridge as an image, the bridge’s omnipresence within the city’s symbology washes away a huge part of the underlying identity of the place. Redding has always prided itself as being an isolated, mostly rural community, purposefully different than the hundred or so other cities in California of a similar size. The bridge has taken on a role of both reflecting and guiding an attitudinal shift away from this isolationism, which is subjectively good, but not reflective of the desires of many in the community. Regardless of Redding’s choice in building the bridge, their decision to use it as the defining marker of the city is definitely contentious. https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/2018/3/12/upya1iz3nreet41f8gcxjq7444fg58-e4ddh monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520910198697-XTOS8YUP6RD7HAEPHT11/Balkrishna_Doshi_courtesy-of-VSF.jpg image About ten days ago, for our studio, we were driving toward MassMoca. With research focused on museum campuses, the purpose of the trip was to visit this one-of-a-kind museum typology. While on the drive up, we were playing the very timely Pritzker Game where we rated Pritzker’s recipients from A to C (let's see where we are in sixty years) and speculating on the imminent question: which architect would receive the honorary 2018 crown? A few days later, on Wednesday March 7th, Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi was bestowed the laureate of architecture’s highest honor. None of us in the car had brought up his candidacy as a possibility to the discussion. Upon hearing the news, both his proponents and critics have proliferated all forms of media, from the most general to the most specific. It is particularly relevant to examine this year’s announcement through the lens of our field, urban design. In the past ten years, we have seen the word « urban » only once in a Pritzker announcement: in 2011, when Eduardo Souto de Moura received the award. We read that the Burgo Tower was creating a dialogue with « the urban landscape. » Before that, the word urban appeared in 2007 for Richard Rogers’ announcement. With this year’s award, many declensions are aligned in Doshi’s announcement: urban planner, urbanization and urban design. Should we understand here a shift in the role and discourse of the prize? Are we witnessing the rise of a celebrated urban consciousness? We will be able to answer those questions more clearly in the coming years, but it is evident that through Doshi’s projects, such as the Co-Operative Middle Income Housing in Ahmedabad (1982) or the Aranya Low-Cost Housing (1989), a few kilometers away from Indore, that we see a pressing interest towards issues of the contemporary metropolis. Selecting Balkrishna Doshi as recipient of the Pritzker Prize not only recognizes an accomplished figure of both the 20th and 21th centuries in the field of architecture (and honors the legacy of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn), but it also showcases to the public sphere design solutions which address critical concerns of affordability, culture, and integrity, all of which promote the universal right to public enjoyment of a place. When Alejandro Aravena received the Hyatt Foundation’s prestigious medal, there was already speculation on the Pritzker’s ideological agenda at the time. In 2016, with the awarding of the work of his firm ELEMENTAL, the Pritzker highlighted the pressing challenges of the 21st century city: resilience, sustainability and collective space as a key element of the built environment. Therefore, the move to give exposure to those questions today with Doshi seems to confirm an objective for the Pritzker Prize, that being to reveal the role design has in serving the city and its larger society. https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/category/urban+design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/tag/Urban+Consciousness monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/tag/City+Challenges monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/tag/Pritzker+Prize monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/tag/Aravena monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/tag/Souto+de+Moura monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/tag/Urban+Design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/tag/Doshi monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/image-1/tag/Communication monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1 daily 0.75 2019-01-17 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/4/11/digitalspace-ghgg5 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523491033049-YR44U1JWQHEDXBG52SVX/unnamed.jpg pedagogy - Image source: [ http://www.urbantransformations.ox.ac.uk/blog/2018/digital-and-spatial-governance-in-shaping-the-future-city-through-urban-living-lab-ull-working/] As a Master in Urban Planning student at the GSD I frequently wonder why our discipline pays so little attention to digital space. What occurs in digital space is rapidly changing the layout of cities, management capacity, how people organize, movement within it and how urban dwellers interact and socialize with one another. Users of applications, search engines, and social media platforms create digital data trails which have capacity, especially when spatialized to inform us in the decision-making process about how these people move around, what spaces are frequently visited - what is or is not working. In terms of infrastructure, should we as planners advocate that people have access to the same opportunities to exist in digital spaces? I argue that digital space should benefit from some planning, zoning, and place-based policy initiatives in both the physical and digital public realms. Digital space could benefit from the guiding principles of planning as a discipline. Digital space and the UX design practices that create it use many of the same principles of navigability that have been essentially standardized within the field. Many planners utilize urban sociology methodologies and theories to justify their proposals. In fact, neuroimaging of the brain has shown that the same areas of the brain that are employed while an individual navigates physical space are active in navigating digital platform or general web browsing. Similarly, within digital space there are different cultures, norms, and manners of social conduct that can be visible. Notions of Publicly Owned Public Space Vs. Privately-Owned Private Space in the Digital Realm When thinking about the rules that govern digital space, I think of differences between publicly owned, publicly managed and a privately owned, pseudo public space, and how the rights of the urban dweller and the manager of these spaces differs. In the US it assumed that when someone is in a privately owned public space they are subject to the rules of conduct as determined by the individual owner or entity, whose end goal in providing the space in the first place is to generate profit or provide the space as a type of amelioration of the social costs that went into developing other elements of their property. They determine hours of operation, the physical design, and surveillance. In turning back to digital space, users are subjected to the rules as determined by the platforms or applications that provide the “infrastructure” of digital spaces. Often, these spaces are privately owned by companies, the vast majority of which are providing the space in order to profit from it, which in the digital world equates to individual’s data. Wwhen it comes to digital space, the fact that the same standard’s regarding privately owned public physical space apply as a status quo is not only absurd, but extremely precarious. Unlike physical “public spaces” the digital is not restricted by factors such as which neighborhood it is located within and the physical limits of hosting only a certain amount of people at a given time. While I think that many planning solutions could easily be applicable to the digital realm, assuming that because a digital space is privately managed the individual should be subjected to the rules of the private jurisdiction is problematic in terms of the high user populations and the fact that digital space combines, fuses, and mixes with commonly agreed upon notions of the public and private in ways that until recently we have never fully experienced. In thinking of the digital public realm, theoretical models such of those of Hannah Ardent, Habermas, and Sennet can easily be applied. As Hannah Ardent distinguished in her political theory work, “The Public Realm and Public Self,” there lies a nexus between an individual when alone and in a public space, or the “space of appearance.” Additionally, the importance of public space for people to organize, gather, and protest has long been studied in western political urban sociology. Such spaces have been historically linked to many revolutions and political shifts. Such capacity is frequently associated with digital space. The term “social media justice worrier” or phenomena such as the social media organizing that led to the Arab Spring offer examples of such similarities between the digital and the physical public while also providing nuance. Planning Digital Space Digital space should be planned along standards that mix models of theory and practice while taking into account the interfusing of private and public that occur within it. I am eager to explore ideas of local governments playing more of an active role in governing digital space. Scalability is obviously an issue, with such platforms it can’t be ignored that digital space should be fit for local contexts. For example, China’s political relationship with information, data, and censorship have, as a nation, essentially planned digital space to fit the rules and policies of their “real-life” counterparts. Rather than allow Facebook, Amazon, Uber to dominate the nation, they made sure to block them from entering and instead encouraged domestic versions of similar technology. The way in which that captured and localized wealth created by such platforms, tailored the platforms to the culture of China, and maintained many of the principles that are governing China today. Regardless of the controversy surrounding its control and monitoring, this can be viewed as an impressive endeavor. For Now In the short term, I believe there could be huge benefits for local governments to digitally plan space as it applies to capital capture. One example is requiring apps such as Uber, Lyft, and Via to pay city taxes when users access their digital services from within the physical boundaries of their jurisdictions. In thinking about the dialogue regarding platforms and technology in the United States, it is seemingly almost always about “disruption”. How people move around or interact with others has often been in ways that are largely positive. However, the role of government has been significantly weakened in the process. Although only few cities have been able to do so, this may represent the beginning of digital planning practices. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/2/24/whatisurbandesign-7grke-d4e6m-ha5hr-7pjhr monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547584042860-E6MGQBL020QGR21UNQNB/1.jpg pedagogy - Camille Pissaro: "Le Boulevard Montmartre, effet de nuit (The Boulevard Montmartre at Night)", The community of Jardim Colombo is a neighborhood of 20,000 inhabitants located 7 miles to the West of São Paulo’s city center. It has been witnessing for the past 15 years the turning of Fazendinha, a 1,000 square meter piece of land that used to be a little farm, into a huge dumping site. Jardim Colombo is an urban fabric with high density, and Fazendinha is currently the only large open space available for public use. However, its transformation into a dump has prevented Fazendinha from being considered for any alternative use. For this reason, almost a year ago, the community leaders Ivanildo de Olivera and Ester Carro, with the support of ArqFuturo, began considering transforming this huge dumping site into a park for the community. Between December 2017 and January 2018, a collective cleaning process took place in Fazendinha and ended up with the filling of 40 tracks with rubble. Despite this huge collective effort, Fazendinha continued to accumulate trash, causing despair in the volunteers working on the site. Would the creation of a new park actually ensure that the neighbors of Jardim Colombo take care of it? How should the project be addressed to foster this change in behavior? Moreover, could this transformation process become a way of strengthening the community to pursue other goals beyond just the physical construction of a new park? Those were some of the challenges that we faced when I arrived to Jardim Colombo and met Ester during the first week of June 2018. Beyond the physical transformation of Fazendinha, we also realized the need for developing a cultural programming for the community. In time, we came up with an idea that could eventually bring these two goals together: the organization of an art and participation festival in the dumping site. The objectives were twofold: first, generating expectations about the huge potential of Fazendinha; and second, engaging the community with the design process of their future park. Prior to the festival, we organized several workshops on image design, carpentry, pot design, photography, and landscaping, in order to start engaging more community members from Jardim Colombo and spreading the word about the Fazendinha Project. The proposal generated expectations from the people both from inside and outside the community, and the network of volunteers expanded dramatically up to over 30. In the meantime, we raised funds, collected donations, continued with the cleaning of the dump and designed a temporary architectural intervention to accommodate the activities planned for the big day. The first art and participation festival of Jardim Colombo took place on July 22, 2018. In the morning, volunteers coordinated several workshops—recycling, origami, participatory design, community gardening, decoration, and graffiti. After a massive community lunch, various street performances took place in the afternoon, including a one-hour theater play. The event finished with a music show in the central platform of Fazendinha together with everybody celebrating the transformation of the space. The festival was only the first step towards what could become a deeper and long-lasting transformation of Jardim Colombo. Since then, many more events have taken place—including a women festival, a graffiti festival, and capacity building. Moreover, the design of the park, based on the ideas accumulated during the festival, has moved forward into its next stage—there is now a formal project proposal—along with new landscaping interventions in Fazendinha. The network of people contributing to the project is continuously expanding, and most remarkably, neighbors of Fazendinha have stopped throwing trash into the site: the temporary intervention that was designed for the first festival still enables the space to be used for different activities three months later. Beyond the main goal of the project—the physical transformation into a park—the process has become an important example of urban pedagogy. The Fazendinha Project contributes to the expansion of the community’s conscientização (Freire, 1968) around its current situation and its potential to overcome certain structural challenges. Every new event that is organized increases the community’s capabilities to both define and pursue the goals “they have reason to value” (Sen, 1997). There are certainly a number of uncertainties around the project, and only time will tell if Jardim Colombo is experiencing a real shift in its mindset, but, so far, the culture-oriented approach that we adopted and implemented is filling us with hope. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/2/24/whatisurbandesign-7grke-d4e6m-ha5hr monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547584063607-FNWWCD5EF8ANUPCDCC84/4.jpg pedagogy - Camille Pissaro: "Le Boulevard Montmartre, effet de nuit (The Boulevard Montmartre at Night)", In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin. - Oscar Wilde As an architect and urban designer, one is reminded daily to redefine open and public spaces under the market of modern development. To adapt to new technological progress and restraints, several architectural features are replaced with anti-spatial elements. Plazas are replaced by Amazon, town criers are substituted with the New York Times, and essential fountains of sustenance are integrated into each individual’s plumbing system at home. Nevertheless, with all these advancements, our environment becomes more engaging and receptive when it allows us to reminisce in its presence. The pedagogy of design therefore acknowledges the importance that good platitude could be signified as moments of the obsolete. However, while selected through the appropriate lens of Art, the informal surrounding makes the whole world kin. Certain charms of the past no longer entice us, or at times become a certain hindrance rather than cultivating desire. Instead of a depiction of affluence, one may feel convoluted with a certain baroque entry procession sequence. With urban growth and expected efficiency, processions through buildings have developed through visual connections. The value of these architectural elements has diverged through time. Therefore, the need for a practical architect comes into play. The picturesque is not dubbed an idiosyncrasy and abandoned, as an alternative it is further rationalized with technical possibilities. During each innate conflict between the picturesque and the practical, it is up to the architect and designer to decide if that is a particular battle worth the confrontation. As an architect picks his or her battles between the picturesque and the practical, he or she also experiences the same tension between the formal and informal. Both abide by various rules and complexities and one is not independent of the other. Through this process, an architect should remain courteous and realize that a complete imitation of nature is beyond one’s capabilities. By respecting what already stands in the original site, the designer should then cherish and preserve the intent of precedence. One begins to define the new through the participation of the old, and not lust for a creation of a site-less estranged icon. It becomes a practice of filtering through the puzzle and rearranging of the parts. The exhilaration comes from finding and interpreting a suited composition, instead of from creating a new addition whenever one hits a complication. The blurring of entities becomes a quintessential aspect of design. The blurring of art and life in the picturesque demarcates a dialogue between the past and present, while the blurring of the informal and the formal negotiates policies that adapt to varying sites. The designer retains an authorship to their design, though by understanding the subtleties of the mediation between these elements, he or she has to remain civil to the needs of the surrounding. As Wagner’s idea of the metropolis states, “it is a conception that understands the city itself to be a place, not of some homogenized [global] culture or deracinated [multiculturalism], but rather where the presence of difference within culture, is inscribed and articulated.” In other words, one must not be obsessed with explicit characterization. Furthermore, designing to feed aspiration may begin with a simple form of anonymity in which the addressee can adapt, perceive, and customize the formation. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/2/24/whatisurbandesign-7grke-d4e6m monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547584083608-VPHTD14Y0TKUKYESMYQJ/Charlestown.png pedagogy I’m an urban designer, but I’m not an Urban Designer I spent the better part of my first year as a grad student in urban planning clarifying for family and friends whether I was studying urban planning or urban design. To their credit, I am studying planning at a design school. Also to their credit, I ramble about design a lot. So what’s the difference and does it matter? Well, it must matter otherwise Harvard wouldn’t offer degrees in both urban planning and urban design. To enter the Urban Design program, you need to already hold a degree in architecture (which I don’t and definitely never will). This sets a high bar for the skills and backgrounds required to become an Urban Designer. Firms hiring Urban Designers will expect these skills and backgrounds. So where does that leave us urban designers? I’m an Urban Planner with a strong focus and official academic concentration in urban design, but this doesn’t make me an Urban Designer. Yet, design is how I see the urban space, how I frame urban issues and how I solve urban problems. For me, planning can’t be separated from design. I know governments and design firms employ Urban Planners, and I know they employ Urban Designers. But is there a place for Urban Planners who are designers? Last fall, I took the brilliant course, Urban Design for Planners, taught by GSD Lecturer (and Tombow aficionado) David Gamble. The class introduces planning students to the profession of Urban Design while also teaching the techniques and skills of urban design. Every week, we literally put pen to paper. We stretched our Rhino and SketchUp capabilities to mass and model site designs. We manipulated Photoshop to produce concept collages. We studied successful urban design cases studies and practiced perspective drawing until our eyes crossed. One semester of urban design training by no means amounts to the two years Urban Design students commit to the GSD (nor the many more years prior spent earning architecture degrees). But it’s also not nothing. The planners who walked out of that course have bona fide and useful urban design skills. What are we going to do with those skills? For some of us, we’ll find work as one of the small minority of planners employed in design firms large enough or complex enough to warrant hiring a strict urban planner with strong design skills. For most of us, we’re going to have to prove ourselves and our skills to push boundaries and expand the range of places we’re allowed to enter as planners. I strongly believe there’s a place in the urban planning profession for strong design skills. I think our cities benefit when Architects and Urban Designers shape the built environment alongside Urban Planners who understand and can execute design. I’ll never have the skills and expertise of an Urban Designer, and that’s okay. Planners need their skills. But while I’ll never be an Urban Designer, I’m not giving up on being an urban designer. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/2/24/whatisurbandesign-7grke monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520199685278-4MFASB21US70L76A97P5/c9.jpg pedagogy At the beginning of our curriculum here in urban design at the GSD, we were asked as a collective group to voice our personal understandings of what constitutes its framework as a pedagogical discipline. Many answered with matters of scale, seeing urban design as negotiating a scalar gap between architecture and urban planning. Others answered with issues of the public, seeing urban design as serving the collective communal inhabitants of the city or state. My initial answer was one of mentality, where a project becomes urban when the designers & parties involved adopt attitudes that conceptualize the project in its broader urban context. However, by core semester’s end, it has become clear to me that urban design is in fact not about scales, not only about the public, and only partially about mindset. Scale-wise, architecture can (and should) absolutely be urban. Sculptural objects like monuments (or “counter-monuments” a la Daniel Bluestone) can be urban landmarks that orient the greater grids of the city (as it does in cities like D.C.) or serve as immediate scalar grounds for urban activities like protests and rallies. Small scale interventions can be as urban as large city planning projects (like the Big Dig), and urban design can even transcend the city toward regional megaprojects (like the CA High-Speed-Rail) or even blur national boundaries (as in the case of the Philippines call centers functioning on the time zones of the States). In addition, urban design is not only about serving the public good, but must negotiate between private forces and public governance structures. Urban design must work in the intersecting zone between the incentives of private market-driven capitalism versus more socially oriented ideals regarding the administration of a more Just city. This is true for all forms of governance & economic structures, not only in democratic republics (like the US) but even in more complex models of authoritarian developmentalism that have driven the rapid urban growth of cities in the East. What I’ve come to believe now is that urban design begins with a matter of discerning and critiquing the contemporary issues surrounding our cities today. Throughout the academic discourse at our time here in the UD program, the constant theme of contention in contemporary society has pervaded the plethora of readings, viewpoints, and lecturers we have encountered. These issues lie in the role of community advocacy groups for the administration of justice in the city, the role of historic preservation in accelerating (or mitigating) gentrification in the city, or the complicated paradigms between informal settlements and more regulatory planning apparatus’ that force us to confront the notion of “whose city is it anyways?”, among others. These myriads of issues all involve competing yet equally valid perspectives that entail contention and controversy in the city today. What is crucial is our role as designers (and our critiques of these issues) within the larger back and forth pendulum swing of these contemporary issues of contentions. The importance of our role as designers leads me to another crucial understanding of urban design, which is that while it begins with a critique of contentions, its ends with an intervention in the physical space of the city. One cannot overstate the importance of physically intervening in the urban condition, acts of interventions that accompany and go beyond intangible law or policy reform matters. To design is to intervene in these contemporary issues, and these interventions hold the capacity to project alternative and better futures aimed at changing existing contentions into preferred solutions of consensus. This is why I declared earlier that urban design is only partially about adopting a certain attitudinal mindset in conceptualizing a project in the broader urban context. Our discipline is both a form of intangible knowledge of a current urban condition in a particular moment in time, and simultaneously a proposition for how that condition may be shaped and sculpted in the evolution of the future metropolis. In this way, urban design can be understood truly as a bridge discipline, not only between political bodies, community members, advocacy groups, private and public entities, but also between the intangible issues of society and the tangible, physical design of the city. Therefore, urban design can be understood as a cog in the ‘solution’: the city needs both good design and accompanying policy reforms and governance mechanisms that will enable good design to become successfully integrated into the evolution and use of the city long-term. Coupled with both in hand, great accomplishments can be had in the contemporary metropolis today. To that end, while urban design might be understood as the history of contention and strife in the city, it should also be understood as a confluence of harmonistic endeavors that bring together multiple competing interests to impact a holistic positive change in the broader urban context. In essence, I propose that urban design can be defined as the bridging of ‘tangible’ physical interventions with ‘less-tangible’ contemporary issues of the city, critiquing their contention, intervening in their dialogues, and (if successful) is integrated by the collective public in a way that improves the broader livelihood of the city and beyond. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/3/4/narrative-ax582 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520216647485-3L9G862LIR4EF05PIHZF/narrative.jpg pedagogy - Image by Daphen Binder and Teddy Kofman In preparation for a class presentation about New Urbanism, it was suggested to me to watch a conversation, moderated and organized by Alex Krieger. This confrontation of two distinct ideologies and architectural schools of thought took place in Piper auditorium in 1999. Andres Duany, the co-author and propagator of the New Urbanism movement debated Rem Koolhaas, for whom the city is where the globe is held captive. The conversation is captivating. Both speakers have parallel world views on professional operation: while Koolhaas chooses to “reflect, understand and manifest the culture of our time” in his architecture, Duany is looking towards its reform. Duany argued that people desired the suburb, and New Urbanism was an attempt to make it better and “fix” its inherent problems. In response Koolhaas questioned the cultural and social implications of Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s movement. “The relentless commitment to changing things,” Koolhaas retorted, “is unbearable in terms of the immaturity of the profession as it is currently constituted.” The relevance of this conversation has not subsided in the 19 years that have passed since, yet it is hard to imagine it happening today. It stems, in my view, from a lack of a dominant contemporary narrative in urban design or architecture. It is not that pertinent issues relating to design are not discussed and addressed. The influence of technology on design, the integration of ecological infrastructure, walkability, housing and equality, to name a few, are all ‘of our time’. Rather, these issues are dealt with in isolation and as a result do not aggregate to become a larger framework of operation; there is no clear sense of direction of where this is all going. Having a narrative, some would even say ideology, could mean having a path or goal which can be achieved through design. While it has formal consequences, a narrative is not solely formal. It can provide a broad holistic reasoning and purpose to our work as designers. It may offer an alternative to following the most current technological advancement or responding to the recent ecological crises, important as they are. On the other hand, a collective narrative could be considered dogmatic and confining. Can a single ideology adequately capture the broad and complex nature of design? New Urbanists have defined their own narrative and are following it, but for the rest of us, what is our story? While we constantly try to come to terms with the natural environment and technology, what is the vision we put forth for the spatial environment we would like to live in, and the culture it both represents and generates? It seems like we are operating in a multiplicity of individual narratives, which cross paths at moments while implementing the latest trend. Design trends come and go, and as influential and important as they may be, they don’t yet come together to become a movement. As architects and urban designers, we don’t have a collective professional vision to align with, or to push against. Will the lack of narrative, or the search for one, define our time? Have we reached a mature state as a profession in which we don’t need a narrative, or is this simply a loss of direction? Whose role is it to define our narrative? And most importantly, do we need one? Link to the conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlPZNrzY_t8 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/3/19/8i2c0x0f1rsdankbkgxcayn45x83do-x84ew monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521474401230-5U2P3G55Q1LYOXZ9YIGK/home7.jpg pedagogy - Image by Claudia Tomateo Bigness does not have history Bigness does not have theory Bigness operates without context Bigness competes with context Bigness aims to eliminate context In “Bigness, or the problem of the large”[1] Koolhaas (1995) foresees what would be an important discussion of contemporary architecture. Whether it is a feature evident to the observer or not, somehow it managed to hide from practitioners and historians in order to theorize and understand its origin and possibilities. Was Bigness a natural outcome for architecture? In the absence of a clear social mission for contemporary designers, does Bigness represent an experiment to see how far we can get? Here I aim to analyze what triggered Koolhaas to have such a radical view and also point out its weaknesses and inconsistencies. Understanding that the current narrative canon is oscillating between liquid and iconic architecture, what is the role of bigness and where is it positioned under this spectrum?[2] Bigness does not have history “Beyond a certain scale, architecture acquires the properties of Bigness. The best reason to broach Bigness is the one given by climbers of Mount Everest; “because it is there”. Bigness is the ultimate architecture.” In the first explanation of Bigness, a simple analogy is made to understand the feeling of something that is big, yet passes unnoticed. Mount Everest is used as a natural example for Bigness which is later introduced as the “ultimate architecture”. It is in a sense funny that after all the pre-Columbian history of incredibly large-scale interventions on the landscape, bigness is presented as something “ultimate” for the discipline. The effort to bring the discipline to the limits of one of its most important elements (scale) is valuable. However, this definition fails to recognize its historic references, even if they were not intended for the same purpose.[3] Bigness does not have theory “Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a singular architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures. The impossibility triggers the autonomy of its parts which is different from fragmentation: the parts committed to the whole…. Issues of composition, scale, proportion, detail are now moot. The art of architecture is useless in Bigness.” This is critical for the theory of buildings and cities, because there is a definition of the form of bigness as something diffuse but that is composed by parts.[4] Koolhaas makes a distinction between what he calls “Frankenstein buildings” and Bigness. Bigness is an aggregation of architectural gestures that are independent, but at the same time part of the whole (i.e. Hagia Sofia). Frankenstein buildings are neither one nor the other, and therefore only half successful (i.e. Steven Holl MIT dorms). Bigness operates without context Bigness is not about program, it is about complexity. In “S,M,L,XL” the authors argue for the birth of Bigness as a consequence of current technologies that allow the buildings to be thicker and taller, resulting in artificial interiors, electricity, air conditioning, elevators, among others. Under these circumstances, the interior and exterior become detached. It could be possible that to a certain extent the building does not need a specific context to function, because Bigness is a concept that can be deployed all over the world, even outside cities. The façade does not have to reveal what is happening inside in order to have a conversation with the city, and I find it simplistic to argue that buildings and cities must have direct physical connections. Yes, the building is enclosed, but that doesn’t mean that an attitude towards the exterior is absent. Bigness competes with context There is no global intention for architecture, and that is why we have returned to Bigness; it is the exit door to escape artistic movements and modernism. Koolhaas makes a clear distinction between modernism and modernization. He refers to modernism as the formal language, the style, while modernization is the pioneer attitude. We need modernization, not modernism. Consequently, I will argue that for Koolhaas, the idea of Bigness competing with the context is less a race for the prize, but instead is an agent of change, an “urban condenser”.[5] Bigness regulates the intensities of programmatic coexistence, an unexpected programmatic alchemy. Bigness aims to eliminate context I will use this last statement as a way to understand Bigness in context; historically, theoretically and physically. Many reflections have been made on Bigness as an artifact. But I find it crucial to identify its vision for the city and its influence in the world to reflect about its canon under the contemporary spectrum. “In such a model of urban solid and metropolitan void, the desire for stability and the need of instability are no longer incompatible. They can be pursued as two separate enterprises with invisible connections. Through the parallel actions of reconstruction and destruction, such a city becomes an archipelago of architectural islands floating in a post-architectural landscape of erasure where once was a city is now a highly charged nothingness” (Koolhaas 1995, 201) In this statement, context is reduced to “nothingness”, a figurative argument for the devouring of urban tissue. We can see this sort of dystopian attitude throughout Koolhaas’ life. One of his most famous manifestos “The Green Archipelago” argues for the recovery of strategic urban fragments while Berlin is consumed by a big forest as the ocean of this archipelago of iconic buildings. It was a resilient strategy both in planning and socially. A strategy to recover and to erase the trace of the bombing after World War II. I appreciate Bigness as a space for the minds to float above reality and to free themselves to imagination. And that is precisely where I think Bigness belongs in the contemporary canon of narratives. Today’s architecture is partially about materials, iconicity, liquidity… But it is mainly about the story that the building wants to tell. No problem to be solved, no revolutionary vision of life (in comparison with World War II). That is why architects should narrate their own stories; the issues are plural and we do not share any overarching narrative. There is a need to create our own alternative universes and test our ideas there. During modernism, the future was the goal. Today we accept the future as it is, it escapes us. The intentions of Bigness as buildings to resurrect the city and as laboratories for new theories and new architectural thinking is valuable. Yes, Bigness can build up a city, yet many other elements can do so as well. Context is inevitable, by denying it we accept its existence. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/3/25/eu5nwgsc5yhdrmz1ymaed219ed50x6-3799e monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521998646305-Q8G6XZS340YERNBRHO7Q/Image+02.jpg pedagogy - Image Source: Washington, D.C., February 2017. [Ted Eytan] In the concluding remarks of Michael Murphy & Alan Ricks paper Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity the authors make a definitive plea that the profession of architecture needs to re-focus its values and practices in order to address the current and future needs of the societies it serves. They argue that if not, we will lose our agency as designers. If we take seriously this plea, how and where do we begin to make strides in re-focusing these efforts? Here are three places to start. Language Far too often, our language as designers is inaccessible, irresponsibly insular, and more concerned about constructing a language of own aesthetic. Here I mean this visually, whenthen we use verbal and written language in support of our aesthetic agendas. We debate work using language and syntax that is largely academic in nature and use platforms for communication of work and ideas that are primarily sourced by designers for other designers, becoming trapped in disciplinary jargon as so many other professions do. We must ask ourselves, is this a responsible or even productive practice? If language is principally about communication, and we only ever communicate to ourselves as an audience, how are we ever to be effective in understanding or addressing the current and future needs of the communities in which we work? We would do well as designers, and as students of our respective disciplines to develop new practices of language, to communicate with a broader audience as a way to understand and respond to their most critical needs. Language becomes the bridge by which we as designers can exchange and relate ideas to a diverse and broad collective. We must use language as a means to communicate our ideas outward, not just inwardly to ourselves. Audience Who is our audience? To put it in a different way than for whom do we, design, the question is an easy one to ask, but perhaps one of the more difficult to answer. Urban design for me, even more so than architecture, situates itself as a design of the public realm. As champions of projects of-and-for the people, the greatest challenge is that we are never designing for a single individual or group. There is always a friction a ltension of a greater diverse collective in our work, and I don’t see this as a negative. I see this diversity as being the source of great exchange and possibility. However, what I believe therefore results in our practice is that this complexity leads to complacency and broad generality in our practice, and in our language. We generalize ideas and language as a broad brush, over-simplifsimplification ofying complex problems rather than pressing into the tensions and challenges to give language and resolution to more nuanced readings and solutions for our cities and their citizens. We as urban designers cannot become complacent in accepting broad generalities and in proliferating them as universal ideals globally. There is too much at stake. We must be able to use our agency as designers in reading the city, the communities, the places in which we work, leveraging the skills we possess, in order to construct and articulate new narratives through design in support of the people and locales in which we practice. Values I believe this all leads to values, and this is perhaps where we have the most work to do. I was recently in a studio review in which a critic asked this very question. “What are you bringing to this, what set of values are driving you?” At the time, the question seemed so natural and central to defining the work, but I later realized how abnormal that question was in the context of the academy. We often are more concerned with big ideas than big values. What if this were reversed? What if we as urban designers focused more on listening to our communities and forming values in the stewardship of those communities as a way to generate new ideas, rather than the reverse? Developing values as designers allows us to see clearly the audience of our work, and to articulate through language, the problems and potential solutions to the multitude of challenges we face. This work is no small task, but the earlier we start this practice, the better equipped we are to serve our cities and their citizens. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/4/1/k3rsk9lgw5ixx4sven67ctj3j98ewf-y6ate monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522619320787-QTO4FYB2A9BQ2QB1WT55/2018+1+29_WTP+LOGO+DESIGN-1+CROPPED.jpg pedagogy Just 10 days ago, we released an Open Letter to the Harvard Graduate School of Design community with a simple message: that greater cross-disciplinary collaboration is desperately needed at the GSD if the designers and planners who study within its walls are to graduate with the skills and competencies necessary to truly make a difference in addressing the challenges of our built environments. We argued that the burden for achieving this goal falls on all parties - the administration, the faculty, and the students themselves - and that fundamental shifts in practice must take place in order to embed a culture of collaboration into an institution that is all too comfortable operating in disciplinary silos. The outpouring of support from all corners of the GSD has been beyond heart-warming. Over the course of the week, more than 100 students from across nearly every discipline read our letter, attended our events, wore our pins (inscribed with our campaign’s motto: “Let’s Work Hand-in-Hand”), and voiced enthusiasm for our initiative in casual conversations. Members of the administration and faculty reached out with words of encouragement, affirming that our goals were indeed critical and long overdue. Ideas on how to increase real collaboration flowed forth in abundance, with suggestions ranging from the highly-ambitious (the administration should hire more professors who have interdisciplinary backgrounds; faculty should create new courses on soft skills tailored to negotiation and collaboration for those working in the design disciplines) to the seemingly-obvious (students should talk more to peers from other disciplines in the trays; faculty should publish mid-semester review schedules). The energy around our initiative was palpable. Despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback, we can’t help but temper our optimism with a certain degree of caution. We know that this past week’s conversations are just the beginning and that a long road remains ahead before this work reaches a place where the true benefits of cross-disciplinary collaboration are realized. Culture shifts aren’t easy, and they certainly don’t happen overnight. They also don’t happen as the result of one week, one initiative, or one student group’s appeals. A culture of collaboration at the GSD will require nothing less than a sustained push for changes large and small - both inside and outside of the classroom - from all corners of the student body. To that end, we implore you to continue this effort in your classes, with your professors and department heads, and perhaps most importantly, with your peers. If you have ideas of your own on how to most effectively increase real collaboration at the GSD, we’d love to hear them (hupogsd@gmail.com). In a world with increasingly-complex, ever-evolving challenges, a culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration is critical for the continued success of our collective professions. That works starts here, with all of us, and we hope you’ll join us, hand-in-hand, as we strive for more a collaborative, understanding, and inclusive future. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/4/11/cerda-p4lfe monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523492171911-ESLEOBOU1DDL7DDM56KT/1803.jpg pedagogy - Image source: [https://cartografic.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/barcelona-5-1841-1860-neix-leixample/ Last Wednesday, April 4th, 2018 the Harvard Graduate School of Design hosted the presentation of the very first translation into English of Ildefons Cerdà’s fundamental theoretical writing, his monumental General Theory of Urbanization. Originally published in 1867, and now edited by the Institut d’Arquitectura Avançada de Catalunya and ACTAR, Cerdà’s foundational book constituted the very first attempt to systematically define Urbanism as a new science and professional discipline. In this article, I would like to succinctly highlight three reasons why his legacy stands out as a seminal reference of the highest quality, as well as a source of inspiration for new generations of urban designers, eager to provide appropriate responses to the needs and pressing challenges our cities face today. Design Thinking | Urban Design as a form of Art Cerdà’s revolutionary vision led him to pursue highly idealistic goals by deploying extremely pragmatic and grounded design methodologies. His creative endeavor focused on responding to the urgent need, spurred by the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, for a systematic understanding of what modern cities were and could eventually become, by transforming a once unstructured and outdated set of minor disciplines into a cohesive, rigorous profession. He started by coining a set of concepts that would allow him to codify the fundamental elements and dynamic systems that constitute modern cities. Way before the words urbanism, Städtebau or City Planning started being used in city-related studies, he coined the word Urbanization (1). Cerdà was the very first City Designer to overcome the traditional planning routines inherited from pre-Industrial times, by proposing a set of rigorous methodologies to integrate all the techniques and design considerations that should be harmonized to successfully address the problems that modern cities necessarily face. Systems Engineering | Urban Design as a Science Cerdà understood that modern cities require the juxtaposition of complex systems to effectively deploy the multiple services enhanced by the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. His innovative vision allowed him to systematically address qualitative challenges by developing quantitative models. His ultimate goals addressed considerations such as eradicating early child and mother mortality, increasing the standard of living of working class families, merging social classes within the same neighborhoods and buildings to reduce social stratification, drawing specific street patterns to induce egalitarian power relationships, balancing the human need for isolation and privacy with the ability for people to socialize, prioritizing pedestrian mobility and sociability over alternative means, or establishing efficient mobility and energy systems able to adapt to further foreseen technological changes. To address such challenges, he designed a series of probabilistic, non- deterministic heuristic models, based on extensive avant la lettre Big Data analysis. Cerdà iteratively refined and sophisticated such methods, allowing him to come up with ranges for optimal building height, footprint, and density; street and sidewalk width; integrating all urban services in the very same way we still do to this day. His envisioning of a grid system became a reference for all grid models that came after his Barcelona Expansion plan, including Manhattan in NYC. Human-centered design | Urban Design as a Service Ildefons Cerdà developed his main book whilst designing the Barcelona Expansion Plan, completed in 1859. Not only did his plan accomplish all the fundamental goals it pursued in a masterful way, but it also represented a benchmark for high quality urban design practice. Today we can empirically contrast not only the lasting achievements that his plan brought for the city of Barcelona, but also the benefits of well thought design methodologies. By way of example, recent studies comparing the cities of Atlanta and Barcelona (2) show how metropolitan areas with a comparable population can embody massive differences in terms of environmental footprint or transportation efficiency (3). For all these reasons, Cerdà is a source of inspiration for new generations of city designers who want to contribute to the enormous technical and social challenges that the discipline of Urban Design needs to respond to in this age of rapid and often abrupt technological changes with a human-centered and rigorous approach. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/2018/6/9/2ae1jwk0s33b0tvd1q9w4v24kxo5yd-yggjb monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1528557144627-QSSLMUUXG6ZVSAFMAIG7/Educationtryptych-1.jpg pedagogy - Source: Urban Omnibus. “Teaching Urban Design.” Urban Omnibus, 12 Dec. 2017, urbanomnibus.net/2011/03/teaching-urban-design-2/. What is the dependency of the discipline of urban design on architecture? Is there a necessity to distinguish urban design from architecture? For me, this is a vital question that arose as I reflect back on my first year of academia in the discipline and venture into its practice for the summer. It is a culmination of thoughts that manifested after attending a book talk at the MIT Press Bookstore followed by a conversation between Brent Ryan, Alex Krieger and Rahul Mehrotra. The Largest Art, written by Brent D. Ryan, is an effort to redefine the discipline as an art – an art that differentiates it distinctly from other building arts. The book seemed to have focused most of it energy in illuminating aspects which sets urban design apart from architecture – the incompleteness of form and the temporality of interventions. But before one can venture an answer to such a question, one must understand the foundational dependency these two disciplines share in their intertwined histories. As an academic discipline, urban design was founded at the Graduate School of Design in 1960. The very founding of the discipline was generated around a series of conferences by Jose Luis Sert during the years 1957-1965 to understand the need for and the responsibility of this discipline in the making of contemporary cities. In essence as I understand it, the foundation of the discipline of urban design grew out of an attempt to combine the disciplines of architecture, landscape and planning and emphasizing a need for a ‘bridge’ discipline. However, over the years, the attachment between architecture and urban design has only strengthened: urban design interventions are largely considered to be architectural interventions across scales. This dependency seems to have grown out of the need for the discipline of urban design to rely on that of architecture as a visual language and mode of representation. Cities have been designed long before any formal training in urban design was given. Indeed, the most exemplary urban designs were conceived by engineers, lawyers and socialists. The matters of contestation in the urban realm does not rise simply from spatial incongruencies but from an accumulation of socio-political circumstances. Intervening in the urban requires distinct forms of action arising from the specificity of its geopolitical context. So, the question then arises, how did urban design become so entangled and reliant on the field of architecture to define it? How do we start moving away from architectural design as the solution and start introducing multiple modes of engagement in the learning process? How should we learn urban design and therefore how should we teach it? Architecture is critical as a visual language and as a methodological tool which helps illuminate scalar and spatial relationships. However, we must not confuse architecture as a representational tool with architecture as a methodological solution to urban design problems. While understanding the need for architecture as a visual language, we must also understand its limitations in communicating essential aspects of urban design projects – among others, these embodying concepts of incompleteness and temporality. Furthermore, since urban design already expresses in-depth knowledge of design thinking processes, its education can and should explore how these processes apply to policy creation, advocacy initiatives, private-public partnerships and community collaborations that are so intrinsic to the forefront of the discipline, issues that recede when urban design is framed as ‘architecture’. Rather than defining (or re-defining) urban design, maybe we should start by re-evaluating the way we teach it. A methodological academic shift can have huge implications in the way we approach the practice of urban design today. In thinking of urban design as a way of intervening and critiquing the contemporary city, we must acknowledge the complexity that surrounds issues of urbanization. A focus on ‘design’ as the primary skillset has led to the extensive use of architecture as a solution, whereas the applied practice of urban design requires us to be much more versatile in incorporating research and contemporary issues into design, rather than resorting to default modes of ‘architectural design’ interventions. https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/category/design+education monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/category/Koolhaas monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/category/collaboration monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/category/urban+design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/category/definition monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/category/urban+planning monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/category/interdisciplinary monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/MAUD monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/practice monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/education monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Interdisciplinary monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/discipline monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/urban+planning monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/urban+sociology monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/parks monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/City+Design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Koolhaas monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Narrative monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/context monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Istanbul monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/big+data monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/communication monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/19th+century monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Urban+Planning monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Social+Justice monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Barcelona monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/narrative monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Definition monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/social+life monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Arendt monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/history monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/New+Urbanism monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Landscape+Architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/digital+space monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Urbanization monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Urban+Design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/design+agenda monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/theory monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Plater-Zyberk%27s monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/mobility monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Design+Studies monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/design+education monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/urban+design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Public%2FPrivate monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/representation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Urban monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Harvard monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/public monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/rights monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/GSD monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/definition monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/social+media monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Ildefons+Cerd%C3%A0 monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Cambridge+Analytica monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/facebook monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Scale monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Duany monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Pedagogy monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/urban monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/Collaboration monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/culture monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/pedagogy-1/tag/General+Theory+of+urbanization monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1 daily 0.75 2019-01-15 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/2/24/pyeongchang-75lcm-6cr46-yl5a3-fjala-a9b6k monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547584484304-PIC1PEWW6M50V6QLU66Q/NorthenLima_01_AstridCam.jpg temporality Cemeteries are cultural manifestations to remember a deceased relative or friend situated mainly in cold and rigid landscapes. However, the meaning of sadness, coldness, and death flip to celebration, music, and life in one of the biggest and most popular cemeteries in Latin America: The Nueva Esperanza Cemetery. The collective self-construction of the cemetery, the Peruvian Andean traditions, and people’s manifestations on the “Day of the Dead” and other holidays convert this cemetery into a vibrant, colorful, and hectic public space. Nueva Esperanza – or “New Hope” in English – is an atypical cemetery that began more than fifty years ago in Villa Maria del Triunfo, Lima, Peru. It is a clear manifestation of the waves of immigrants who came from the Peruvian highlands to the coastal capital. In fact, many Andean social and spatial dynamics have brought a special soul and colors to the cemetery. This sprawling cemetery occupies more than 150 acres of arid and steep landscape and contains more than one million tombs. Over time, it has adopted mainly a spontaneous development where the position, structure, material, and nuances of each tomb vary according to the economic progress and dedication of each family. Those developmental and incremental patterns of tombs and mausoleums are associated with the patterns of growth of many informal settlements that originated from basic materials and one-story buildings, evolving into complex configurations, multi-story buildings, colorful wall tiles, and exposed iron bars on the top of the units. The settlement and cemetery share the same built language, but at different scales. The steep territory, arid land, dust, and unstable paths are not obstacles in the configuration of the whole cemetery. Diffuse limits are part of its DNA where a couple of painted rocks or a small tomb expansion might not create a conflict or litigation with other families. The “low density”, land tenure of families and variable topography facilitate the use of some corridors as public streets, vacant spaces as plazas for meetings and performances, and slopes as bleachers. In addition, each of the few trees of the cemetery is a landmark for commercial activity. In addition, “La Cruz mayor” is also an important landmark for praying and gathering. In a nutshell, those features facilitate the cemetery as a perfect space for convergence. This setting becomes an informal public space when a wave of people visits the cemetery, especially for the “Day of the Dead”. A new smell of life comes from Nueva Esperanza on November 1st. An overflow of people invade the cemetery, bringing not only candles and flowers, but also traditional food, beers, religious songs, orchestras, Andean music, and dancing to celebrate the remembrance of a loved one. This ritual is charged with tradition, memory, nostalgia and a high amount of celebration. There is no space for loneliness, only for collective celebration, creating a respectful party. In addition, this massive manifestation incentivizes informal economies for cleaning and painting tombs, parking, selling food and beverages, and the blessing of some families by priests. This living territory of mini urban-informality gathers families, sellers, priests, moto-taxi drivers, and musicians on the corners and interstices of the cemetery. Nueva Esperanza is an example where a cemetery becomes a suitable public space where people’s manifestations and traditions bring life, color, and hope. https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/2/24/pyeongchang-75lcm-6cr46-yl5a3-fjala monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547584282503-X4371GVOH7S1G4WANU7O/NorthenLima_01_AstridCam.jpg temporality The Narayanganj City Corporation (NCC), located 17 km from Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, is situated along the banks of the Shitoloksha in Western Bengal. NCC is one of the oldest urban settlements in Bangladesh and has undergone many transformations: first as a Moghul city, then as a Colonial trading center focused on large-scale jute production, and now as an industrial center for the growing garment and service industries. On account of the city and regional economic agglomeration, Narayanganj is projected to double in size over the next 20 years from two to four million people, estimated by local officials. As NCC continues to rapidly grow, the city’s housing will be greatly shaped by the incoming population, much of whom will be female rural-urban migrant workers. On the national level, concerning rural-urban migration flows, the proportion of young men is greater and there is a broader age composition among men. However, women are increasingly playing an important role and now dominate the flow from the age range 15-29. Women face a litany of social challenges in Bangladesh. While the minimum legal age of marriage for girls is 18, it is constantly flouted. Shockingly, 46% of girls aged 15-19 are married (DHS, 2011) and 9% of girls aged 15 have already begun childbearing (DHS, 2014). Moreover, almost half of urban female workers are unpaid family workers, compared to 4% of urban male workers (BBS, 2011). In the Dhaka Megacity, which includes NCC, the largest percentage of female workers, especially migrants, are employed in food processing, woodworking, garment manufacturing, and other trades. There are significant benefits to the expansion of opportunities for women, both migrants and non-migrants. Female paid employment challenges the norms of social and economic isolation, while providing women with incomes. The trend enables women to marry later, gain social status and recognition, and gain greater independence. However, employment, especially in the readymade garment industry, exposes women to harassment, discrimination, and unsafe working conditions. No initiatives have taken place to adequately house female migrant workers. As such, they are extremely vulnerable. In addition to low wages, migrant workers have limited money to spend on housing as they are likely to send a significant portion of their salaries back to their families in rural villages. Currently, 40% of the city’s structures are temporary (katcha). The structures are usually single story and constructed by community members with found materials such as scape aluminum and mud. Often the homes are elevated with piles, yet remain extremely vulnerable to climatic events, particularly flooding. Structures can house upwards of three families, or 15 people, in an average home size of 480.39 square feet. Overcrowding is frequent and leads to severe health risks. The structures have one shared room, where inhabitants sleep, cook, eat, and, often, work. Women are especially vulnerable in these unsafe housing conditions and over long journeys as they commute from home to work. As such, it is critical to consider housing options for female migrants close to work. Among other interventions, including long-term land tenure agreements, community housing development funds, and housing material upgrading, efforts should be made to specific plans and designs for female migrant workers in Narayanganj. The government should engage in partnerships for employers to provide dormitories with improved accommodation for female factory workers. The dormitories should be located close to work and provide hygienic, well-lit, and secure homes. Given their position as the backbone of the expanding garment industry, on which much of the city’s economic prosperity relies, it is vital to center female migrant workers in the future of Narayanganj. https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/2/24/pyeongchang-75lcm-6cr46-yl5a3 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547584140176-BRSE14ZUZ4PVETW18LGQ/NorthenLima_01_AstridCam.jpg temporality Cities in the developing world have experienced exponential growth since the 1940s due to a massive rural-to-urban migration (Karpat, 1976). This growth has resulted in a proliferation of informal settlements as the main driver of residential urbanization in these cities for the past few decades (De Soto, 2002). It is in this context, that the architecture of the self-built houses of the informal settlements has managed to create architectural typologies strongly influenced by individuality, local backgrounds, and cultural traditions (Matos Mar, 1984). The study and analysis of the self-built housing typology of the informal settlements (or the architecture of the urban non-architects) could bring new spatial configurations to our profession beyond its traditional reach. When we investigate the spatial distribution of informal houses, we see patterns of communal living conceived with the principle ideas of flexibility and temporality. As the urban migrant family grows, so do their buildings; as their children grow older and start a new family of their own, parents tend to add vertical space that will later become its own independent housing units (Riofrio, Driant, 1987). This flexibility works just as well with relatives who arrive from their respective provinces in subsequent urban migrations, and who tend to stay with settled relatives in these cities. Though these buildings grow, they are softly constrained by local zoning ordinances. Such regulations however, should allow for a commercial use of the ground floor at a later stage. Therefore, buildings can become a consolidated unit of communal-living and income generation that grows with an inherent spatial flexibility considered from the very beginning. Ground floors especially, must be conceived with as much spatial distribution flexibility as the structure would allow it. A brief argument can thus be made for a concentrated analysis into the configurations of informally self-built housing settlements, which can and should be conducted to better understand the characteristics of the novel types of spatial distribution used. In fact, I would advocate that architects from the developing world who are serious about potential future designs for urban inhabitants have a real obligation to study the typologies of self-built housing in these informal settlements. My criticism of the field is that it has traditionally thought of these settlements as residing outside the spectrum of what the profession considers formal architecture. But by doing so, we as architects are missing out on the opportunity of exploring spatial configurations, designs and ornaments that we might not have considered before, but which touch on all the primary factors we seek to address with our designs. If we were to address this ongoing process, we would be better equipped to respond to the actual architectural needs of the new urban user, perhaps adding value to our own craft. An opportunity is thus being presented to design for a local identity, instead of endlessly following the trends of the vanguard-architecture styles of generic cities. This new approach, if successful, could be applied to other developing world contexts, in sum creating a richer & crafted local architectural style that stems from the mixture of diverse cultures endemic to our own national realities. https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/2/24/pyeongchang-75lcm-6cr46 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/2/24/pyeongchang-75lcm monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520199460846-88TZEA4PU2T3AJOA49ZG/pyeongchang_main.jpg temporality - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/0/winter-olympics-2018-best-pictures-south-koreas-pyeongchang/aerial-view-pyeongchang-olympic-stadium-venue-opening-closing/ As the 2018 Winter Olympics come to a close, the watching world will quickly retreat to more routine affairs both at home and abroad, and Pyeongchang will likely fade in our collective memory. However, as urban designers, perhaps now is precisely when we should start paying attention to what is happening there. The sustainability of purpose-built sporting facilities and their associated infrastructures after the Olympics have ended has been a major topic of debate for host countries trying to justify the immense expense of their initial construction. These Olympic facilities have historically been extremely vulnerable to underuse in a city’s post-Olympic period. With their original functions vanished, many of these facilities remain today only as faded monuments to bygone glory. However, successful examples of post-Olympic integration of facilities can be found in cities like Barcelona, which hosted the Olympics in 1992. Barcelona’s strategy was the first attempt to consider the Olympics as ‘a catalyst for the redevelopment of its waterfront’ and subsequently designed a series of public spaces including parks, fountains and public arts in order to give something more permanent for the Barcelona residents, as well as retain tourist interest after the ending of the Games. 4 years later, the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 transformed athletes’ housing into dormitories for Georgia Tech University students, reflecting the Olympic event’s role as an impetus for civic improvements of the city. However, unlike cities that had to construct new facilities from scratch, Paris and Los Angeles won bids for the 2024 and 2028 Games respectively by planning to use their extensive network of existing facilities. This myriad of examples show us the varying needs and approaches that face Olympic host cities with respect to scale and status. Learning from both the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul and the 2002 FIFA World Cup, the Korean government anticipated the burdens associated with hosting such major events, and therefore examined Pyeongchang critically. Since the city is located in a relatively remote area, the needs of its infrastructure needed to be resolved first in order to become a successful sustainable city beyond the Winter Games. Therefore, facilities other than major infrastructure or facilities with explicit future demands will be demolished. Furthermore, the Olympic Village will be transformed into condos, and the express train line will remain to increase Pyeongchang’s proximity to Seoul. Distinct from many previous host countries, the Korean government intends to use the Olympics in Pyeongchang to catalyze infrastructure development between Seoul, the capital city, and Kangwon-do province located on the east side of Korea, which has historically not been considered a major development region. Venues that will only exist temporarily include the “roofless” Olympic Stadium, the Gangneung Hockey Center, the Olympic speed skating venue, and the downhill ski course in Jeongseon. In these cases, I’d like to ask what kind of architecture & aesthetics these ‘temporal ‘Olympic-related facilities should take the form of? Some articles say that the roofless Olympic Stadium embodies an extreme case of pop-up architecture in the contemporary context of the Olympic era. However, there are other more critical voices that claim that these facilities have not considered “the disappearance of the project” along with their physical characteristics. Certainly, it opens up new conversations regarding the ephemeral nature of architecture and its increasingly controversial role in event-oriented urban design & city-building. https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/3/19/w8td8huf50mbbysfp8ihfk54zd88k6-5d3yf monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521473922158-F757Z8HF8V5NZ0W7FMDA/cover.jpg temporality - Image by Hayden White Let me take a moment to contextualise the terms of preservation and temporality, and position them as an apparatus that contains both the best and the worst of humanity. Within the historical lineage of events leading to our dominance over the planet, we began to draw and reproduce the environment around us, a form of communication and recording, albeit primitive in nature. We then began to form sounds and words, associating meaning to those noises and thus allowing a transference of knowledge. When beings were able to transfer and accumulate knowledge on a societal scale they discovered history. Generations of hunters and thinkers were able to transfer wisdom down generations that may have otherwise stopped at the grave. Our eldest ancestors stumbled upon the first form of preservation by marrying language and the recording of it. Temporality was encountered at the dawn of agriculture, when man became non-nomadic and first encountered the brutality of seasons. That seasonal registration of time forced society to plan and prepare to store goods for oncoming winters. Society discovered time and its passing. In architecture the term preservation is used for the “aesthetic, historic, scientific or social value” (Mehotra, emergent urbanism in Mumbai, Pg 221), something that provides for generations, and is defined by its “authenticity, ancientness, and beauty” (Koolhaas, Pg 2). However, conservation typically favours the structure and aesthetic of a thing or building. If we are to believe Victor Hugo’s attestation to the king of France that architecture does indeed contain the literature and cultural history of the city, then we might believe that preservation of buildings is in some way a modern preservation of knowledge - but we don’t. The internet allows for an epidemic in storage and dissemination of knowledge that is unbounded. Hugo thought that the history and culture of the city was imbedded in its architecture, and although we might believe that the structure of the city once reflected the movement of people, or even an age – such as Edinburgh’s transition from old town to enlightened new town – we cannot help but find that city building of past decades did not reflect societal temporalities, but rather framed and even attempted to mould them. One might recall Paris’s widening of its streets in order to prevent the establishment of blockades. Thus, we must ask ourselves, what are we preserving? A picture? Some stone? An idea? Oppression? In Rem Koolhaas’s lecture transcript Preservation is Overtaking Us, he describes the emergence of conservation being at a time where anaesthesia, photography, and the blueprint were invented. However, I would argue that conservation does no more than capture an object in time (photography), placing it in a state of suspended animation (anaesthetic). The object is preserved in the city as an artifice of the ancient, suspended within an evolving apparatus of movement and dynamism that no longer has need for it. The true form of preservation, stemming from its roots as storage of information for learning would be to capture it digitally – projects by the UK team ScanLAB capture landscapes and buildings three-dimensionally for use as flythrough tools for learning and analysing. However, Koolhaas pushes an entirely different agenda, honing in on his ideal for an architectural abstinence; architecture that has neither purpose nor intention. From any other perspective than architectural theory, one could not define a more abominable carbuncle for the city as a reflection of the ego. From a strictly ecological viewpoint the preservation of objects and aesthetic values in states of cryogenesis is as useful as hammering nails into a river and asking it to stay put. All that can be accomplished is the mild disruption to the processes surrounding it. https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/5/4/82hyrxgyg3b1w7h2zn1u97rd5ums7u-mw6sj monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525533215804-27UMQ9U3U9SHJQFIXI0T/kREN.jpg temporality - ‘ReFLORESTAndo’ Project: Process to generate economic resources and strengthen social institutions Given the complex economic and political situation Venezuela is currently facing, it is critical to start questioning the scenarios produced by the duality of crisis and temporality while reflecting about the role of the city in overcoming crisis. This reflection is urgent for two reasons: firstly, because longstanding crises require long periods of recovery, especially when the social and institutional fabric has been damaged, generating a political trauma that has negative impacts on the execution of urban interventions. Secondly, because crisis that persist generate periods of normalization over social behaviors that modify space, institutions, and the focus and scope of urban interventions. Henri Lefebvre tells us that “there is a politics of space because space is political.” In Venezuela, this has been taken to both extremes. On the one hand, interactions in public space tend to be more conflictive because of various insecurities and the strong division of society in two opposing political groups. On the other hand, and stemming from this tension, some of the last urban interventions seek to depoliticize the purpose of the projects. Between these extremes, it is also well-known that the public space is what defines the character of cities. In this context, CCSCity450 emerges as a project for the reconstruction of the city, as part of the celebration of the 450 years since Caracas’s foundation and led by architects Aliz Mena, María Isabel Peña, and Franco Micucci. This project aims to create spaces for the discussion about the city, appropriation of space, and the urban memory while proposing alternative models for a possible reconstruction in Caracas. At the end of last year they called for a competition of temporary urban interventions to tackle the crisis, all within a budget of $2,000.[1] Proposals addresed issues such as enhancing accessibility routes to a hospital, tackling food provision, and addressing the challenge of generating resources and empower existing social institutions within the community[2]. In this context, and given the selected projects to be implemented, it is necessary to think about what gets prioritized and who is benefiting from them. How much public participation is really necessary and pertinent? What are the forms in which people can communicate and collaborate to the other public institutions? This could be a way to tie together solutions for an ongoing crisis that demands immediate responses and plans that allow us to rethink ephemeral interventions as structural project bases. This is different to thinking of them as temporal forms of appropriation that will eventually disappear. This is what we should expect from ephemeral interventions in context like in Venezuela. During any given crisis, the awareness of the urban realm’s trajectory over time is fundamental, both for finding new paths of opportunity and to lessen the difficulties of living in such a troubled city. In this sense, ephemeral interventions could have a leading role in the reconstruction of the state. Following an urban plan is essential, but more importantly this process must be visible to its citizens, because only then can it have the power to mold and influence future political projects associated with Venezuela’s reconstruction. To overcome a crisis is to rethink what the future could be, it is to discover and focus on the future we want, based on our own difficulties. That way the difficulties or byproducts of the crisis will be allowed to be incorporated into the process of recovery, which consist on proposing alternative models to foster development initiatives that go beyond a public space that is just a mirror image of other realities. This text was written as part of the Taller Ciudad Venezuela (Venezuela City Workshop) about the urban situation in Venezuela for an event organized by Venezuelan undergraduate students called Plan País (Country Plan) held in Boston University on March 30th and 31st. The session was moderated by Ignacio Cardona (DDes 19), with Andreina Seijas (DDes 20) as note taker. This is the first time that a session about the role of cities in the reconstruction Venezuela was introduced. It is an event that has taken place for more than eight years where groups of undergraduate students meet to study the future of the country. [1] Because of inflation now that budget is less than half of what it was when the winners were announced. [2] This last is a winner proposal called ReFLORESTAndo, by Rodrigo Guerra (MAUD’17) and Karen Mata (MAUD’18) in collaboration with Patricia Álvarez (MDES’18), Pablo Escudero (MDES’18) and Rudy Weissenberg (MDES’18). https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/6/9/ippjnlnqbqjwjsk2cpwe5kg7wbjbnm-kz94r monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1528558061292-UXTRK6HTU1U9T2O6K1I8/urban+water+cycle-01.png temporality - Source: UNESCO, Urban Water Cycle Processes and Interactions. (Taylor and Francis) 4. The evolution of infrastructural networks often catalyzed the progress of modernization. The construction of the modern ideal of a networked city involves an array of integrated infrastructures in a variety of contexts and throughout different disciplines, promoting the “infrastructure ideal” as the central precept of an equitable future in the city. The modern ideals of the city and its infrastructures materialized historically through homebased consumption, is controlled through energy, water, transportation and communication grids, and perpetuates the aspirations of the modern nation states in providing public infrastructure monopolies throughout its territory (Graham and Marvin, 2001). This attempt to “equalize life conditions at a national scale” (Brenner, 1998a, 445) remains one of the main issues in countries in the global south, where the cost, time and bureaucratic implementation that these infrastructural grids require becomes endless.[i] In a Latin American context, the consequences of such long-term fixed infrastructure solutions forces people into resorting to informal solutions. Often, many of these ad-hoc solutions contribute to the unsustainable social, environmental and economic development of these cities. Paraguay, a land-locked country of 7 million in South America is blessed with abundant superficial and underground sweet water. It contains numerous underground reservoirs including the Patiño Aquifer, an unconfined aquifer[1] that lies underneath the capital Asuncion[2] and its metropolitan region. The Patiño aquifer is a crucial reservoir for the area, due to its extension which overlaps with 22 cities within the greater region. Its hydrological characteristics as an unconfined aquifer means that it has a higher risk of contamination due to its proximity and vulnerability to the surface (Monte Domecq and Baez, 2014). Growth in population as well as rural migration into the city has led to uncontrolled regional urban sprawl, where low density and lack of zoning has empowered citizens to occupy land with activities that encourage contamination and exploitation of the reservoir, like slaughterhouses, gas stations, bottled water companies, amongst others (Nogues and Villalba, 2014). In parallel, the government, led by a small political elite, rules with corruption, nepotism and prebendalism resulting in the lack of public services which instantly leads to the privatization of public infrastructure services limiting the access of services to only those who can afford them and fragmenting the region into areas of economic segregation (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Nevertheless, the Patiño aquifer plays a crucial role for the city, given that it provides water consumption through individual wells[3] for more than 60% of the population of the metropolitan region of Asuncion. Within this same area, 77% of the population lacks sewage infrastructure and uses latrines or discharge cesspools[4] as an alternative sewage method, emitting waste directly into the reservoir. The absence of infrastructural support in terms of water provision and sewage networks has led to the contamination, overconsumption and exploitation of this precious resource. These overlapping informal schemes generate a huge risk for its consumers, not only in terms of public health, but also in jeopardizing the future of the aquifer given it’s both the main source of water as well as the receptor of liquid discharge. The case of the Patiño aquifer highlights the importance of considering not only visible infrastructural grids, but also those vital systems that are invisible to our eyes yet extremely critical for a city’s vitality. This case also helps us distinguish how essential the agency of design is in the process of urbanization and how there is an urgent need to design systems that are feasible within the socio-political realities of a country. These design systems hold the capacity to create synergy between urban tissue and other geographies. There is an opportunity to imagine an alternative method of development, where the paradigms of urbanization are not dependent on fixed infrastructural systems, but rather on accessible, sustainable, and transitionary solutions (Mehrotra, 2008) that can mitigate and improve the present while we evolve into a permanent solution for the future. [1] Unconfined aquifer: meaning where there is no confining layer in between the aquifer and the surface 2 Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. Asuncion’s metropolitan region is composed by 22 cities with a population of 2.887.087 people (2012 census). The average density is 26.4 people per hectare. 3 Water extraction through wells refers to one well per household or for low income communities access to potable water through private water well distributors 4 Cesspools: underground reservoir for liquid waste. [1] Unconfined aquifer: meaning where there is no confining layer in between the aquifer and the surface [2] Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. Asuncion’s metropolitan region is composed by 22 cities with a population of 2.887.087 people (2012 census). The average density is 26.4 people per hectare. [3] Water extraction through wells refers to one well per household or for low income communities access to potable water through private water well distributors [4] Cesspools: underground reservoir for liquid waste. https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/7/14/760cuc63r1hudqa03xhz6i4i4aw847-a8h5j monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/2018/7/14/dajfcvttqy5r9azjediy94lvf1nt2s-mttyf-xmw2m monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/category/conservation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/category/urban+design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/category/sustainability monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/city monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/urban+water monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/ephemeral monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/india monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/sanitation+infrastructure monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/public+space monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/space monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/preservation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/koolhaas monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/water+infrastructure monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/public monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/paraguay monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/latin+america monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/context monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/event-oriented monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/crisis monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/spaces+of+interaction monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/temporality monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/analysis monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/Just+City monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/Pyeongchang monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/sustainability monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/Bogota monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/institutions monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/Ephemeral+architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/conservation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/interventions monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/urban monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/Gyeonggang+line monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/Olympics monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/temporality-1/tag/infrastructure monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories daily 0.75 2021-03-05 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/from-a-place-nahant monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1614960748150-ITBDSNT810LG34LNJO9C/000022_003.jpg territories https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1614960748070-NPUCGKYGALIO4MN5DP09/000022_004.jpg territories https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1614960748933-SCOAEBXLHX613WGH6QGM/000022_002.jpg territories https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1614960749622-U2VF3S1KU45W8LR3NIU5/000021_003.jpg territories https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1614960750525-6NCFH9B334SHJW2R3GXW/000022_001.jpg territories https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1614960751272-8CB7VFHTH6GSVSVZKJRF/000021_002.jpg territories https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1614960752064-UIP4DNS9KAIGQ8FO0VK9/000021_001.jpg territories https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c-7dw96-f35nn-4mzt8-4s92b-hwn7j-985am monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1554142498823-HRYXFW29MQ7J16Q9C9OH/metrofluvial.png territories - “Hidroanel Metropolitano” Metropolitan Waterway Ring, GMF, FAU USP, 2010 The fluvial metropolis is a vision for the city of São Paulo – one in which the metropolis is transformed through the exploration of a series of infrastructural interventions in and around the city’s rivers. The Metropolitan Waterway Ring (MWR) is a project led by Professor Alexandre Delijaicov through the Fluvial Metropolis Group (GMF) a research group at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo. Delijaicov has been putting forward this vision since 1998 when he defended his master’s dissertation at USP. São Paulo. The vision wrestles with issues of water management, pollution, congestion, waste management and more. The Fluvial Metropolis addresses and responds to these issues with design, policy and management strategies at the metropolitan level. It is in no way a silver bullet solution to the overarching problems facing São Paulo, but it tackles urgent issues of mobility and environmental recovery. The project can be broken down into 3 main aspects: First, the rivers become paths. They are transformed into a network of navigable canals that can transport people and cargo along 170 km of waterways (GMF, 2010). This increased mobility alone is a substantial asset for a city overflowing with cars and trucks. In 2017 São Paulo ranked 6th in a study that evaluated traffic in over 1,000 cities worldwide. The results showed that the average São Paulo driving commuter spends 86 hours in traffic annually (INRIX, 2018). The creation of a mobility alternative unaffected by cars would significantly alleviate traffic in a city that has almost 9 million registered vehicles (Detran, 2018). The ability to transport larger cargo without the use of the avenues would also allow the widths of the avenues to be reduced, creating usable areas along the waterfront. These new usable areas facilitate the second part of the project. Second, the rivers become linear parks. The areas made available after the rescaling of the canals and avenues would be transformed into recreational spaces. Delijaicov envisions a series of parks safeguarding the wetlands of the river and offering leisure space to the city. They would vary in width and would occupy areas that today are either urban highway lanes or residual buffer areas for flooding. Traffic would be redirected to the rivers, and flooding would be mitigated by the park design. Certain areas would be designated for drainage, ponds and lakes. It is an environmental strategy that also supports civic use through the network of public spaces along the waterfront. This multifunctionality is one of the project’s greatest strengths. Yet, Delijaicov goes further and states that transportation and recreation will not suffice; preservation is fundamental. Delijaicov’s preservation strategy is to introduce housing complexes within this scheme so people are living directly adjacent to the newly created landscape. This creates a new type of stakeholder for the project; the citizen of the fluvial metropolis. He imagines the fluvial metropolis as an interconnected armature framing the public parks along the river’s margins. The waterfront would be inhabited, and the project complete. The combination of all three elements creates a mixed used infrastructural system that operates on different scales throughout the city. Beyond the numerous technical improvements, I would argue the most provocative potential is the creation of a new type of citizen. This fluvial citizen takes a ferry to work, enjoys the weekends biking along the waterfront parks and boasts a view of the water from their apartment that has become home. The fluvial citizen is, perhaps, who the São Paulo citizen would rather be; an aspiration that can only be achieved through the transformation of the city. This is a city with less traffic and fewer floods, with more homes, more parks and more transportation options. If by transforming our environment we can hope to transform ourselves, we ought to have a clear vision for the city we wish to live in. The Fluvial Metropolis and the Metropolitan Waterway Ring are currently in discussion at a governmental level. In 2009 the State Government of São Paulo commissioned an official study to investigate the implementation viability of the MWR. In 2011, FAU USP articulated the urbanistic and architectural studies with viability reports through the GMF. These studies have shifted the discussion from rivers as problems to rivers as solutions. One of the main reasons this discourse is gaining momentum is that traffic is getting worse and the environmental crisis caused by poor water management is intensifying. This creates a new context in which the agenda of the State aligns with Metropolitan Waterway Ring advocates. Within this context, Delijaicov has been creating more awareness of the fluvial metropolis vision, though it is unclear how long it will take for implementation. It took Prestes Maia about 25 years to begin implementing the Avenues plan and it has already been 20 years since Delijaicov first presented his dissertation. Could we be on the verge of action? The political scenario suggests this is unlikely, but not impossible. During the 2018 elections for governor in São Paulo, candidates brought up the fluvial metropolis. The elected Governor, João Dória, stated in his government’s plan that he will implement the MWR in the Tiete, Pinheiros, Guarapiranga and Billings sections (Doria, p.17, 2018). However, he also stated that he would not leave his position as mayor to pursue the state governments’ office, so progress remains uncertain (G1, 2016). The MWR is a project that challenges the urban development framework for São Paulo and subverts the current logic in place. It fundamentally reframes the rivers as crucial assets for promoting a more humane city. It addresses issues of mobility, ecology and society by promoting a network of ports, a system of parks, and the creation of urban fabric on sites currently dominated by 7 lanes of congested traffic. It is a scheme that has been studied both at a comprehensive scale and as an incrementally phased process, while challenging the modernist utilitarianism of São Paulo’s rivers as a destination for waste and a corridor for high-speed automobile circulation. The inspiring work that Delijaicov puts forward has recently shown enormous momentum and showcases one of theory’s greatest urban contributions: the ability to question and illustrate how our cities could be different and allow us to reimagine ourselves in those cities. https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c-7dw96-f35nn-4mzt8-4s92b-hwn7j-etjn5-njgx5-dr25y monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1549897900215-XD10UASWIHNTPLKSSSI9/Pan_Jimmy_IMG_01.jpg territories Normal water is water that behaves. It is a water that is tame. There is nothing to fear, since it is not threatening. It does not violate the boundaries that the built environment has set for it. Water is held behind dams, kept out behind levees, rainscreened, conveyed to drainage outlets on street corners, and only allowed into our sacred space of home if we choose to open the tap or flush the toilet. We have it under control. Home is a protected space, an intimate space, sterilized by the limitations of what we choose to allow within its borders. Home, for the dweller, is the emblem of safety and security—a constructed familiarity isolated from “dirt, fear, and anxiety.”1 Yet, the “intricate set of networks that produce this bliss” remain “invisible to him/her, hidden underneath and outside the house.”2 Buried systems, especially those related to water, have excised process from product, shifted insight to the periphery, and inadvertently arrested our imaginary to a routine of maintenance rather than a custom of adaptation. If within this status quo normal water is assumed as the only water, and the multiplicities of waters are reduced into a homogenized singular water, then disaster must be a product of water blindness. Goodbye line, it was nice knowing you. Where does my lot end? Where does yours begin? Inundation doesn’t care. The compulsory and reflexive desire to rebuild in the exact same location after devastation demonstrates the success of the illusion—a “high level of control over the interaction between edifice and its environment” is the only course of action.4 To discover new futures, planners, policy makers, and designers must investigate unfamiliar tools. We do not need control. Subduing randomness to order and converting uncertainty into risk is a dangerous game of drawing boundaries by assumption. Resilience is a confused term. It is defined as “the quality or fact of being able to recover quickly or easily from, or resist being affected by, a misfortune, shock, illness, etc.; robustness: adaptability.”5 Isn’t robustness the antithesis of adaptability? We are conditioned to focus on ‘coming back stronger’ or ‘bouncing back’ to normal. Similarly confused are the myriad of urban projects focused on thickening the shorelines. We are merely redrawing boundaries, adding breadth to the line, and endowing thinness with an abundant poche of false gravity. I wonder—would Euclid laugh or cry? Normalcy is governed by elasticity. Transformation emerges from plasticity. “When an angel accidentally falls and drowns in the sea, its desperately flapping wings send out vibrations that cause a harmonic fluctuation that coincides with the sound of a suppressed cry, announcing an ocean storm. Think not the feathers washed up on the shore a natural event.”6 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c-7dw96-f35nn-4mzt8-4s92b-hwn7j-etjn5-njgx5 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547582182017-FNZTRTI0RM8HKNZ199CH/Phillip-Island-House-by-Denton-Corker-Marshall-002.jpg territories - Tribal Delegation to the White House to negotiate land rights, 1860. Image source: The National Archives, David M. Rubenstein Gallery, Records of Rights The extent of Oklahoma’s state sovereignty currently rests on the outcome of a 20th century capital murder case. In 1999, Patrick Dwayne Murphy was convicted of the murder of George Jacobs in an Oklahoma court and was, as is state law, sentenced to death. Both men were citizens of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and the defense claimed that the crime occured in Indian Country rather than within the state of Oklahoma. For the defendant, this spatial determination is a matter of literal life or death; major crimes occurring in ‘Indian Country’ fall within federal jurisdiction, making capital punishment an unlikely outcome, whereas major crimes elsewhere fall within state jurisdiction. If the court ruled in favor of state jurisdiction, Murphy would certainly be sentenced to death. In his obvious best interest, the defendant appealed the Oklahoma court’s ruling, claiming that the state illegally asserted jurisdiction in Indian Country and that Creek Nation territory still existed as delineated by its 1866 reservation boundary. Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, and it has since been assumed that this boundary no longer exists. Yet, as the arcane dimension of American Indigenous land law proves, the question of the case--whether Congress ever disestablished the 1866 boundary of the Creek Nation--has been escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court without clear indication as to which direction it will fall. The spatial, legal, and cultural implications of this forthcoming decision cannot be understated. If the Court determines that the Creek Nation boundary was never dissolved, tribal land, governance--and therefore sovereignty--would be restituted to the tribe. It would set a precedent for the remaining four of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ to challenge the historic disestablishment of their boundaries, and it could ultimately return half of the state of Oklahoma--roughly three times the area of Massachusetts--to tribal territories. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547582255535-F3732XRVZY4TFRU5FC7T/image-asset.png territories - Previous boundaries of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’. Image source: the author. In the current era of Indigenous self-determination, courts are ruling in favor of greater degrees of sovereignty for tribes. This means that the tribes are gaining autonomy from federal paternalistic oversight and state interference than they have in past eras of federal law. Common law, at its core, is iterative. In real time, it alters rights and their relationships to land and is decided upon by people in inherently temporary positions. It builds upon the current cultural ethos, which creates a system of power and control that is both reflective and directive of cultural norms. If territory is the product of socio-spatial processes that aim to exert power or control, the determination of criminal jurisdictional authority is part of the ongoing processes of (re)territorialization; the outcome of which is the territory itself. As David Knight states, “territory is not; it becomes, for territory itself is passive and it is human beliefs and actions that give territory meaning.” The Creek Nation’s current territory encompasses metropolitan Tulsa, where over one million people reside, work, commute on state and interstate highways, and pay taxes. Still, the single most confounding aspect of this case is that America has yet to envision a future where urban land is also tribal land. Where profitable energy industries are headquartered. Where the urban dweller pays taxes to the Creek Nation. Where indigeneity is not stuck in a history book. Where multiple sovereigns collide. Felix S. Cohen, creator of the modern field of Federal Indian law, states “the laws governing the Indians of Oklahoma are so voluminous that analysis of them would require a treatise in itself.” It is this complexity that has deterred spatial thinkers from utilizing law and governance as lens through which patterns and forms of spatial development are investigated. Furthermore, tribal jurisdictional politics have been largely unexamined as a spatial component of urban studies, and perhaps they can be informative of both modern tools of territorialization as well as a projective future for the coexistence of multiple sovereigns. Adelle researches the territorial process of global capital, particularly those related to the cycle of non-renewable resources and American Indigenous land. https://vimeo.com/268261848 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c-7dw96-f35nn-4mzt8-4s92b-hwn7j-etjn5 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547583464655-TC855VBPRIYAFK7FPVDA/Phillip-Island-House-by-Denton-Corker-Marshall-002.jpg territories - Meik Design [http://www.meik.jp/profile.html] Tokyo has been cultivating its borderless urbanism with one of the most intensive railway networks in the world. I believe that Tokyo’s model of transit-oriented development (TOD) associated with this railway network will remain essential in the future not only as the role model for developing countries, but also as Tokyo’s leading force in competition with other international cities. In 1920, Tokyo’s railway infrastructure expanded rapidly in response to motorization. It is now composed of 158 railway lines and 882 stations owned by 48 public and private companies1, which enables 85% of commuters to use the public transit system.2 Putting this in a global context, three stations in Tokyo dominate the top 3 rankings of the world’s busiest stations.3 This clearly shows that Tokyo's train stations accommodate and are an essential part of its urban activities. Several backgrounds must be covered first to understand this situation. Railway networks in Japan didn't historically possess state power until the 1920s post World War I, where railway developments began to strengthen their industrial and military transportation capacity . At that moment, railways represented the accomplishment of Japanese modernization and the power associated with the new government. However, after the devastation of World War II, GHQ / SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), which controlled the allied occupation of Japan, transformed the national railway company into a semi‐governmental corporation that weakened the power of the Japanese government.4 This new power arrangement, which removed embodied state power, enabled the train stations to become urban spaces. As a result, great train stations, which can sometimes become too monumental in the urban fabric, have become hubs for vibrant civic activities. In addition, although they possess public character, TODs (railway + real estate development) have been one of the most prominent business models for profit-seeking capitalists.5 In the 1910s to 1930s, Ichizo Kobayashi funded a railway and real estate developer company in the western part of Japan where, in this business model, the developer purchased more land than they needed just for railroads, and constructed retail centers and housing around the stations.6 When this rail was connected to the retail center, the stations worked as hubs to stimulate more substantial housing development around these sites, while simultaneously producing long-term profits for the railway company. The success of this business model drove other players to enter this field thereby enabling public-private partnerships that allowed a building of comprehensive plans to distribute a network of supported urban growth. Lastly, the train stations, especially Japan Railway East after the 2000s, expanded their business into more diverse industries, such as commercial, hotel, museums and nursery rooms, to make people stay longer within their parcel or even within the ticket gated area.7 For example, at Tokyo station, Japan Railway East incrementally expanded the ticket-gated area to accommodate restaurants and retail to serve the need of its transit passengers. This scheme has been criticized because it has weakened the surrounding retail clusters; however, this business model undoubtedly attracts considerable patronage and provides urban amenity hubs. Within its historic & capitalistic context, TODs in Japan works as a hub or a network to stitch urban sprawl together, rather than a boundary that segregates it. This railway "boundary" serves as an urban amenity that support Tokyo’s borderless urbanism while simultaneously improving its quality of life in greater metropolitan area. As preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games are undertaken, the railway companies are now improving the language barrier-free environment for incoming international audiences. These continued improvements on its historic legacy will further strengthen Tokyo’s competitive ability in contemporary Asia’s urban century. https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c-7dw96-f35nn-4mzt8-4s92b-hwn7j monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547583506568-QR3FUW40AE6IQ4YTL43M/Last%2Breminiscences%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bpast.jpg territories The shoreline is a border between the earth and the sea that acts as a physical projection of the unstable balance between bothexpanses. From the jagged rocks to the subtle curves of the beaches, the shoreline is the confluence between specific features of both the land and the sea that agree on their respective territories in an endless war of attrition. First, mankind established itself along the coastline with respect to its natural characteristics. Creeks were used as ports because of their protection against the winds and ocean currents. Then, humanity's necessities evolved, and the shoreline modified to meet these new needs. The coastline has been moved back like the polders, in order to extend habitation and cultivation areas. The shoreline has also been smoothed, for instance in the case of commercial ports, to enable boats to dock. Similarly, overcrowding in cities, such as Tokyo or Singapore, has led to the construction of artificial islands to house their inhabitants. All these changes, emergent from utilitarian and economic external, altered the shape of the shorelines far from their intrinsic attributes. Dubai houses the most radical examples of shoreline operations. The islands of Palm Jumeirah and Palm Jebel Ali are two significant examples of these operations. The coastline of the Persian Gulf is designed as a palm tree in bird’s eye view, the symbol of hospitality and rest in the Islamic culture. The Emirates, once totally dependent on oil revenue, has now diversified its economy. Planted in Dubai, the symbolic palms that have grown with the generation of oil income attempt to spread this symbolism to an urban scale by welcoming tourists and investors under the shades of their leaves. Like the Nazca Lines which were presumably used for rituals to attain water, the palm islands are used by the Dubai government to attract foreign capital to ‘make its rain’. However, from a human perspective, inhabitants of the palm islands do not perceive its symbolic shape. Rather, satellite technology has enabled the projection of these palm shaped borders onto our screens, the only medium where these shorelines become apparent. In a country where camels are retrained as touristic attractions, the past remains a strong nationalist tool. The symbols remain but the use of technology seems almost like a visceral reaction against nature, once so close to the way of life of the Emirati. https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c-7dw96-f35nn-4mzt8-4s92b monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547583581498-IQWLWMU5GVHXF5EG414T/Phillip-Island-House-by-Denton-Corker-Marshall-002.jpg territories - Image Credit: By authors “From a point on the South line of Bienville Boulevard, that is coincident with the West line of Block “T”, run thence Westwardly along the South line of Bienville Boulevard a distance of 160 feet to a point; thence turning an angle of 90 degrees 00 minutes to the left run Southwardly a distance of 350 feet to a point; thence turning an angle of 90 degrees 00 minutes to the right run Westwardly a distance of 126.5 feet, to an iron pipe with a concrete collar, thence run due North on said West line 352.26 feet to an iron pipe with a concrete collar on the South line of Bienville Boulevard; thence run Easterwardly along said South line 86.75 feet to the place of beginning.” The property herein described is yours. Also, it is underwater. Four lines at right angles, narrated like a set of directions, filed away in the record of deeds, is what generally constitutes a formal, legal description of real property in the United States. The nuanced physical characteristics of land, or the fact that land may no longer exist, feature minimally if at all in the official record. Instead, artificial lines that delineate the boundaries of ownership are superimposed onto an abstracted, fixed space: terra firma. This fundamental practice has been underway for centuries: the territorial sovereignty of the United States is predicated on the transformation of land into discrete, calculable parcels. But on the coastlines, the boundaries and limits of private property are being put to the test. Dauphin Island, a barrier island off the coast of Alabama, is geomorphologically predisposed to migrate landward overtime and is highly susceptible to tidal action and sediment movement. Large swathes of the shoreline regularly erode and accrete. And yet, private property has dominated the landscape — after every storm, sand is restored, and homes are rebuilt and propped up with taxpayer money. Today, nearly sixty “beachfront” parcels abutting the Gulf of Mexico, platted on land in 1953, are now completely submerged. Though common law attributes title of submerged property to the state, on Dauphin Island, owners of these submerged lots still pay their taxes and can technically claim ownership. Here, on this contested coastline, property assumes its purest form as a social construct. Divorced from physical realities of the ground, these submerged parcels don’t enclose land, but rather circumscribe interested parties that mutually agree on the abstraction and commodification of space. Thus, despite radical changes in the environment, the political, social, and economic institutions in the United States have proven anathema to change and have demonstrated their absurd desire to subsidize the concept of private property despite the actuarial cost. Land movement and sea level rise on barrier islands, however, holds a mirror to the conundrum of the private property regime in America and reveals, in the words of Theodore Steinberg: “Real estate is not as real, solid, or lasting as it may seem...Real property, like land is supposed to stay put; that is what distinguishes it from, say, personal property, which can be moved or carried around, [but] nature’s complexity can at times make ownership a precarious, even unreal affair.” https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c-7dw96-f35nn-4mzt8-ajagg monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547583616423-YGLZXXCEHTMO1R0QHADO/Phillip-Island-House-by-Denton-Corker-Marshall-002.jpg territories - Ourfalian, George. “The Al Shaar neighborhood lies in ruins as Syrian pro-government troops advance through the Karm al Jabal district during theiroffensive to retake Aleppo”, December 5. Los Angeles Times Time passes, the destruction continues, confusion and fear persist. Syria today is a country that has been torn asunder. Racked by unrest and violence, the nation has become a flashpoint in international politics with no end in sight to a conflict that has defined the country over the past years. “Syria,” we are told, is “burning”, which in some respects is an accurate description of the state of affairs for the past seven years. Moreover, as one of the flashpoints of the civil war, the city of Aleppo stands out in terms of the human and physical toll that has accompanied its destruction. It is, in every sense of the word, a ruined city. The battle for control of Aleppo has been likened to the battle for Stalingrad during World War II, which left thousands dead and the city in ruins. As one of the last major strongholds in the resistance to Assad, Aleppo soon found itself under siege, resulting in an onslaught by forces loyal to the government, as well as the Russian military, which fully supported Assad’s characterization of the rebels as terrorists. The consequences for the city were almost incomprehensible; leaving some sections of Aleppo totally destroyed and uninhabitable and rendering much of the ancient city unrecognizable to those who once lived there. Tens of thousands of residents fled before and during the siege, only to return to the city to find it a site of complete devastation, where all familiar landmarks had gone. Even today, nearly a year after the siege ended with Assad’s forces regaining control, when almost 300,000 displaced Aleppans have returned to the east of the city since the start of 2017, the humanitarian situation remains grave and the city remains a shell of what it once was. Aleppo is, quite simply, a traumatized city that no longer resembles what it once was. Amidst this destruction, Aleppans struggle to find meaning, looking to memorialize what was lost while hoping to find meaning in the future. Looking forward: The world is increasingly facing unforeseeable risks, from rising violence to social inequity. Such challenges have placed new demands on architecture, positioning mitigation and adaption at the fore. In a post-war context where the landscape is marked by destruction, opportunities abound to create new meanings, new identities and new experiences. With these opportunities, however, comes the responsibility both to create an architecture that fulfills the hopeful expectations of the people and that replaces absence with abundance. Of crucial importance is an appreciation of resilience that encompasses more than immunity to trauma and the ability to recover from chaotic events. Instead, resilience transcends survival, since the site itself will always exist, even after destruction, and depends on adaptation as its key measure. Many significant changes will occur during the next century, and architecture that mitigates environmental, social and economic risks will play an important role in helping society adapt to the challenges that will arise. https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c-7dw96-f35nn-4mzt8 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547583542086-HDOPQXGNFR0Z0KA79L7Y/Phillip-Island-House-by-Denton-Corker-Marshall-002.jpg territories - https://www.behance.net/gallery/16976969/The-Concentration-City ‘Wait!' Franz leapt out of his seat and stared at the indicator panel. ‘What's the matter?’ someone opposite asked. 'East!' Franz shouted. He banged the panel sharply with his hand but the lights held. ‘Has this train changed direction?' ‘No, it’s eastbound,' another of the passengers told him. ‘Are you on the wrong train?’ 'It should be heading west,' Franz insisted. 'It has been for the last ten days.’ 'Ten days!’ the man exclaimed. 'Have you been on this sleeper for ten days?’ Franz went forward and found the car attendant. 'Which way is this train going? West?’ The attendant shook his head. 'East, sir. It’s always been going east.’ ‘You’re crazy,’ Franz snapped. 'I want to see the pilot's log.’ 'I'm afraid that isn’t possible. May I see your ticket, sir?’ This extract from J.G. Ballard’s dystopian short story Concentration City (1957) captures the moment at which the protagonist, Franz, discovers that his mission to discover free space in an endless urban agglomeration is not to be. The story is set in a place of immense human and built density, where property is traded by the square foot and addresses locale space in a seemingly endless vertical and horizontal three-dimensional grid. Franz, a physics student, has developed a conceptual flying machine, and hypothesizes that free space must exist somewhere on the edge of the urban. Here, he could test his invention, so he sets off in one direction on a ‘Supersleeper’ highspeed train to find it. As we’ve discovered, the train travels for ten days through variations of this hyperdense fabric only to suddenly be traveling back. In a true science fiction turn, the train delivers Franz back at his starting point at the exact date and time of his departure. In crafting this ubiquitous urbanity in three (possibly four) dimensions, Ballard creates a world full of boundaries, but without a boundary itself. These boundaries appear in the rigid property matrix, severe class distinctions, and the ever-present walls which come to demarcate everything. In Franz, he creates a dreamer who imagines a world beyond and, unlike many bounded by their daily drudgery, sets out to find it. By choosing to do so, Franz draws his own mental border; the city must eventually come to an end and at that point there should be enough free space to fly his machine. Designers are often tasked with imagining and preparing for distant possibilities, and like Franz, are left trapped in the machinations and self-replicating material matrix of their political and financial systems. This is not to say that we designers should be quasi-deities dictating life, but rather, we should be exploring the boundary zones we collectively construct as a society, and working in the murky space beyond. In imagining the beyond, Franz constructs an absent boundary: a space of immense social, political, and cultural productivity. Today, that boundary is often associated materially with borders and walls, and socio-politically with insurmountable inequality and divisions. However, we are so mired in overcoming this mesh of boundaries that ensnare our everyday that we fail to see, and imagine beyond, the immaterial boundaries that confine us. https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/4/1/5qxi64py2pytv620k2r66ww3lcyr1c-7dw96 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522633071776-RV9VP8EX11429C8KSL6U/Phillip-Island-House-by-Denton-Corker-Marshall-002.jpg territories - Image by John Gollings. Phillip Island House, by Denton Corker Marshall The idea of limits is crucial to contemporary life. Limits bring order and understanding to space, they provide a frame for which to enter and exit. How else do we feel the excitement of moving through the chaos of one environment and into the sanctuary of our private rooms? Thresholds, portals and entrances provide the rhythm for our experiences and encounters on a daily basis. It is within this ideology I would argue that an urban-architectural project could exist. There is a tendency to celebrate the generic nature of the expansions of many contemporary cities. Sprawl and urbanization have been a result of many factors and forces, and the outcome a new form of territory. This new form of territory has blurred the boundary between the traditional center and the periphery, to a state where we really have no definition of the city anymore. In defining the city, or at least the idea of a city, we may be able to argue for the return of true urban design projects. These are projects which have value in either being part of, or against the city. The projects that sit on the fence are precisely that – they give up something to be a part of something else. Projects that stand for something take on a ratbag attitude, somewhat naively but at least they stand strongly in favor of something. To be clear, this is not an argument against the explosion of urbanization, but simply an approach to claim one side or the other. What would a project look like that argued for the return of the definition of the city? One answer could be that of limits. In other words, the new project could have no real interest in style or facade, but be purely concerned in defining itself against what it is not. It is a project that sets up boundaries between itself and the rest, which states clearly its political intention without blending in to the rest of the city. The urge to blend, to mix or to become hybrid has diluted the power of the urban-architectural project to make a statement. Once the ability for urban projects to comment on their position in the city is lost, they may no longer be urban at all. https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/5/4/1sau83bb58bk4mr4f0mdhjqc4vqns6-fwdlc monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525480556543-Y2LHFTIY4KJR80QERGYH/rod1.jpg territories - Evolution of Lake Valencia, water consumption, and effects of sea level rise Image Credit/ Bibliography Trasvase de agua desde el Lago de Valencia, Venezuela | EJAtlas. (2016, May 8) Retrieved from https://ejatlas.org/conflict/el-trasvase-de-las-aguas-del-lago-de-valencia Cities are differentiated from their hinterlands by their density and access to work, services, products, entertainment, and personal development opportunities. In Venezuela, cities like Caracas are understood through a center versus periphery relationship that privileges cities over the rest of the country. This disproportionate distribution of resources can be defined as uneven development. This is important, because a development plan for Venezuela that focuses only on the main cities will tend to exacerbate the center-periphery divide, unless the forms of territorial, economic, and social relationships are re-imagined. The UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) has many studies that link urban and economic decentralization with higher levels of national development.That is why myself, Karen Mata (MAUD’18), and a group of students from the Simon Bolivar University are starting a research project on Lake Valencia, the second largest water body in Venezuela, to try to better understand the relationship between the city, environmental considerations, and economic activities. After the expropriation of more than 24,000 acres of Sugar Cane fields and its later abandonment by the government, Lake Valencia has been expanding and encroaching on surrounding working-class neighborhoods, endangering many industrial and institutional activities located at its borders over the last decade. Moreover, high levels of pollution in the lake as a consequence of receiving industrial and city waste waters, the expansion is not only compromising the safety of the nearby residents but also the regional water system. . To face this problem means to break the urban-rural cliché and re-imagine the system of relationships between different scales of populated centers, between agricultural and industrial activities, and between urban and environmental vulnerability. The economic limitations that Venezuela will face during its reconstruction will inevitably limit the type of infrastructure that can be implemented. Nevertheless, it is imperative that projects confront more than one issue at a time, integrating management of natural resources with economic productivity, housing, and public space. It will be fundamental to focus urban projects in promoting economic and social development, while building the infrastructure and services needed to face the urban and environmental challenges that we will are experiencing. This will only be possible if we manage to cultivate the technical, economic, social, and institutional capacities at a local scale. By transforming the highly centralized governance model in Venezuela, we could enable new forms of institutional collaboration across the territory. This text was written for one of the modules of the session Taller Ciudad Venezuela (Venezuela City Workshop) about the urban situation in Venezuela for an event organized by Venezuelan undergraduate students called Plan País (Country Plan) held in Boston University on March 30th and 31st. The session was moderated by Ignacio Cardona (DDes 19), with Andreina Seijas (DDes 20) as note taker. This is the first time that a session about the role of cities in the reconstruction Venezuela was introduced. It is an event that has taken place for more than eight years where groups of undergraduate students meet to study the future of the country. https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/6/24/0s1w47ylg8x3fngbgokrffshvv5f4h-bmlwj monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529817571085-ZOFIQSDHGMQSUB44JQIS/China-HSR-Update-16-Dec-2012.jpg territories - The Transport Politic, https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/01/12/high-speed-rail-in-china/ “Speed replaces distance”. Currently in China, High-Speed Rail is not only a new mode of transport that links cities and regions together but it is also catalyzing a new scope of urbanization and economic development. The Chinese High-Speed Rail system is unique given China’s huge land mass. Despite the vast distances between its North and South, East and West, the High-Speed Rail network covers almost the entire country. There are three major HSR systems in China: regional HSR connecting major metropoles, intercity HSR connecting regions within megalopolis’, and the future potential of HSR connecting Chinese to other countries across the border in line with its “One Belt One Road Initiative”. Jean Gottmann raised the idea of the “Megalopolis” as early as 1957 and since then, mega-regions have become a crucial identity in measuring the level of social and economic development of a country or region. According to the current definition, there are 10 such megacity clusters undergoing planning in China. Among them, the largest three accomplished ones are the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Jing-Jin-Ji megaregion which are connected by this regional High-Speed rail system. The development plan of the Jing-Jin-Ji Megaregion was expected first, largely because of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and was officially announced through Chinese Central Economic Work Conference in late 2014. The Jing-Jin-Ji megalopolis consists of a metropolitan area 6 times the size of New York’s and is going to be an experiment as a prototype of modern urban growth for China and possibly for the whole world. Its strategy was first conceived of and implemented through transportation and infrastructure networks. It is expected that by 2020, 9 projects and 1100 kilometer of new track will be laid, and that it will become a “one-hour commuting circle” in the area, interlinking multiple cities infrastructural-ly, economically, and politically. Three influential aspects are directly affecting Chinese cities by the HSR. First, it is improving the densification of population along the HSR lines. For Yangtze River Delta, there is an average population growth rate of 0.51% and a growth rate of 0.79% in the HSR cities. For cities at Wu-Guang Line, the average population growth rate is 0.60%, and is 0.96% for HSR cities. Secondly, it is improving the polarization of regional hub cities. These mega-cities have been overgrowing in population that spills out to contiguous cities, gradually releasing the pressure of its high density and increased industry. As such, due to its lower transportation cost and time, the HSR has expanded the influence of these cities, helping to improve the development of its surrounding regions. Therefore, capital cities can hold a higher concentration of population. Nanjing and Hangzhou, capital cities in Yangtze River Delta, have a relatively high growth rate, 0.74% and 9.53%. As the cities are already populated with relatively high attractions, thanks to the optimization of people and resource flow, it is easier for these capital cities to expand their radiation scope. These push and pull factors will bring out dynamic changes in Chinese cities within a few years. Lastly, it is important to note that the effects are not necessarily beneficial to the small cities along the HSR. Only cities along the HSR line and close to the major cities have higher growth rate. The development of Jing-Jin-Ji megaregion aims to decentralize Beijing. Intercity HSR lines help to disperse its non-capital functions more directly, and to create half-hour and one-hour economic zone. With the opening of some new Intercity HSR lines such as Jing-Zhang Line (Beijing to Zhangjiakou), Jing-Cheng Line (Beijing to Chengde) and Jing-Jiu Line (Beijing to Kowloon), Beijing could also expand its economic and political influence and disperse its population and functions to Zhangjiakou, a one-hour city to the west; Chengde, a one-hour city to the north-east; and Hengshui, a one-hour city to the south. In effect, the possibility of connecting to all four-axis directions from Beijing will help enable the establishment and realization of Jing-Jin-Ji Megalopolis. https://www.ud-id.com/territories/2018/6/24/huma monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819008127-QA0RDZ2IM4OQY3A8OY4A/diagram1.jpg territories …Publicness is a performative and incremental condition embodied in the hybrid physical-virtual environments of evolving societies. Publicness happens, taking on a performative aspect that is often lost when we focus too heavily on architectural space alone. Public space is always an appropriation of an existing space, a layering of a political space over legal space… - Adrian Blackwell, Tar and Clay: Public Space Is the Demonstration of a Paradox in the Physical World, 2017 When architects and urban planners talk about creating democratic spaces, they fall into the trap of immediately talking about the spatial attributes of publicness. But the search for democracy in urban settings is not necessarily about the sole considerations of spatial phenomenona. In actuality, publicness goes beyond ownership and spatial attributes. When talking about public spaces and democracy, the architectural space is just the tip of an iceberg. Patrick Geddes points out “The hope of the city lies outside of itself.” Looking through the lens of democracy, the disappearance of the idea of the “public good” under neoliberalism has had concrete effects in the city. In the early and mid-20thcentury government-funded parks and squares were broadly provided for all citizens as a disciplinary strategy of social management. Political power often seeks to reorganize urban infrastructures and urban life with an eye on the control of restive populations. (Harvey, 2013) And while these reorganizations are clear in some cases, in other cases some numb the mind while others mesmerize the eyes of the people. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819098957-SS9Y34WQ1RG6LVNOOEEJ/diagram13.jpg territories Challenging the urbanistic trend of an “apolitical domesticity”, new ways to define public spaces and publicness can be traced to house environments. This exploration of the house environment would bring “political domesticity” where true publicness is located in the house, the traditional hub of “privateness”. In searching for new ways to define public spaces, this investigation would find new sites for the representation for its people. These sites will be helpful in “spatializating", maintaining, and strengthening public interaction, which would otherwise be floating around the city in a nomadic form. Moreover, these “hubs of privacy” can be perceived as a different form of cul-de-sacs and as an extension of a powerful non-space that denies any programmatic imposition, the street network. Rather than seeking state and market driven public spaces which are in most cases manipulative and alienating, masquerading behind beauty masks and not helpful in triggering positive change in the society, re-appropriation of the private spaces should be considered. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819054922-00MOPT5RZZFRWZL9AJMA/diagram12.jpg territories …Geographer Kanishka Goonewardena has made a powerful argument for the ideological nature of the capitalist city, claiming that the fully immersive sensory aesthetics of urban space make it a very powerful ideological tool. We simply cannot deny what we feel, and urban space is experienced with all our senses… - Adrian Blackwell, Tar and Clay: Public Space Is the Demonstration of a Paradox in the Physical World, 2017 In this regard, public spaces acted as the opium of the people. With commonly used terms like liveliness, beauty, livability, the effects of the state and market regulated public spaces on the society is covered. As urban theoretician Alvaro Sevilla - Buitrago points out, state driven public spaces, like parks, are suggesting a different form of enclosure in the urban setting. Sevilla mentions that the park, in this case Central Park, is understood as an early stage in the project of imposing new social relations through the enclosure of public conduct and he designates the park as a first effort to “tame the urban commons and prevent the subaltern appropriation of public space.” (Sevilla, 2013) On the other hand, public spaces have transformed into hubs of consumption. What can be seen in this period, is a restricting of spaces of public authority, from their Keynesian Fordist function as normalizing spaces designed to make all citizens into good capitalist consumers, to a new function of differentiation, in which certain segments of the population are more violently policed by the public authority, while others are lavish pseudo-public spaces, designed to encourage consumption practices. In the end,urban designs under neoliberalism, which claim to have produced more livable “public” spaces, have in fact produced geographies of inequality. (Blackwell, 2017) The traditional definitions of public spaces are not sufficient to untie the knots in democratically suppressed cities. Rather than seeking the public spaces “assigned” with top-down decisions, one can think of re-appropriating private spaces to form them. https://www.ud-id.com/territories/category/urban+design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/category/definition monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/category/sprawl monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/rural monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/masterplan monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/discipline monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/public+space monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/house monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/space monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/publicness monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/Urban monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/cul-de-sac monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/public monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/China monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/uneven monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/definition monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/appropriation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/periphery monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/development monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/multi-scale monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/center monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/private+space monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/transportation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/institutions monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/environment monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/interventions monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/urban monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/infrastructure monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/high-speed-rail monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/reappropiriaton monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/territories/tag/megalopolis monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1 daily 0.75 2019-01-17 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/2018/5/4/l9eu9gtx9z0dgz46vfzjo0rlxvkzui-cdprh-m57gs monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573184652798-I7MC27774NGGA0GBPQCJ/Golconde%2C+India-2.jpg contextualism Golconde (1942), a dormitory in Pondicherry, India, was one of the first modern buildings to address the pragmatic impositions of a tropical context while proposing environmental sensitivity as a foundation for the design process. All images captured by the author https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/2018/5/4/l9eu9gtx9z0dgz46vfzjo0rlxvkzui-cdprh monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525450513924-NCFC9MMC101421Z0GLM6/Collage.jpg contextualism - Image by Gina Ciancone On a clear spring morning in Taichung, Taiwan I rode with a team of researchers and scientists in a 20-seat bus through the campus streets of the world-renowned Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan. As a gold sedan suddenly merged into our lane, the bus came to a jolting stop to allow for a safe right-of-way passage, and I was reminded of the myriad of people who had anticipated this exact moment. Urban planners, designers, sci-fi enthusiasts, journalists, mechanics, and scientists have all awaited the era where a driverless vehicle will successfully react, in real-time, to the seemingly unpredictable high-speed ballet of cars, motorbikes, and pedestrians that all lay claim to the road. Two days later and more than 11,000 km away, a driverless car fatally struck a pedestrian in Phoenix, Arizona. And while the incident did not mark the first death in the world of autonomous vehicles, the pedestrian became the initial casualty in the new frontier of “off-track” driverless cars. When I learned of the event from an innocuous ping on my iPhone while commuting from Hong Kong to Taipei, my response was similar to predictions made by the New York Times less than six months prior. Was this “the one catastrophic accident that could imperil the whole experiment?”[1] Given the recent headlines, designing trust in autonomous vehicles has become all the more salient. Riders will need to be reassured beyond statistical data, which reveals that human-controlled vehicles pose a much greater risk to the public than driverless cars. But the question remains, how does trust become automatic, especially in the aftermath of a tragedy? And how can the ownership models pursued by the automotive industry be of benefit? The autonomous, mid-sized bus I rode in Taichung, Taiwan was not considered a Level 5 Automated Vehicle, which is defined as a “full-time performance by an Automated Driving System for all aspects of the dynamic driving task under all roadway and environmental conditions.” In other words, an automated vehicle with no human driver. The bus I rode in still had a nervous graduate student perched behind the wheel. Anticipating a manual override of any “mistakes” that the artificial intelligence system may have made, human feet were always within inches of the pedals, and other researchers were constantly monitoring the several screens positioned within the body of the bus. It felt like a beta-version of the future, hopefully with less cables. Though I had previously ridden in a Level 5 autonomous car in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, the scale of vehicle currently in development in Taiwan (mid-sized buses used for public transportation) re-frames the degrees to which vehicles should be considered autonomous. In fact, accepting vehicles as a type of urban infrastructure positions autonomous public transportation as a shared platform that could provide the same level of accessibility as a private car. Development in Taiwan encourages a shift in scale: no longer should the highest level of autonomous vehicles be designated solely by the sophistication of the artificial intelligence commanding the vehicle. The top benchmark of driverless vehicles should instead be classified by type and not by degrees of autonomy. In other words, vehicles designated for public transit, which have the capacity to reduce the number of private cars on the road and increase urban densification, should be granted the highest accolades. Perhaps a Level 6 should now be designated for completely autonomous vehicles that can transport more than 10 people per trip. Designing trust in the technology will come from re-framing the types of autonomous vehicles developed, rather than the degree of autonomy it performs. As Marshall Brown, founder of the Driverless City Project forecasts, because “society is cultural, and political, and aesthetic, and about desires — [autonomous developers] are going to need more than just software engineers working on it.” [2] https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/2018/7/4/igoeaa8d5ad5gq9mnjgky7s0pt46v9-l5xm7-wxj74-ellab monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547583884103-BUFDDI3FTG63K3N41P7N/180510+Final+Presentation101.jpg contextualism Amidst concerns about the precariousness of both ecological and social sustainability on a global scale, there is a growing demand for an analytical framework that transcends the duality between nature & society and offers a novel and integrated platform from which to understand both. In pursuit of that goal, the tools of both energetics and urbanization theory can be drawn on to understand agricultural production as an area that serves as perhaps the most representative nexus between society and nature. The integration of the two theories - and thus an analysis of the energetics of urbanization under capitalism - allows for a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the socio-spatial and environmental transformations that have been instigated across global scales: specifically, the ‘soyification’ of Brazilian agriculture. Agricultural intensification and GMO-dependence in Brazil has resulted in an agricultural monoculture, extensive herbicide use, an unsustainable reliance on genetic engineering, a tenuous socio-spatial re-organization, and perhaps most importantly, widespread deforestation. All of the above have contributed to an ecological situation that is inherently unstable in the long-term. Perhaps ironically, this intensification is driven largely by international demand fo meat as GDPs increase internationally; 80% of the soybeans that are produced in the Amazon region are used for animal feed. Soybean production in Brazil exhibits prime symptoms of an unequal ecological exchange: Brazilian natural resources are being depleted in the service of luxury consumption elsewhere. An application of the metabolic rift thus lies at the core of this issue, and enables us to spatialize and uncover one of the soybean’s main contradictions: a seemingly stable production system that is, however, founded upon inherently unstable and contradictory processes. https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/2018/7/4/igoeaa8d5ad5gq9mnjgky7s0pt46v9-l5xm7-wxj74 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1547583948788-NW3DVA4G0ELWS37EX6HB/180510+Final+Presentation101.jpg contextualism - https://matadornetwork.com/trips/40-worlds-impressive-skylines Beijing is a city under constant transformation, from the imperial capital, the communist vanguard, the industrial center, the Olympics city, to the global metropolis today. Each transformation marks the end of a regime, a leadership, and a cultural generation, and the particular mix of ancient and modern physical structures is the outcome of past dominant political ideologies and different social environments. Ancient forms such as the hutong (traditional alleyways) and the siheyuan (traditional courtyard houses) are still highly involved in contemporary Beijing and are constantly given new identities to cater to the current political and social environment. The city has been the hot spot for the powerful to build their signature heritage: imperial Beijing was designed for the ancient royalties, socialist Beijing was modified for the Communist Party, and capitalist Beijing was established for the global economy. The history of city planning is indeed equivalent to the contemporary history of Chinese politics. Due to the complexity of the politics and Beijing’s ever-changing identity, the historic preservation tends to lag behind destructive forces and still remains problematic in many ways. Theoretically, the idea of preservation is recognized by officials. However, due to the influence of the new market economy, the complicated relationship between central and local governments, and the opaque top-down decision-making process, good concepts are rarely realized and implemented from the way they are suggested. This problem applies not only to historic preservation but also to many other cases that began with good intentions but ended entirely differently when power and profits became involved in the process. It has been an unjust war in Beijing between the old and the new. For a true global city of the future, the old and the new should both have their places, forming a symbiotic relationship. Fortunately, there has been growing hope for the hutong preservation in terms of policy and public participation. With the growing market demand for the siheyuan and successful cases like the Nanluoguxiang neighborhood, the preservation of historic neighborhoods and the Old Beijing cultural heritage is proving to have an increasing economic value. More and more media coverage highlights the disappearing Old Beijing lifestyle; a growing number of boutique hotels in hutongs cater to young generations who consider the hutong life trendy and desirable, and the market price of the siheyuan in the Old City have gone up to 6 million U.S. dollars. It is clear that there has been a growing market demand for the Old Beijing heritage to come back as popular mainstream culture. As long as the property is secured from demolition, a great number of people are willing to invest their own money in restoring the siheyuan. The hutongs in the Old City are experiencing a new life cycle where the notion that living in a siheyuan is a symbol of status, has returned with the public’s growing appreciation of historic heritage and the establishment of more promising preservation policies. The problem of hutong gentrification has been heatedly debated in recent years, as a number of dilapidated siheyuans were restored and transformed into exclusive mansions with luxuries like jacuzzies and underground swimming pools. Indeed, more regulations on fair siheyuan trades and appropriate restoration should be implemented accordingly to better protect the originally vernacular architecture and rent stabilized tenants. However, looking at this gentrification from a historical perspective, we see that this is in fact not a new phenomenon. Rather, the siheyuan is completing a life cycle by going back to the hands of the rich and the powerful as a secure open space for pleasure and leisure, just like it originally was in Imperial China. The reality is that the physical condition of many siheyuan and hutong is concerning and does require restoration, so, if this can be done with private money under proper guidance, it does not necessarily have to be so frowned upon. The importance of historic preservation in Beijing goes beyond establishing a museum city full of cultural artifacts and is rather about preserving the physical structures at all possible means, so that future generations can connect with the history carried by the Old City, and at the same time infuse the historic space with new meanings, reinventing the space based on particular social backgrounds dominant with their times. This is the best way to keep the hutong alive. One can prune a dying plant, but as long as the root system is still there, a new life canal can grow its way back. In the past six decades, layers of history and culture intermix and overlap in Beijing at an accelerating speed, creating social phenomena inclusive to contemporary urban China. Due to the intricacy of Beijing’s present urban issues, this post is in no way presenting a solution, but rather hopes to provide a greater historical, social, and political context of China, so that readers can better understand the city planning of Beijing and the current status of historic preservation from a more comprehensive perspective and therefore place them into ongoing discussions around contemporary China in a global context. https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/2018/7/4/igoeaa8d5ad5gq9mnjgky7s0pt46v9-l5xm7 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530727582191-GUFP8QY1TZM2BAHTEFML/180510+Final+Presentation18.jpg contextualism https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530723420805-85783PKKN13IO2KVTC2E/180510+Final+Presentation101.jpg contextualism My thesis is the culmination of a year-long investigation into the parallel urban phenomena of Rust Belts and Innovation Hubs. The project proposes a new type of innovation development for a rust belt context by establishing a literal platform developed around the research and development of polymer science and engineering that takes advantage of Akron, Ohio’s geographic centrality as well as a growing desire for innovation industries to settle in non-coastal territories. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530727193666-38BB07B5SI7ML3XQBLTF/p4.jpg contextualism Rust belts and innovation centers are in many ways indicative of America’s position within the broader global economy. The development and prosperity brought about by America’s industrial capabilities in the 19th and 20th century have led to a society whose standard of living and pay far exceeds that found in less developed nations. However, as poorer nations began to bridge the gap between themselves and developed nations (most notably by acquiring the manufacturing responsibilities that had given developed nations the opportunity to get ahead in the first place) the most apparent consequences for those developed nations were a decline in manufacturing output and emerging areas of economic balkanization. While regions of developed countries that maintained global relevance as centers of finance, entertainment, energy, or tech continued to benefit from their presence in a global market, traditional manufacturing in the West could not compete with the fractional labor costs of modernizing nations. This has led to the emergence of so-called ‘Rust Belts’ in former manufacturing zones. Existing on the other side of the economic spectrum from rust belts, ‘innovation centers’ are reaping the benefits of globalization. With high paying jobs, popular urban amenities, and dynamic lifestyle offerings, these regions are both economically successful and socially attractive. Characterized by a clustering of individuals, institutions, and enterprises around a particular focus, they represent the comparative advantage developing nations have over developing ones with regards to engendering and supporting R&D based ventures. Centered on the belief that progress is most effectively made collectively and that an open sharing of ideas, resources, and talent can lead to higher rates of innovation, these hubs are reconstructing how both private and public enterprises choose to operate. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530727359606-QAGSFLGZE67P0R0UC7FL/image-asset.jpeg contextualism The design project posits that neither the isolated headquarters campus nor acupunctural situated incubator can adequately resolve the spatial or contextual requirements of the modern innovation hub or the cities that are home to them. Sited in the former tire manufacturing hub of Akron, Ohio, the project is positioned as modular, flexible, and adaptable, in direct contrast to the static and iconic high-tech campuses currently in vogue. By puncturing the platform with towers and slabs, a secondary set of more programmatically specific building types establish a balance between working and production with living and leisure as well as establish a dialectical framework between integrated and isolated spaces necessary for an innovation development. The resulting platform then serves as an urban system that would attract both locals and any one of the many individuals or organizations who would seek to establish a presence in the world’s polymer capital. https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/2018/8/11/3h6cwlqnpmcf2cowwivvx4oxoptk67-exxyy monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1534033560220-3EQIAQNAY5NJPQ3A0UYG/Collage+-+AD.jpg contextualism - Collage by Kahira Ngige 1. Abu Dhabi and Dubai are twin cities. Like twins, casual observers are shocked when they display divergent personalities. Dubai is ‘bling’, Abu Dhabi ‘underrated’. Both cities are notable for being casually obliterated by David Harvey. 2. I treated coming to the Gulf with a mix of Denise Scott Brown’s bemused snobbery (Vegas!) and Mike Davis’ “arch sensibility” (LA!). In the preface to the second edition of Learning from Las Vegas, Scott Brown argues that the whole point of the book “reassesses the role of signs in architecture.” In essence, she demands that architects take a back seat to pop culture. 3. Abu Dhabi is neither Vegas nor LA. As a national capital, it is self-aware (in a way Dubai is not). Here, symbolism is important, represend by Jean Nouvel’s world in miniature under a sublime dome at the Louvre, Ferrari World in Ferrari Red, and Foster’s mendacious World Trade Centre. In Abu Dhabi, architecture is ‘dumbed down’, meaning it can be literal. However, it can also escape that symbolism. Downtown Abu Dhabi is gridded with pastel colored blocks, Gulf post-modernism built for oil. Beyond this core is the new Abu Dhabi comprising themed islands and hyper-speed technological determinism built for an age without oil. 4. Abu Dhabi isn’t merely an idea in the making (its overall vision to be determed). Rather, it is the constant rewriting of history. Downtown, demolitions of the candy colored old (built circa 1970) and the banal (souks) is common. The Gulf is after all, America - built to British standards. 20th century sins are magnified here and so is constant reinvention. Unsurprisingly, fast food is the glue that binds together this two-tiered nation of citizens (those that belong) and expatriates (those that never will). 5. Unlike LA, freeways in Abu Dhabi offer no pop cultural insights. Driving on a freeway does not make one more at ease with the local vernacular or even attempts to capture that local vernacular. Metaphors in Abu Dhabi are plain in that they are not metaphors at all. A shopping mall is a public space. 6. Abu Dhabi may not be a complete living theme park. However, like one it offers timed entry. 7. Unlike most nations, the UAE does not demand assimilation. There is no test of Emirati values. Yet, bar tourists, all of us are here in the service of the nation. Renier de Graaf, in jest, captured the spirit of the expat lifestyle with the mantra: “invoice early and invoice often.” What he meant to say was “take the money and run” [my translation]. 8. Abu Dhabi is a city of memories without ruins. Like all cities, it is this forgetting that allows for growth and further deepening of the city’s founding myth. The city flips the Clintonian logic “there is no them; there is only us”. ‘Them’ denotes: the army of architects, consultants and experts that appear to outnumber citizens 10 to 1, while ‘Us’ designates: Emirati nationals. This is urbanism at a vast scale – a global scale, which demand that all architectural symbols be viewed at a distance as you fly out. https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/2018/8/11/ism9rnphdi06okvc1z3s1jrq9q89d6 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1534034579180-UGYX0779DYZ4XWDNQ58O/ver+1.png contextualism - Image by Veronica Cardenas Sustainable development is a global concern and a major challenge for many nations, especially for developing countries. At the same time, urbanization has become a crucial factor to consider when considering sustainable development due to the fact that in recent decades, the world has experienced unprecedented urban growth (from 2.8 billion to 4.2 billion in the past 20 years) [1]. Currently, 55% of the world’s population live in cities or urban centers [2], and by the middle of this century, that figure is estimated to rise to 68%. [3] Additionally, cities contribute to 70% of global GDP, about 60% to global energy consumption and 70% to global carbon emissions. [4] Therefore, during my fellowship this summer, it was vital for me to acknowledge the macroeconomic potentials of urbanization, principally across spatial density and economies of agglomeration, given that it interlinks vital issues of economy, energy, environment, science, technology, and social aspects all within a physical setting. Hence, it is essential to consider multisector linkages and the interactions between financial flows and urban dynamics to formulate integrated policies needed to achieve sustainable development. The official mandate of the United Nations’ Regional Economic Commissions is to promote the economic and social advancement of its member States, foster regional integration, and encourage international cooperation for sustainable advancement.[5] At the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), significant actions are being taken to plan and structure frameworks at multinational and sub-regional levels to promote adequate development. In addition, urbanization and industrialization are jointly being presented as a vehicle for structural transformation in Africa. Due to rapid urban population growth and the increasing rural-urban migratory patterns in the continent, urbanization has become a pivotal opportunity to both alleviate demand and boost economic development. Moreover, it is essential to acknowledge the fiscal revenue potentials of cities that face the infrastructure, service delivery, and amenity provision financial gap. Therefore, the underlying economic opportunities coming from urbanization has led governments and international agencies to assess planning and policy interventions across urban systems in order to attain collective and inclusive progress. In “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”[6], “The New Urban Agenda [7], and “Economic Report on Africa”, the role of urbanization is significantly recognized and featured via frameworks for development. Altogether they are useful guidelines to meet global and continental visions that, in my view, should be addressed holistically: integrating them into the national priorities of each member State. Developing countries face many challenges that require diverse actions and demand special attention within their own country-vision plans. Therefore, the first step should be to consider ways to promote better national planning and management that can capture the urban dimension as a platform for inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable development. In my opinion, this can only be done when political leaders follow global recommendations with a critical position that considers their nation’s urban context and macroeconomic trends. Finally, it remains essential to align and adapt frameworks for an effective management of a country’s multi-level planning that could mainstream positive context-related activities. These frameworks for development effectively inform policymakers on how to capture the spatial and economic potentials of urbanization for sustainable progress, and therefore should be seen as an adaptable means rather than a fixed end. In other words, there is a need to be analytical about exogenous and macro frameworks given that they should not be implemented without adequate coordination with each country’s plans and priorities to consciously achieve a sustainable spatial, social, and economic development. https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/innovation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/politics monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/Urban+Planning monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/Driverless+Cars monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/Transportation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/urban+design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/history monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/ohio monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/akron monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/Uber monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/Autonomous+Vehicles monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/rust+belt monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/Taiwan monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/Public+Transportation monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/UAE monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/Strategy monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/Urban+design monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/landscape monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/contextualism-1/tag/architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation daily 0.75 2024-10-22 https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/bernard-tschumi1 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/504186f1-968d-4dad-9a37-c00f0e1f4af9/bta-s4-8+La+Villette+Aerial+%C2%A9+Bernard+Tschumi+Architects.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Parc de la Villette, 1982-1998. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/a1ffb898-d3bf-426a-8fc9-d38f015bb8f6/34-26-LV237_xx_SI_xx_sk_E2S+top_retouched_MC+copy+%C2%A9+Bernard+Tschumi.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Concepts of large scale organization (city scale). Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/5fe2339b-ea73-46ef-8c71-08073bc99eb0/bernard-tschumi.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out © Andrew Boyle courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/7528e679-4cfb-4da9-abcf-12a47d40a7fc/BTA_kans01axon+copy+%C2%A9+Bernard+Tschumi+Architects.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Kansai International Airport, Kansai, Japan, 1988. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/84422dda-70fc-4ae1-bab8-325af7c1bb82/012507-DR-PerspectiveView10-flat+%C2%A9+Bernard+Tschumi+Architects.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Elliptic City (International Financial Centre of the Americas), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 2005. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/b354881d-2d63-42c3-b2f9-2fb443c86fa4/Saclay_0012%C2%A9+Christian+Richters%2C+courtesy+Bernard+Tschumi+urbanistes+Architectes.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out The firm’s most recent project, the Biology-Pharmacy-Chemistry Center for the University of Paris-Saclay, 2015-2022. Image by Christian Richters, courtesy Bernard Tschumi urbanites Architects. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/a0e34dfb-e48f-49bb-a507-91a6708af8e3/ADMZ+black-background+copy+%C2%A9+Bernard+Tschumi+Architects.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Media Zone Master Plan, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2008. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/134af358-01ad-41e4-846c-7152c627e319/dv_01A_persp+copy+%C2%A9+Bernard+Tschumi+Architects.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Downsview Park competition entry, Toronto, Canada, 2000. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects. https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/jeannegang-5cnxf monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/ff3bbf29-26cc-4df0-b0b6-e43a1ada8791/GilderCenter_2_%28c%29Iwan_Baan.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image by Iwan Baan © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/5c56ebbc-8cbe-46e7-ba61-a0851cadeee4/062799_001_webview.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image by Steven Hall © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/b2e3c78b-0da3-47de-b047-7e99c5d77a15/GilderCenter_1_%28c%29Iwan_Baan.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image by Iwan Baan © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/a97dfedc-1657-4ebb-834b-93a2fd49e157/View+04_jedit_w_logo_webview.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image by Aesthetica Studio © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/60b32f9d-2de5-4de7-a4c1-4c430cb2e508/Jeanne-Gang_2019-%C2%A9-Saverio-Truglia_crop.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/6dcd1a30-5c4a-4ae5-ac47-8594bd723ebd/STUDIOGANG_C40_View+04_AS_webview.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image by Aesthetica Studio © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/f249b394-59ac-4833-a506-47b01d8ba227/FCEC_Porch+final+40x24_webview.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/6f0edf2d-5d78-4e16-bc73-f41f6037ea62/201014+Arbor+-+Storefront_webview.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image by Aesthetica Studio © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/5fb34ec3-e07a-4f8d-8a8d-c9a72cc03a17/FinalCover_webview.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/bb9105df-cefb-49f0-a293-f24221b04132/Beloit+Powerhouse_%28c%29Tom+Harris_Courtesy+Studio+Gang_12_webview.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image by Tom Harris Photography © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/16b26699-96da-4fc9-9a0a-95f473e0d95a/Tom+Lee.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image by ©SCAPE and TyCole © Studio Gang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/5b328451-f39a-43f5-b544-e6f66aac0081/062799_020_webview.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Image by Steven Hall © Studio Gang https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/dirkvangameran monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/e403fcf3-6eaa-4b18-bd83-9a453b8deb9e/14_VDM_Doshi_Aranya.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Balkrishna Doshi’s Aranya Low-cost Housing Development in Indore, India. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/9c9da735-4dcc-4d63-a3a5-8fe760b03132/Cover_DASH15_2.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out DASH 15 - Home Work City: Living and Working in the Urban Block. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/3dd8ffeb-dc5c-4db1-bc40-c911938fea17/1.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Herman Herzberger’s Diagoon Experimental Housing. Delft, Netherlands. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/9382313d-cd69-416d-8bae-66e376b0d1c7/1580466052008.jpeg In Conversation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1dc1759a-1a71-43b7-b5f5-dd639e47b95e/CANDILIS+Georges%2C+WOODS+Shadrach%2C+BODIANSKI+Vladimir%2C+PIROT+Henri%2C+Carrieres+Centrales%2C+Casablanca%2C+1952.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out CANDILIS Georges, WOODS Shadrach, BODIANSKI Vladimir, PIROT Henri, Carrieres Centrales, Casablanca, 1952 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/80244ccf-6c88-4f2c-a6f5-a7ce88d5ea45/CANDILIS+Georges%2C+WOODS+Shadrach%2C+BODIANSKI+Vladimir%2C+PIROT+Henri%2C+Carrieres+Centrales%2C+Casablanca.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out CANDILIS Georges, WOODS Shadrach, BODIANSKI Vladimir, PIROT Henri, Carrieres Centrales, Casablanca, 2004 https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/michael-manfredi monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/9b04414b-d850-4bc6-a329-dda47e0d5795/WeissManfredi_Brooklyn+Botanic+Garden+Visitor+Center_Albert+Vecerka__0.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, WeissManfredi (Albert Vecerka). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/d7f97186-7cf3-47fb-85d2-9e5f2c1d5047/WeissManfredi_University+of+Pennsylvania+Krishna+P.+Singh+Center+for+Nanotechnology_Albert+Vecerka.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out University of Pennsylvania Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology, WeissManfredi (Albert Vecerka). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/724e6c48-22e0-4363-9f34-14fb459ed1dd/WeissManfredi_Hunter%27s+Point+South+Waterfront+Park+Charcoal+Collage.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park Charcoal Collage, WeissManfredi. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/11df411c-b525-4ff0-96a5-fd332ce0cbb2/MM_updatedil.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/a3c877bf-356b-490a-8530-1917955cf91c/WeissManfredi_Hunter%27s+Point+South+Waterfront+Park_David+Lloyd%2C+SWA.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park, David Lloyd, SWA, WeissManfredi. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/47fb8d8d-d9f8-4a8c-9c12-94ab5a62699d/WeissManfredi_Olympic+Sculpture+Park_Iwan+Baan.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Olympic Sculpture Park, WeissManfredi (Iwan Baan). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/b69b38e0-eaca-40b0-9953-2104455ee5c4/WeissManfredi_Olympic+Sculpture+Park+Sketch.png In Conversation - Make it stand out Olympic Sculpture Park Sketch, WeissManfredi. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/f3c98410-c6c9-4378-bd50-d61ecb0ac82c/WeissManfredi_Hunter%27s+Point+South+Waterfront+Park_Albert+Vecerka+%282%29.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park, WeissManfredi (Albert Vecerka). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/0ed90fcd-9d68-4d93-b80f-15015a3a32ba/WeissManfredi_Hunter%27s+Point+South+Waterfront+Park_Albert+Vecerka.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park, Albert Vecerka, WeissManfredi. https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/cristiano-luchetti monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/6ff8a9db-36f1-402d-8c0b-c7380c0d6b73/20220208_CL_BW_150dpi.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/cristiane-muniz-and-fernando-viegas monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/7827af8b-591d-4b1d-b107-8679726d4f05/MUNIZ-VIEGAS-HUMA+KLABIN_05.jpeg In Conversation - Make it stand out Huma Klabin, São Paulo by Una Arquitetos https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/55c2d569-f5c1-496f-bbdb-efdaf01e7ea6/MUNIZ-VIEGAS-HUMA+KLABIN_02+%281%29.jpeg In Conversation - Make it stand out Huma Klabin, São Paulo by Una Arquitetos https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/a5c9a95f-d73c-430a-a2d2-17c2ab66041f/JO%C3%83O-BATISTA-VILANOVA-ARTIGAS-FAU-USP.jpeg In Conversation - Make it stand out Caramelo hall, FAU-USP designed by João Batista Vilanova Artigas https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1637622305939-TAUODK28Q6X4R70V380Q/cris%2Band%2Bfernando.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/0035e157-63c7-4420-bc6d-ea1471c0e77b/MUNIZ-VIEGAS_ESTACAO+NOVA+LAPA.jpeg In Conversation - Make it stand out Estação Nova Lapa, 201 - A masterplan proposal to improve the Lapa region through a new station that links existing industrial sites and considers new real estate opportunities for local investment, Una Muniz Viegas https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/3b594b41-a111-4703-a019-4f099f4e940f/MUNIZ-VIEGAS-HUMA+KLABIN.jpeg In Conversation - Make it stand out Huma Klabin, São Paulo by Una Arquitetos https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/natalie-allen-the-urban-advisory monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/84b5695f-ed84-4a43-ad57-7d73d8cd2248/190722_TUA_WhatisUrbanStrategy_Watermark.png In Conversation - Make it stand out What is Urban Strategy, a framework of working elements around knowledge, action and people. TUA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/44818d12-c15c-4973-ae3a-2bf578f7869c/210407_TUA_WellbeingDomains+v2.png In Conversation - Make it stand out Urban Wellbeing Domains – public feedback and community goals reflected in 12 aspects of wellbeing (Aligned to New Zealand Treasury’s Living Standards Framework, but operationalized at a neighborhood scale). TUA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1637163612177-X7M1HIWC9WEVO4TGM11T/Sustainable+neighbourhood+Vauban_Freiburg.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Sustainable neighborhood, Vauban, Freiburg. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1637163610801-XSGCWKOSH1399D5Z674K/Sargfabrik+and+Miss+Sargfabrik_Vienna.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Sargfabrik and Miss Sargfabrik, Vienna. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1637163611057-FGTIPL22FQY6Y2JEMI5E/Prioritised+bike+parking+Vauban_Freiburg.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Prioritized bike parking Vauban, Freiburg. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1637163612703-6WN6TX6KGV23JTB6YU6J/Wohnprojekt+Wien_Vienna.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Wohnprojekt Wien, Vienna. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/8f871556-bad2-4d85-927d-2051137f4b23/NatalieAllenFeb2021-4.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1ac91e66-8c04-4293-8d2d-09041fd6782a/210614_TUA_HousingContinuumGeneric+v3.png In Conversation - Make it stand out Housing Continuum – a toolkit of options for housing models in Aotearoa. TUA https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/kishore-varanasi monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/9c693c0e-0f85-44f3-af13-d0f7e9f3d675/kishore_work+%283%29.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out 585 Third Street, Cambridge. Credits: CBT Architects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/f73a7710-8dba-41df-86d9-581d82bd35a2/kishore_work+%282%29.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Masdar City Etihad Eco-residences. Credits: CBT Architects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/186d2eff-86aa-46fd-a845-5448a27abb94/kishore_work+%281%29.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Cambridge Crossing. Credits: CBT Architects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/8b04540e-a904-408f-accf-059624286c24/kv+photo3.png In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/shaney-pena-gomez monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1635468861892-5M6EJ7RW97ZL6B01KIRF/599f5d86d97a6-bpfull.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/renia-kagkou monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1634424661970-HW9V7WIQXN150F4OWG2F/renia_thumbnail.png In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/maryanne-jillallen-sasaki monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1627487777852-4F7KTJ744XT92J257T6J/ssk5.png In Conversation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1627486966453-380DL3LCZNWKPTI9B871/ssk1.png In Conversation - Make it stand out Network analysis of community feedback to create a park that would be more welcoming to a greater range of interests, Greenwood Park. Sasaki. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1627486918067-3LF7Y33BI468JJURFNSL/ssk2.png In Conversation - Make it stand out High Line Canal Vision Plan – 5-character zones reflecting public feedback, community character, and ecological transects. Sasaki https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1627487819629-AU08SOQLP3OAQJ0TZMPU/ssk6.png In Conversation - Make it stand out Ananas New Community – Top: Climate and agricultural strategies integrated into the configuration of housing and public amenities. Bottom: Pollinator paths serve to build off the agricultural history of the site and become productive sites for community gardens and local farming. Sasaki https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1631582016477-7H1CUZ3CRK9YY0VA7K4C/Sasaki+Interview+Image.jpg In Conversation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1627487134623-ZAPUSRXO0T2HIJEOLLGL/ssk4.png In Conversation - Make it stand out Syracuse University Campus Framework – Top: Organizational structure of the campus reflects a 30-year vision. Bottom: Future gateway district accommodates a mix of uses, a civic realm, and mobility improvements for the Campus City. Sasaki https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1627488348081-QI26DI0EU6CKVEIO5ZIH/ssk7.png In Conversation - Make it stand out Parks and Equity Beta Mapping Tool. Sasaki https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1627487106297-HMCHT83KJ5OOJW0KVAEJ/ssk3.png In Conversation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/ellen-lou monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1627481908613-7XQ2NZ6EU7PF0WJ4BA2R/ellenlou2.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/inconversationwithalexkrieger-5mxan-ahdz6 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1605890216739-X6BAD3624YJ5KMRGHX5Q/Krieger+black+and+white.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/2020/9/24/in-conversation-with-kent-larson monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1601054413937-AHXXOX3M45E52G97O58X/thumbnail_larson.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/wilkinson monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1598477348885-VLNSR9WXR5L2KV5LQU5M/1-MichelleJoanWilkinson_by_Jati_Lindsay%5B2305843009371568156%5D.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/reidel monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1574434002316-6HWHGRRXXHFY1BWXSZWQ/2019-Reidel-Portrait-For-GSD-Web_B%2BW.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/waldheim monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573154822321-CIMDDBD0YRSILG3HH1B5/Waldheim-headshot_July-2019-for-web_B%2BW.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/safdie2-9a5gd monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1572491913939-LE4M11RYQ40DMS9FNLSB/thumbnail_JKWE5687.jp In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/mostafavi monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1572491592629-OBISNGUBS6Y8LD9A3SZX/image-asset.jpeg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/safdie2 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1572490918326-036USB75GKD824HIM8LD/Moshe+Safdie.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/baan monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1572490045032-C6LREULONHHQHEIK02O6/Chelina+ODbert.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/brooks2 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1572489784244-OTCSCK8CXA5MXTW1Y8GY/Chelina+ODbert.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/odbert2 monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1572489012895-UI1Z8N1M7KRAQ7DGXGMH/Chelina+ODbert.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation/picon monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1572487188374-VTR7ZUSE82A6W69MKN69/39f70bbceab6_0101_picon.jpg In Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/about daily 0.75 2022-03-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1647384089299-WISSVCMQ4K5DJLAQ6RIM/0D5D01BB-F169-4C6E-92D4-D50B7AFD66BD.jpg ABOUT - Chris Ball (MAUD '23) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1647384097546-UH5CGFODYZAKS7VS4ANW/E8D86C43-3156-4BFD-9BCD-8F5649FFD476.jpg ABOUT - Aakanksha Jain (MAUD '23) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1647384093891-I1L3UG7CYJD1NVEX89SB/D6D6329F-1E0D-4E8A-AE8B-059E8E002727.jpg ABOUT - Saad Boujane (MAUD '23) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1647384093907-JIZWMCPMRZ2SHY3DGHDG/D4839B2C-6F6C-41B3-80E3-B388726A793F.jpg ABOUT - Elyjana Roach (MAUD '22) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1647384089453-CS10CF38UUWYQO0G91SO/8598E71B-F7AF-4483-AD7D-10F21E809A6F.jpg ABOUT - Juan Villalon (MAUD '22) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573007509176-Q77OB7KJX9I6NUKMDL4V/Naksha+-+Copy.jpg ABOUT - Naksha Satish (MAUD '22) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573222078394-BXIRKUWOUQOPEAF1MJ73/Sai+Photo.jpg ABOUT - Sai Joshi (MAUD '22) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1647917051479-D0AWJE5WRF7IRRNQSJ0J/WhatsApp+Image+2022-03-21+at+10.38.19+PM.jpg ABOUT - Gerardo Corona (MAUD '23) https://www.ud-id.com/home daily 0.75 2019-01-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529891946152-0N4L0BHS9URPM662FU5D/Artboard+1+copy+10-100.jpg Archive Last Wednesday, April 4th, 2018 the Harvard Graduate School of Design hosted the presentation of the very first translation into English of Ildefons Cerdà’s fundamental theoretical writing... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523846255505-CJHMPI3AM8PM4UKFWOUL/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive This time last year, I was reading a book called “Design like you give a damn: architectural responses to humanitarian crises” by Architecture for Humanity (AFH). It was interesting to find out that although...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1531593365473-RERXZ9B23QCWO98WP858/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive The public realm is the space where citizens meet with strangers. It is theoretically, the space where anyone can express their opinion, a space where everyone is free. While this may have been the case several decades ago... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525801724671-KGBQEVEQX6T2JYGS6S77/Artboard+1+copy-02.png Archive On a clear spring morning in Taichung, Taiwan I rode with a team of researchers and scientists in a 20-seat bus... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819686906-SMM5D0USCLBOXXJ9TIDY/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive When architects and urban planners talk about creating democratic spaces, they fall into the trap of immediately talking about the spatial attributes of publicness. But the search for democracy in urban....(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1528559223230-D7D5D5ZDVD7Q2RWXPHBO/Artboard+1+copy+16.png Archive The evolution of infrastructural networks often catalyzed the progress of modernization. The construction of the modern ideal... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523655382504-R03VP34ZMYN01RUCCJL5/Artboard+1+copy+15.png Archive As a Master in Urban Planning student at the GSD I frequently wonder why our discipline pays so little attention to digital space... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520960162736-08UMGB7HTY8X12SU3IAZ/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive "The increasing privatization of public space has become one of the leading topics of debate in contemporary cities..." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520221219821-ET17022XLAER6PUV9RRG/TITLE_180304-06.png Archive "Within the capitalist milieu that has come to define the 21st century, what agency do young designers have, if any, to affect change towards greater urban social justice?..." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1534034931691-DN83VHDMCHVQET3N5S9L/image-asset.jpeg Archive Sustainable development is a global concern and a major challenge for many nations, especially for developing countries. At the same time, urbanization has become a crucial factor to consider when... ( Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530728040362-NTQD46OH60JWCL3ZT1RW/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive This summer we had the opportunity to travel to South Africa on a whirlwind two-week research trip with the Just City Lab and the lab’s founder, Toni L. Griffin. Our mission was twofold: to take the work of the lab global... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819711490-J9J037LZMKY7FVZVAPWF/Artboard+1+copy+16-100.jpg Archive “Speed replaces distance”. Currently in China, High-Speed Rail is not only a new mode of transport that links cities and regions together but it is also catalyzing a new scope of urbanization.... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520960150997-O09CUCEM2HS30Y652QDT/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive About ten days ago, for our studio, we were driving toward MassMoca. With research focused on...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520219399897-JMS43Y98DDB1R7ZDB7PT/TITLE_180303-05.png Archive "In preparation for a class presentation about New Urbanism, it was suggested to me to watch a conversation, moderated and organized by Alex Krieger..." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522633757467-N8ZL8O0KWZ8OVFL84AZX/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive Just 10 days ago, we released an Open Letter to the Harvard Graduate School of Design community with a simple message... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1534034910542-MSW8UMK4XIOQ3J3Z26OL/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive Abu Dhabi and Dubai are twin cities. Like twins, casual observers are shocked when they display divergent personalities. Dubai is ‘bling’, Abu Dhabi ‘underrated’. Both cities are notable for being casually obliterated by David Harvey....(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522635028036-MTIQKNUTA4N5XNK7MOXC/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive The idea of limits is crucial to contemporary life. Limits bring order and understanding to space, they provide a frame for... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525480877503-256G7R57NCKS2XUO0RZE/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive Given the complex economic and political situation Venezuela is currently facing, it is critical to start questioning the scenarios produced... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520206273033-JR37HW0GUEZ9QSQMGJ9N/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive "As the 2018 Winter Olympics come to a close, the watching world will quickly retreat to more routine affairs both at home and abroad, and Pyeongchang will likely fade in our collective memory..." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1531593378310-TVLBUFOGT5QDQ43ALIDR/Artboard+1+copy+16-100.jpg Archive I lived in Ahmedabad, India for 4 years, working at now Pritzker Laureate Balkrishna Doshi’s office, Vastu Shilpa Consultants. While I was there, the office was designing a plaza in the center of the old city... ( Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1536113427721-YIU57YO0LS6JYM9JRZE1/image-asset.jpeg Archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522001024229-B92YQZO8JKS5T17V8B4D/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive How can design generate alternate anticipatory strategies that integrate ‘debris reuse’ and ‘community-led recovery’ tactics in disaster-prone rural areas?(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521474630190-HEZ4YJV3AM5Y0XIS1H2L/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive Let me take a moment to contextualise the terms of preservation and temporality, and position them as an apparatus that contains both the best and the worst of humanity... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1536113409209-W48LYUIR2S4QMZZCWQ4B/Artboard+1+copy+9-100.jpg Archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522000932206-XJBQPDJI2SILS47YS3WV/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive In the concluding remarks of Michael Murphy & Alan Ricks paper Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity the authors make a definitive plea that the profession of architecture...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1528559185124-XO4AHAEQB0AWK48U59QP/Artboard+1+copy+15.png Archive What is the dependency of the discipline of urban design on architecture? Is there a necessity to distinguish urban design from architecture?... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521474616524-NEYLKT4S7VHBDARM243Q/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive Bigness does not have history, Bigness does not have theory, Bigness operates without context, Bigness competes with context, Bigness aims to eliminate context... ( Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532814708045-0CCU9RDJ8VDBP3S2QRG4/Artboard+1+copy+16-100.jpg Archive The famed Manhattan Grid and its ability to absorb manic heterogeneity emancipates each block into an island of its own identity and ideology, inspiring architectural ecstasy. Conceptual alternatives by the likes of Ferris, Hood, Superstudio,...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525533266241-Z9LVZDRLR6SW4421U8L1/Artboard+1+copy+16.png Archive Cities are differentiated from their hinterlands by their density and access to work, services, products, entertainment, and... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520206261794-XTS3PAXYU28E623MOOFS/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive "At the beginning of our curriculum here in urban design at the GSD, we were asked as a collective group to voice our personal understandings of what constitutes its framework as a pedagogical discipline...." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532816863761-7KXXQGF188YKK4KE8RR4/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive Proliferation of public parks is one of the key defining features of the changing urban fabric of 19th century Istanbul. Most scholarship has interpreted this proliferation merely as a symptom of the Western influenced modernization... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530728053627-RVXV3ROOKGECSFCVMOO0/Artboard+1+copy+16-100.jpg Archive Rust belts and innovation centers are in many ways indicative of America’s position within the broader global economy. The development and prosperity brought about by America’s industrial capabilities...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523846372040-HNNLWWWSOI7HMJI1Y20N/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive What is the agency of designers in addressing complex and far-reaching social issues? With over 65 million displaced people, global forced migration is at the highest levels since World War II. In the face of this crisis...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523655382504-R03VP34ZMYN01RUCCJL5/Artboard+1+copy+15.png Archive As a Master in Urban Planning student at the GSD I frequently wonder why our discipline pays so little attention to digital space... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522633757467-N8ZL8O0KWZ8OVFL84AZX/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive Just 10 days ago, we released an Open Letter to the Harvard Graduate School of Design community with a simple message... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525480877503-256G7R57NCKS2XUO0RZE/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive Given the complex economic and political situation Venezuela is currently facing, it is critical to start questioning the scenarios produced... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529891946152-0N4L0BHS9URPM662FU5D/Artboard+1+copy+10-100.jpg Archive Last Wednesday, April 4th, 2018 the Harvard Graduate School of Design hosted the presentation of the very first translation into English of Ildefons Cerdà’s fundamental theoretical writing... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521474616524-NEYLKT4S7VHBDARM243Q/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive Bigness does not have history, Bigness does not have theory, Bigness operates without context, Bigness competes with context, Bigness aims to eliminate context... ( Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530728040362-NTQD46OH60JWCL3ZT1RW/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive This summer we had the opportunity to travel to South Africa on a whirlwind two-week research trip with the Just City Lab and the lab’s founder, Toni L. Griffin. Our mission was twofold: to take the work of the lab global... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525801724671-KGBQEVEQX6T2JYGS6S77/Artboard+1+copy-02.png Archive On a clear spring morning in Taichung, Taiwan I rode with a team of researchers and scientists in a 20-seat bus... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520221219821-ET17022XLAER6PUV9RRG/TITLE_180304-06.png Archive "Within the capitalist milieu that has come to define the 21st century, what agency do young designers have, if any, to affect change towards greater urban social justice?..." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520960150997-O09CUCEM2HS30Y652QDT/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive About ten days ago, for our studio, we were driving toward MassMoca. With research focused on...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1536113409209-W48LYUIR2S4QMZZCWQ4B/Artboard+1+copy+9-100.jpg Archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819711490-J9J037LZMKY7FVZVAPWF/Artboard+1+copy+16-100.jpg Archive “Speed replaces distance”. Currently in China, High-Speed Rail is not only a new mode of transport that links cities and regions together but it is also catalyzing a new scope of urbanization.... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1536113427721-YIU57YO0LS6JYM9JRZE1/image-asset.jpeg Archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532816863761-7KXXQGF188YKK4KE8RR4/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive Proliferation of public parks is one of the key defining features of the changing urban fabric of 19th century Istanbul. Most scholarship has interpreted this proliferation merely as a symptom of the Western influenced modernization... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1530728053627-RVXV3ROOKGECSFCVMOO0/Artboard+1+copy+16-100.jpg Archive Rust belts and innovation centers are in many ways indicative of America’s position within the broader global economy. The development and prosperity brought about by America’s industrial capabilities...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1521474630190-HEZ4YJV3AM5Y0XIS1H2L/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive Let me take a moment to contextualise the terms of preservation and temporality, and position them as an apparatus that contains both the best and the worst of humanity... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520219399897-JMS43Y98DDB1R7ZDB7PT/TITLE_180303-05.png Archive "In preparation for a class presentation about New Urbanism, it was suggested to me to watch a conversation, moderated and organized by Alex Krieger..." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1528559185124-XO4AHAEQB0AWK48U59QP/Artboard+1+copy+15.png Archive What is the dependency of the discipline of urban design on architecture? Is there a necessity to distinguish urban design from architecture?... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1531593378310-TVLBUFOGT5QDQ43ALIDR/Artboard+1+copy+16-100.jpg Archive I lived in Ahmedabad, India for 4 years, working at now Pritzker Laureate Balkrishna Doshi’s office, Vastu Shilpa Consultants. While I was there, the office was designing a plaza in the center of the old city... ( Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1531593365473-RERXZ9B23QCWO98WP858/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive The public realm is the space where citizens meet with strangers. It is theoretically, the space where anyone can express their opinion, a space where everyone is free. While this may have been the case several decades ago... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1534034931691-DN83VHDMCHVQET3N5S9L/image-asset.jpeg Archive Sustainable development is a global concern and a major challenge for many nations, especially for developing countries. At the same time, urbanization has become a crucial factor to consider when... ( Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1528559223230-D7D5D5ZDVD7Q2RWXPHBO/Artboard+1+copy+16.png Archive The evolution of infrastructural networks often catalyzed the progress of modernization. The construction of the modern ideal... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522635028036-MTIQKNUTA4N5XNK7MOXC/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive The idea of limits is crucial to contemporary life. Limits bring order and understanding to space, they provide a frame for... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1525533266241-Z9LVZDRLR6SW4421U8L1/Artboard+1+copy+16.png Archive Cities are differentiated from their hinterlands by their density and access to work, services, products, entertainment, and... (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520206273033-JR37HW0GUEZ9QSQMGJ9N/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive "As the 2018 Winter Olympics come to a close, the watching world will quickly retreat to more routine affairs both at home and abroad, and Pyeongchang will likely fade in our collective memory..." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1532814708045-0CCU9RDJ8VDBP3S2QRG4/Artboard+1+copy+16-100.jpg Archive The famed Manhattan Grid and its ability to absorb manic heterogeneity emancipates each block into an island of its own identity and ideology, inspiring architectural ecstasy. Conceptual alternatives by the likes of Ferris, Hood, Superstudio,...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522000932206-XJBQPDJI2SILS47YS3WV/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive In the concluding remarks of Michael Murphy & Alan Ricks paper Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity the authors make a definitive plea that the profession of architecture...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1529819686906-SMM5D0USCLBOXXJ9TIDY/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive When architects and urban planners talk about creating democratic spaces, they fall into the trap of immediately talking about the spatial attributes of publicness. But the search for democracy in urban....(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523846255505-CJHMPI3AM8PM4UKFWOUL/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive This time last year, I was reading a book called “Design like you give a damn: architectural responses to humanitarian crises” by Architecture for Humanity (AFH). It was interesting to find out that although...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1522001024229-B92YQZO8JKS5T17V8B4D/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive How can design generate alternate anticipatory strategies that integrate ‘debris reuse’ and ‘community-led recovery’ tactics in disaster-prone rural areas?(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520960162736-08UMGB7HTY8X12SU3IAZ/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive "The increasing privatization of public space has become one of the leading topics of debate in contemporary cities..." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1523846372040-HNNLWWWSOI7HMJI1Y20N/Artboard+1+copy+10.png Archive What is the agency of designers in addressing complex and far-reaching social issues? With over 65 million displaced people, global forced migration is at the highest levels since World War II. In the face of this crisis...(Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1520206261794-XTS3PAXYU28E623MOOFS/Artboard+1+copy+9.png Archive "At the beginning of our curriculum here in urban design at the GSD, we were asked as a collective group to voice our personal understandings of what constitutes its framework as a pedagogical discipline...." (Read More) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1534034910542-MSW8UMK4XIOQ3J3Z26OL/Artboard+1+copy+15-100.jpg Archive Abu Dhabi and Dubai are twin cities. Like twins, casual observers are shocked when they display divergent personalities. Dubai is ‘bling’, Abu Dhabi ‘underrated’. Both cities are notable for being casually obliterated by David Harvey....(Read More) https://www.ud-id.com/ciara daily 0.75 2018-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538343908543-IMAXTFL29U7LV4T6GAW3/People2.JPG Ciara https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538343908543-IMAXTFL29U7LV4T6GAW3/People2.JPG Ciara https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344170192-GV5G5NG29PRP2B54GKJR/DSC_0227.JPG Ciara https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344175526-4HXX1E4CLE07UP8FHNFC/IMG_0073.JPG Ciara https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344208420-B2VG4Y1XY0EL8CAMFQ7E/IMG_9927.JPG Ciara https://www.ud-id.com/page0 daily 0.75 2018-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538332444873-089Y6TIBBB1UQIWH8IQN/image+1_Page_1.jpg Angeliki https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538332444959-WVP2RYOJ1K8QGKPU9RGR/image+1_Page_2.jpg Angeliki https://www.ud-id.com/page1 daily 0.75 2018-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538333557237-BO1RG19LQZUL1D6HUDLH/post+image.jpg Ina Li https://matadornetwork.com/trips/40-worlds-impressive-skylines https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538333557237-BO1RG19LQZUL1D6HUDLH/post+image.jpg Ina Li https://matadornetwork.com/trips/40-worlds-impressive-skylines https://www.ud-id.com/new-page-5 daily 0.75 2018-11-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538340369947-C9OFYSDF4A28A8UCRSPH/IMG_4947.PNG Issue 01: Preview Page - The City and the Passing Minute by Nicolás Delgado Álcega (MArch II ‘20) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538339120766-G8T4MOWBXYL8ZSG750KB/bhadra+market.JPG Issue 01: Preview Page - Issue 01: Temporality/Permanence https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542515101125-WVWCTS8LH4SN43P98O3C/02_Nuevo+Amanecer_Aerial+view_Eduardo+Pelaez.JPG Issue 01: Preview Page - A Cemetery Full of Life Nueva Esperanza Cemetery as informal public space https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538340289851-ZQUSX6S8TBYSI6VPWD03/NorthenLima_01_AstridCam.jpg Issue 01: Preview Page - Advocating for the Architecture of Informal Settlements A Closer Look into the Typologies of the Informal Settlements by Astrid Cam Aguinaga (M.ArchII & MUP ’19) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344767272-Q9B449VF91ZJHP66P677/People2.JPG Issue 01: Preview Page - Housing Female Migrant Workers Planning for the Expanding Female Workforce in Narayanganj, Bangladesh by Ciara Stein ( MUP & MLA I, ‘21) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538339120766-G8T4MOWBXYL8ZSG750KB/bhadra+market.JPG Issue 01: Preview Page - Issue 01: Temporality/Permanence https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542515101125-WVWCTS8LH4SN43P98O3C/02_Nuevo+Amanecer_Aerial+view_Eduardo+Pelaez.JPG Issue 01: Preview Page - A Cemetery Full of Life Nueva Esperanza Cemetery as informal public space https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344767272-Q9B449VF91ZJHP66P677/People2.JPG Issue 01: Preview Page - Housing Female Migrant Workers Planning for the Expanding Female Workforce in Narayanganj, Bangladesh by Ciara Stein ( MUP & MLA I, ‘21) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538340369947-C9OFYSDF4A28A8UCRSPH/IMG_4947.PNG Issue 01: Preview Page - The City and the Passing Minute by Nicolás Delgado Álcega (MArch II ‘20) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538340289851-ZQUSX6S8TBYSI6VPWD03/NorthenLima_01_AstridCam.jpg Issue 01: Preview Page - Advocating for the Architecture of Informal Settlements A Closer Look into the Typologies of the Informal Settlements by Astrid Cam Aguinaga (M.ArchII & MUP ’19) https://www.ud-id.com/issue01-astrid daily 0.75 2018-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538341356567-Z0KSXTR5Y95MXLQTKEBE/NorthenLima_01_AstridCam.jpg Astrid https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538341356567-Z0KSXTR5Y95MXLQTKEBE/NorthenLima_01_AstridCam.jpg Astrid https://www.ud-id.com/issue-02-preview daily 0.75 2018-11-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538345163239-KXLODD73CF0KPU5ST0F1/1000.jpg Issue 02: Preview Page - Issue 02: Contextualism/Globalism https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344859412-6UH83GVRMTX16CEXC429/ina.jpg Issue 02: Preview Page - Old Beijing in 21st Century Globalized China https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541978390370-MIPTEWPIRHIILIN294ZD/1000.jpg Issue 02: Preview Page - In Conversation with Alison Brooks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344875737-TI4TB1SORPPQS12YVWD3/world+map+of+soybean_Page_2.jpg Issue 02: Preview Page - The unstable stability of soybean production under capitalism Analyzing the Energetics of Urbanization in Mato Grosso, Brazil https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538345163239-KXLODD73CF0KPU5ST0F1/1000.jpg Issue 02: Preview Page - Issue 02: Contextualism/Globalism https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344875737-TI4TB1SORPPQS12YVWD3/world+map+of+soybean_Page_2.jpg Issue 02: Preview Page - The unstable stability of soybean production under capitalism Analyzing the Energetics of Urbanization in Mato Grosso, Brazil https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541978390370-MIPTEWPIRHIILIN294ZD/1000.jpg Issue 02: Preview Page - In Conversation with Alison Brooks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344859412-6UH83GVRMTX16CEXC429/ina.jpg Issue 02: Preview Page - Old Beijing in 21st Century Globalized China https://www.ud-id.com/nicolas daily 0.75 2018-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344526695-JOJE4ZIMURC0PUCWRWRO/image-asset.png Nicolás https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1538344526695-JOJE4ZIMURC0PUCWRWRO/image-asset.png Nicolás https://www.ud-id.com/conversation-picon daily 0.75 2018-10-17 https://www.ud-id.com/eduardo-palaez daily 0.75 2018-11-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542514485009-3MQ9UXAD5NVTKS9LZ0D2/03_Tradition%2C+celebration%2C+cemetery+and+informal+settlement_Eduardo+Pelaez.jpg Eduardo Palaez Image Credit: Eduardo Pelaez (2015) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542514425828-DYE1O894HZBEV77FJN4U/04_Memory+by+music_Punto+Ciego+Colectivo.JPG Eduardo Palaez Image Credit: Punto Ciego Colectivo (2018) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542514264125-OFU93II5CURUAZ3A8998/Submerged+Parcels+Plan.jpg Eduardo Palaez Image Credit: Eduardo Pelaez (2015) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542514444655-8GDJ7PS54KY2QL770NOX/05_Memory+by+dancing_Punto+Ciego+Colectivo.JPG Eduardo Palaez Image Credit: Punto Ciego Colectivo (2018) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542514444655-8GDJ7PS54KY2QL770NOX/05_Memory+by+dancing_Punto+Ciego+Colectivo.JPG Eduardo Palaez Image Credit: Punto Ciego Colectivo (2018) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542514425828-DYE1O894HZBEV77FJN4U/04_Memory+by+music_Punto+Ciego+Colectivo.JPG Eduardo Palaez Image Credit: Punto Ciego Colectivo (2018) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542514264125-OFU93II5CURUAZ3A8998/Submerged+Parcels+Plan.jpg Eduardo Palaez Image Credit: Eduardo Pelaez (2015) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542514485009-3MQ9UXAD5NVTKS9LZ0D2/03_Tradition%2C+celebration%2C+cemetery+and+informal+settlement_Eduardo+Pelaez.jpg Eduardo Palaez Image Credit: Eduardo Pelaez (2015) https://www.ud-id.com/samuel-maddox daily 0.75 2018-11-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543246016902-65FCQNTSLML0KFIDRLT7/frontispiece+opt+A.jpg Samuel Maddox https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/2262937/2012/11/T800x600/580a73b08c13b4f18c22acb1d4339e87.jpg?width=720. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543246016902-65FCQNTSLML0KFIDRLT7/frontispiece+opt+A.jpg Samuel Maddox https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/2262937/2012/11/T800x600/580a73b08c13b4f18c22acb1d4339e87.jpg?width=720. https://www.ud-id.com/melissa daily 0.75 2018-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540765826630-EUU0KOWAIYUVNN1YU27Q/11.png Melissa_Chen Image Credit: Audi’s Urban Futures. https://www.archdaily.com/583601/audi-urban-future-award-2014-team-berlin-s-flywheel-could-revolutionize-personal-mobility/54a6a677e58ecee15b0000af-award2014_berlin_urban_mobility_landscape2-jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540765826630-EUU0KOWAIYUVNN1YU27Q/11.png Melissa_Chen Image Credit: Audi’s Urban Futures. https://www.archdaily.com/583601/audi-urban-future-award-2014-team-berlin-s-flywheel-could-revolutionize-personal-mobility/54a6a677e58ecee15b0000af-award2014_berlin_urban_mobility_landscape2-jpg https://www.ud-id.com/guy-trangos daily 0.75 2018-11-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541983301146-RKGN31O7ZP4CMC1B4942/21.png Guy Trangos https://www.behance.net/gallery/16976969/The-Concentration-City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541983301146-RKGN31O7ZP4CMC1B4942/21.png Guy Trangos https://www.behance.net/gallery/16976969/The-Concentration-City https://www.ud-id.com/bastien daily 0.75 2018-11-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542635890505-SVL7M2MWURO4P9T6GTEU/Last+reminiscences+of+the+past.jpg Bastien https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542635890505-SVL7M2MWURO4P9T6GTEU/Last+reminiscences+of+the+past.jpg Bastien https://www.ud-id.com/chris-nelson daily 0.75 2018-11-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543242786302-9P0ISECTKU3C9SIZQOR6/SundialBridgeRdg-124c+%281%29.jpg Chris Nelson Meik Design [http://www.meik.jp/profile.html] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543242786302-9P0ISECTKU3C9SIZQOR6/SundialBridgeRdg-124c+%281%29.jpg Chris Nelson Meik Design [http://www.meik.jp/profile.html] https://www.ud-id.com/lamia daily 0.75 2018-11-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541983677009-YOQS01AKLNCVXXJNHSV1/1212.jpg Lamia Ourfalian, George. “The Al Shaar neighborhood lies in ruins as Syrian pro-government troops advance through the Karm al Jabal district during theiroffensive to retake Aleppo”, December 5. Los Angeles Times. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541983677009-YOQS01AKLNCVXXJNHSV1/1212.jpg Lamia Ourfalian, George. “The Al Shaar neighborhood lies in ruins as Syrian pro-government troops advance through the Karm al Jabal district during theiroffensive to retake Aleppo”, December 5. Los Angeles Times. https://www.ud-id.com/conversationodbert-1 daily 0.75 2018-11-12 https://www.ud-id.com/conversationodbert daily 0.75 2018-10-28 https://www.ud-id.com/hiroki daily 0.75 2018-11-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542636581949-FNA6LLMEQY06QD4K8X2U/03.jpg Hiroki Meik Design [http://www.meik.jp/profile.html] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542636581949-FNA6LLMEQY06QD4K8X2U/03.jpg Hiroki Meik Design [http://www.meik.jp/profile.html] https://www.ud-id.com/antoine-moya daily 0.75 2018-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539794180829-C940KQA6ODO95GTU6IE5/1.jpg Antoine Moya https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539794267375-6FF9TDNV9RI62FTQK0KL/2.jpg Antoine Moya https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539794180829-C940KQA6ODO95GTU6IE5/1.jpg Antoine Moya https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539794267375-6FF9TDNV9RI62FTQK0KL/2.jpg Antoine Moya https://www.ud-id.com/laura-greenberg daily 0.75 2019-02-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1549892076512-2FDI4PDPX7LD87YIB1RA/Image+Option+2_incline.JPG Laura Greenberg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1549892076512-2FDI4PDPX7LD87YIB1RA/Image+Option+2_incline.JPG Laura Greenberg https://www.ud-id.com/issue-05-boundariesterritories daily 0.75 2019-03-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542510774572-M71KWYPM88UJLWXM73MT/Last+reminiscences+of+the+past.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Shoreline The last reminiscences of the past https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542511092239-ABGUK57SEVQ6HDTTRF3C/image-asset.jpeg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Murder and the Remaking of a Territory https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542511047349-F7QF9IF3XAXTDE2BNX8O/03.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Tokyo’s Borderless Urbanism Transit-Oriented Development leading the cultivation of urban fabric https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541977804401-IGWC3NES5SLD7OIQLYHI/ubg.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - An Unfamiliar Home Aleppo and the plight of its people https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541977690651-QO8FNEW1QW8AFK9YW7O2/sdc.png Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Has this train changed direction? Some thoughts on an absent boundary https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541977853141-YZV91QONLXAUWPPK7X6T/Submerged+Parcels+Plan.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Unreal Property https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541977633453-YY7BVGTWA5UMBAWQMACF/rotate2.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542510774572-M71KWYPM88UJLWXM73MT/Last+reminiscences+of+the+past.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Shoreline The last reminiscences of the past https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541977853141-YZV91QONLXAUWPPK7X6T/Submerged+Parcels+Plan.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Unreal Property https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542511047349-F7QF9IF3XAXTDE2BNX8O/03.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Tokyo’s Borderless Urbanism Transit-Oriented Development leading the cultivation of urban fabric https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541977690651-QO8FNEW1QW8AFK9YW7O2/sdc.png Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Has this train changed direction? Some thoughts on an absent boundary https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541977804401-IGWC3NES5SLD7OIQLYHI/ubg.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - An Unfamiliar Home Aleppo and the plight of its people https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541977633453-YY7BVGTWA5UMBAWQMACF/rotate2.jpg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542511092239-ABGUK57SEVQ6HDTTRF3C/image-asset.jpeg Issue 05: Boundaries/Territories - Murder and the Remaking of a Territory https://www.ud-id.com/conversationbrooks daily 0.75 2018-11-12 https://www.ud-id.com/adelle-york daily 0.75 2018-11-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542515434361-M1F48A4FD3RU77AKV6JA/Submerged+Parcels+Perspective.jpg Adelle York Tribal Delegation to the White House to negotiate land rights, 1860. Image source: The National Archives, David M. Rubenstein Gallery, Records of Rights https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542573821864-Z511E58YGBQL5VFNHN4H/ecx.png Adelle York Previous boundaries of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’. Image source: the author. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542573821864-Z511E58YGBQL5VFNHN4H/ecx.png Adelle York Previous boundaries of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’. Image source: the author. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1542515434361-M1F48A4FD3RU77AKV6JA/Submerged+Parcels+Perspective.jpg Adelle York Tribal Delegation to the White House to negotiate land rights, 1860. Image source: The National Archives, David M. Rubenstein Gallery, Records of Rights https://www.ud-id.com/issue-03-preview-page daily 0.75 2018-11-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539796824158-ZZLOK4KX4TBUHEN1PZDI/2.jpg Issue 03: Preview Page - Art and Participation in Jardim Colombo A culture-oriented approach towards the transformation of a community in the margins https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539797661192-6YFWCDNW22Z5POOQNDO7/Yeo_Axonometric+View+of+the+Aggregate+Form.jpg Issue 03: Preview Page - In Conversation with Antoine Picon https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539796848524-8D9ZZK4GW8F9EJHWKMU8/4.jpg Issue 03: Preview Page - Redefine the New Normal: Reinterpret the Obsolete Designer’s Role: City building through the lens of reinterpretation and selective negotiation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539796691447-OSNE0ZAURGIJ9A8H4JW7/Yeo_Axonometric+View+of+the+Aggregate+Form.jpg Issue 03: Preview Page - Issue 03: Pedagogy/Ideology https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539797292875-ZKJOUV4EC2WWGBKNQ5L4/Charlestown.png Issue 03: Preview Page - I’m an urban designer, but I’m not an Urban Designer Is there a space for Urban Planners who are designers? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539796824158-ZZLOK4KX4TBUHEN1PZDI/2.jpg Issue 03: Preview Page - Art and Participation in Jardim Colombo A culture-oriented approach towards the transformation of a community in the margins https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539797661192-6YFWCDNW22Z5POOQNDO7/Yeo_Axonometric+View+of+the+Aggregate+Form.jpg Issue 03: Preview Page - In Conversation with Antoine Picon https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539796848524-8D9ZZK4GW8F9EJHWKMU8/4.jpg Issue 03: Preview Page - Redefine the New Normal: Reinterpret the Obsolete Designer’s Role: City building through the lens of reinterpretation and selective negotiation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539797292875-ZKJOUV4EC2WWGBKNQ5L4/Charlestown.png Issue 03: Preview Page - I’m an urban designer, but I’m not an Urban Designer Is there a space for Urban Planners who are designers? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539796691447-OSNE0ZAURGIJ9A8H4JW7/Yeo_Axonometric+View+of+the+Aggregate+Form.jpg Issue 03: Preview Page - Issue 03: Pedagogy/Ideology https://www.ud-id.com/issue-04-preview-page daily 0.75 2018-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540695943097-83X74WMPERCPZTFYIDLO/tanzania.JPG Issue 04: Preview Page - Issue 04: Advocacy/Equity https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540696484036-WAIS3CTWAK5ZNHMRPVGN/tanzania.JPG Issue 04: Preview Page - In Conversation with Chelina Odbert https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540772819856-000LJBSC8I16FQI8OE9L/11.png Issue 04: Preview Page - Inclusive Futures Technological Advances, Urban Equity, and Urbanism Representations https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540696031648-RITBGB3MZ3OP1O08UE2S/UD+ID+2.jpg Issue 04: Preview Page - Re-signifying the right to the city in the digital age When public spaces become not public, what are the possible means to reassure their primordial civic function? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540696484036-WAIS3CTWAK5ZNHMRPVGN/tanzania.JPG Issue 04: Preview Page - In Conversation with Chelina Odbert https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540696031648-RITBGB3MZ3OP1O08UE2S/UD+ID+2.jpg Issue 04: Preview Page - Re-signifying the right to the city in the digital age When public spaces become not public, what are the possible means to reassure their primordial civic function? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540772819856-000LJBSC8I16FQI8OE9L/11.png Issue 04: Preview Page - Inclusive Futures Technological Advances, Urban Equity, and Urbanism Representations https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540695943097-83X74WMPERCPZTFYIDLO/tanzania.JPG Issue 04: Preview Page - Issue 04: Advocacy/Equity https://www.ud-id.com/tatum-lau daily 0.75 2018-10-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539794084035-T6I4WN1C4HIM4G9LT9MH/4.jpg Tatum Lau Camille Pissaro: "Le Boulevard Montmartre, effet de nuit (The Boulevard Montmartre at Night)", https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539794020740-VUH4KRAGE3SYD4WB5KTS/5.jpg Tatum Lau Paul Cézanne: “Mount Sainte-Victoire view from Lauves” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539794084035-T6I4WN1C4HIM4G9LT9MH/4.jpg Tatum Lau Camille Pissaro: "Le Boulevard Montmartre, effet de nuit (The Boulevard Montmartre at Night)", https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539794020740-VUH4KRAGE3SYD4WB5KTS/5.jpg Tatum Lau Paul Cézanne: “Mount Sainte-Victoire view from Lauves” https://www.ud-id.com/mark-bennett daily 0.75 2018-10-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539797141416-XBAST3IT89VPBX57GLD3/Charlestown.png Mark Bennett https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539797191626-8RHOY72GWABS8TK9OFM9/South+Station+100.png Mark Bennett https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539797191626-8RHOY72GWABS8TK9OFM9/South+Station+100.png Mark Bennett https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1539797141416-XBAST3IT89VPBX57GLD3/Charlestown.png Mark Bennett https://www.ud-id.com/antoine-moya-1 daily 0.75 2018-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540708612035-WDEPHS6C2XZ6M70TV9AG/UD+ID+2.jpg Camila Huber Image Credit: Photo by Shannon Finney/Getty Images – March 24th 2018 - Accessed October 21st, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/3/19/17139654/march-for-our-lives-dc-march-24-protest https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1540708612035-WDEPHS6C2XZ6M70TV9AG/UD+ID+2.jpg Camila Huber Image Credit: Photo by Shannon Finney/Getty Images – March 24th 2018 - Accessed October 21st, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/3/19/17139654/march-for-our-lives-dc-march-24-protest https://www.ud-id.com/remus-macovei daily 0.75 2018-11-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543247062376-87EUG7PFR3GQ2BF208CI/SundialBridgeRdg-124c+%281%29.jpg Remus Macovei Richard Weinstein, Director of the Office of Planning and Development for Lower Manhattan within New York City’s Department of City Planning, presenting a new development project in Manhattan, 1972; https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543247062376-87EUG7PFR3GQ2BF208CI/SundialBridgeRdg-124c+%281%29.jpg Remus Macovei Richard Weinstein, Director of the Office of Planning and Development for Lower Manhattan within New York City’s Department of City Planning, presenting a new development project in Manhattan, 1972; https://www.ud-id.com/stein-tsang daily 0.75 2018-11-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541991462783-EBSILY5550NYUKXD3MVZ/Submerged+Parcels+Perspective.jpg Isaac Stein / Maggie Tsang Image Credit: By authors https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541991274707-O8TXBRW3INAL1F9GVX24/Submerged+Parcels+Plan.jpg Isaac Stein / Maggie Tsang Image Credit: By authors https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541991462783-EBSILY5550NYUKXD3MVZ/Submerged+Parcels+Perspective.jpg Isaac Stein / Maggie Tsang Image Credit: By authors https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1541991274707-O8TXBRW3INAL1F9GVX24/Submerged+Parcels+Plan.jpg Isaac Stein / Maggie Tsang Image Credit: By authors https://www.ud-id.com/conversationbaan daily 0.75 2018-11-26 https://www.ud-id.com/issue-06-preview-page daily 0.75 2018-11-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206681480-NE2JUVX14VLHUKYSZVE0/zaha-ahdid.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - Issue 06: Image/Representation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206767443-XX8FR7BY3V1NHV14BDJ5/zaha-ahdid.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - In Conversation with Iwan Baan https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206871834-L6XTK6JZXZOA41YC5HJW/SundialBridgeRdg-124c.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - Aspiration and Isolation Redding California’s attempt at a Bilbao Effect https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206940866-IMNB15UW0DHLFOZX8DK7/Richard+Weinstein%2C+standing%2C+presented+plans+for+a+Manhattan+development+project+at+City+Hall+in+1972.+Mayor+John+V.+Lindsay+was+seated+at+center.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - Is the Planner a Tastemaker? The hypocrisy of planning https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206902898-YU64UK1ZZBT4L4C4QPQI/xmas-tree-victoria-albert.png Issue 06: Preview page - Contesting the Christmas Tree Re-Presenting the Representational Tree https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543207010986-LJTOVHPPBLTMCI4A7RFI/FKV_T.+Paglen_They+Watch.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - You, Me, and the NSA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206681480-NE2JUVX14VLHUKYSZVE0/zaha-ahdid.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - Issue 06: Image/Representation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206902898-YU64UK1ZZBT4L4C4QPQI/xmas-tree-victoria-albert.png Issue 06: Preview page - Contesting the Christmas Tree Re-Presenting the Representational Tree https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543207010986-LJTOVHPPBLTMCI4A7RFI/FKV_T.+Paglen_They+Watch.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - You, Me, and the NSA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206767443-XX8FR7BY3V1NHV14BDJ5/zaha-ahdid.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - In Conversation with Iwan Baan https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206871834-L6XTK6JZXZOA41YC5HJW/SundialBridgeRdg-124c.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - Aspiration and Isolation Redding California’s attempt at a Bilbao Effect https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543206940866-IMNB15UW0DHLFOZX8DK7/Richard+Weinstein%2C+standing%2C+presented+plans+for+a+Manhattan+development+project+at+City+Hall+in+1972.+Mayor+John+V.+Lindsay+was+seated+at+center.jpg Issue 06: Preview page - Is the Planner a Tastemaker? The hypocrisy of planning https://www.ud-id.com/mark-heller daily 0.75 2018-11-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543244359154-N7RJ867D59JM9AGTQGRR/FKV_T.+Paglen_They+Watch.jpg Mark Heller Paglen, T. (2010). They watch the moon. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1543244359154-N7RJ867D59JM9AGTQGRR/FKV_T.+Paglen_They+Watch.jpg Mark Heller Paglen, T. (2010). They watch the moon. https://www.ud-id.com/angius-macrakis daily 0.75 2019-03-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1550676028817-9RW62O6Z8OME4649UXGU/Macrakis+%26+Angius+Image.jpg Angius & Macrakis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1550676028817-9RW62O6Z8OME4649UXGU/Macrakis+%26+Angius+Image.jpg Angius & Macrakis https://www.ud-id.com/lina daily 0.75 2019-03-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1551726997498-6XWJB7GPDX6DOSWBY8QK/Gaza-1.jpg Lina Kara'in Photojournalist Andrea Dicenzo www.andreadicenzo.com https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1551726997498-6XWJB7GPDX6DOSWBY8QK/Gaza-1.jpg Lina Kara'in Photojournalist Andrea Dicenzo www.andreadicenzo.com https://www.ud-id.com/in-conversation-with-moshe-safdie daily 0.75 2019-04-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1554991565390-OGOLFR0CC0CCWVRUPMRU/Moshe+Safdie.jpg Conversation Safdie https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1554991565390-OGOLFR0CC0CCWVRUPMRU/Moshe+Safdie.jpg Conversation Safdie https://www.ud-id.com/mostafavi daily 0.75 2019-07-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1562163562440-AAPY4X7T8KGVNKGJCDAS/Mohsen+Mostafavi+photo.jpg Conversation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1562163562440-AAPY4X7T8KGVNKGJCDAS/Mohsen+Mostafavi+photo.jpg Conversation https://www.ud-id.com/kathpalia daily 0.75 2019-09-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1568997069367-LXL88TAOTF6FCIMWPSRL/inrvw.jpg Conversation: Kathpalia https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1568997069367-LXL88TAOTF6FCIMWPSRL/inrvw.jpg Conversation: Kathpalia https://www.ud-id.com/jose-esparza daily 0.75 2019-09-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1568987696962-Q4W3VCS5T1U8VP03EX34/Zocalo_Santiago+Arau.jpg Jose Esparza Photojournalist Andrea Dicenzo www.andreadicenzo.com https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1568987696962-Q4W3VCS5T1U8VP03EX34/Zocalo_Santiago+Arau.jpg Jose Esparza Photojournalist Andrea Dicenzo www.andreadicenzo.com https://www.ud-id.com/ryan-thomas daily 0.75 2019-10-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1570197486058-M6LMGYVF2YQYP8DBO7A9/Razish_Fort+Irwin.jpg Ryan Thomas Capt. Gregory Walsh. n.d. “1-163 Attacks Razish at NTC.” DVIDS. Accessed June 10, 2019. https://www.dvidshub.net/image/5453643/1-163-attacks-razish-ntc. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1570197486058-M6LMGYVF2YQYP8DBO7A9/Razish_Fort+Irwin.jpg Ryan Thomas Capt. Gregory Walsh. n.d. “1-163 Attacks Razish at NTC.” DVIDS. Accessed June 10, 2019. https://www.dvidshub.net/image/5453643/1-163-attacks-razish-ntc. https://www.ud-id.com/karan-saharya daily 0.75 2019-10-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1570201884372-OSU2FA7FV1SPLSI9E7YC/VG%26AD_Mumbai_UNESCO.jpg Karan Saharya An aerial view of the Nominated Property © Abha Narain Lambah Associates; Web source: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1480/ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1570201884372-OSU2FA7FV1SPLSI9E7YC/VG%26AD_Mumbai_UNESCO.jpg Karan Saharya An aerial view of the Nominated Property © Abha Narain Lambah Associates; Web source: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1480/ https://www.ud-id.com/alex daily 0.75 2019-10-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1571668585266-6BB1YJV21A5IEQO65J3D/Maps+of+the+Society+for+the+Diffusion+of+Useful+Knowledge.jpg Alexandra Sanyal Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Vol 1. 1844. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1571668585266-6BB1YJV21A5IEQO65J3D/Maps+of+the+Society+for+the+Diffusion+of+Useful+Knowledge.jpg Alexandra Sanyal Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. 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(© Marvel Studios) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573183165843-TXLA4ZJMKUE17SCG2LGZ/02.+ZHA_WangjingSOHO_VSB.jpg Fiona Kenney and Vaissnavi Shukl Image 2: Zaha Hadid’s Wangjing SOHO in Beijing.(Photograph by Virgile Simon Bertrand, used with permission of Zaha Hadid Architects) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573183189065-0858M5O57FPNDGF1VAT7/Wakanda+AD+2.jpg Fiona Kenney and Vaissnavi Shukl Image 3: Wakanda’s Golden City (© Marvel Studios) https://www.ud-id.com/aditi-agarwal daily 0.75 2019-11-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a91daa0c258b45020910c9d/1573184047059-L0DLQQ188E7QBC6I7QF9/Golconde%2C+India-2.jpg Aditi Agarwal Golconde (1942), a dormitory in Pondicherry, India, was one of the first modern buildings to address the pragmatic impositions of a tropical context while proposing environmental sensitivity as a foundation for the design process. 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