While the myth of the "Old Shanghai" is more a narrative cultivated by a few foreigners than a living point of reference for the Shanghaiers, Shanghai has an instinctive passion for the newness and the promise of each day.
As urban stakeholders -- residents, pundits, developers, associated professionals, and politicians -- we like to discuss and debate aspects of urb...
Messrs. Hollande and Delanoë warn that Paris will become "a museum city" if skyscrapers are not built, and that foreign visitors and foreign investment will dwindle. In fact, Paris will probably be less desirable if its traditional attractions are (literally) overshadowed by modern monstrosities.
Last week, I participated in the Project for Public Spaces' Placemaking Leadership Council inaugural meeting in Detroit. The event left several impr...
Our future city relies on dreamers who find inspiration in the possibility of really being able to affect peoples' lives. Our community's anchor organizations need to cultivate these folks. We need leaders of all cultures and across generations to unify.
The larger story, which can really only be told through numbers, is about how "China's urban population has increased from 180 million people in 1978 to 690 [million] now" and since rural birth rates consistently outpace urban ones, it is specifically a tale of rural to urban migration.
Considering that Beijing's plans for addressing the record levels of air pollution, 45 times the recommended safety levels, were greeted with little enthusiasm, this blogger would like to offer another one: time to abandon Beijing.
I don't necessarily expect that future historians will find purposeful reasons for the emptying out of our great cities. More likely, they will seek to identify social, economic or demographic reasons that resulted in the urban crisis.
If places are not implemented with care, and if they leave a sense of the overly artificial and concocted, we may collectively and forever chase The Great Gatsby's symbolic green light at the end of Daisy's pier.
This is not an obscure antiquarian story, but illustrates a highly contextual place, a small country where the cycles of human history is readily experienced in little more than one day.
If the arts in San Francisco go under, there is far less incentive for startups and tech companies to relocate here. Let's not make the assumption that the success of the tech industry is unique and separate from the rest of the city.
If the benefits of living in a city are diminished because the Internet brings access to the world to you, then why deal with the high real estate prices, traffic, crime, pollution and difficulty of living alongside millions of other people?
One thing that is undeniable about American cities, private residential property and the curbside next door -- for the moment, the eclectic reigns.
Today, across the world, in multiple contexts, the allure of the bicycle knows no bounds. For the past several years, I have been documenting this trend with my own photographs, in order to tell a short story with minimal words.
Emotion must start entering into the conversation of how it is we are forming our cities. Otherwise, our intentions at being well-intended will continually bend to that part of the dark we think we are fleeing or fighting.
Committed to exploring the multiple intersections between art and urbanism, Aurash Khawarzad speaks about creating the post-Hipster city, gentrification, and what it means to (re)build New York City from the ground up.
Now that The Hunger Games phenomenon is set to be released next month in China, it may be a moment to ask -- where, as architects, do we see ourselves in this allegory?
Not only are the walks a great example of just the self-organization Jacobs celebrated, but it is run exclusively by dedicated volunteers whose commitment to the Jacobs precepts brings them together in a totally organic way.
For five hours, miles of streets connecting Hollywood and East L.A. through downtown Los Angeles were closed to cars and became a great festival of mostly cyclists, but also skateboarders, roller-bladers, and pedestrians.
With the death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, the worlds of architecture and urbanism cannot afford to hear no evil/see no evil this time.
The importance of urban research universities is clearly manifest in the scale of the impact, the "footprint," of the university in its city. By late in the last decade, urban research universities were among the top employers in every one of their respective cities.
For the first time in China's history, more people live in a city than they do countryside -- 51.27 percent to be exact, which amounts to more than 690 million people. It's a notable shift.
The NYC Department of Sanitation will use 10 million gallons of fuel, at a cost of approximately 40 million dollars, to collect and dispose of 3.2 mil...
From time to time, a single image captures the look and feel of city life, and successfully depicts an urban place where people come together. La...
More and more I've become fascinated with architects' alternative forms of creative expression, those lying outside the boundaries of their core work....
