Kickstarting Urban Renewal with an Underground Park | New York City on GOOD We’ve been in love with the idea ever since it surfaced last fall: a four-season underground park beneath the hectic streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The concept for the “Delancey Underground” has been drifting around design blogs and New York publications for months now, making lovers of innovative urban space salivate. Now the founders of the project, Dan Barasch and James Ramsey, have turned to Kickstarter, not only to raise funds, but to prove to local government that the public is serious about making the project a reality. If this is the first you’ve heard about it, the Delancey Underground is a concept for transforming a defunct trolley terminal for streetcars coming off the Williamsburg Bridge into public space. The design would preserve the hub's unique, turn-of-the-century features, including cobblestones, rail tracks and vaulted ceilings, while integrating green design technologies, like fiber optic cables to bring natural sunlight underground.
Marc Marius Mueller – Thesis Designing Collaboration: New Platform Helps Global Problem-Solvers Share Stories | Poverty on GOOD Social media and other digital platforms have enabled the world's problem-solvers to connect and share solutions like never before. While much of that collaboration is diffuse, spread out across a multitude of websites, blogs, and social networking sites, a new platform designed by Ideo.org (the design consultancy's nonprofit arm) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seeks to bring tips, ideas, and strategies together into one toolkit and discussion platform for people fighting poverty around the world. The effort is called HCD Connect, and it's designed to open up the field of human-centered design—a technique that uses close listening, empathy, and observation to design solutions for people in extreme poverty—to anyone who needs it. The toolkit is available in hard copy for $21.99 or as a free download. Image courtesy of IDEO.org; Found by hillaryrose
thinkpublic In Barcelona, a Living Wall Is More Than Architecture: It's 'Vegitecture' | Environment on GOOD The environmentally-minded designers at Barcelona firm Capella Garcia Arquitectura take the idea of “green living” to heart. Their latest project, helmed by partners Juli Capella and Miguel Garcia, reimagines and reinvents a unsightly wall left behind from a former building demolition. Their solution: a completely natural makeover. Completed in March, the “Green Side-Wall,” promoted by the Barcelona City Council, is a foray into what the firm has christened “vegitecture,” or a vertical garden with emphasis on the structure's original architecture. The main material responsible for bringing a breath of fresh air to the residential area: Plants—oxygen-producing, living green that cascades down the once plain wall. Spanning a height of 21 meters, the vertical garden is supported by a steel structure that stands apart from the building’s façade. via domus
Gamestorming Better Block: Bottom-Up Urban Reboot In a Single Weekend | Neighborhood It's remarkable what some people can accomplish in a single weekend. While others spend those days catching up on lost sleep or exploring their city with friends, Texas-based nonprofit The Better Block uses that time to rally communities to rethink their neighborhoods. Since its inception in 2010 , the project has built temporary dog parks, pop-up shops, urban forests, cafes, and bike lanes. They've left their mark in more than 35 cities including Philadelphia, Wichita, Cleveland, Houston, and Oklahoma City. The organization's next stop: Detroit, where the city's first-ever Better Block project will take place from September 22 to 23 as part of the Detroit Design Festival . Better Block will fill the vacant lots with work from local artists and artisans, food and drinks, and exhibits from nearby venues. Better Block wants to jumpstart local policy shifts. Several other cities this year will get the Better Block treatment: St. Interested in starting a project in your community?
City development through active citizenship - Orange Innovation Interventions - a tool for urban development Through various twists and turns, the last year of my life has been influenced and shaped by the concept of urban interventions and active citizenship. One way through the fact that it is becoming increasingly popular as an urban trend. Its growing viral presence on social media has sort of taken over my facebook wall. Or Another way I have been exposed to the concept, is through the Colombian based urban movement 100 En Un Dia (100 In 1 Day), which I, together with a group of international Kaospilot students, helped co-create with a group of talented and inspiring Colombian designers, social entrepreneurs and city developers. A global Day of Action But why is city development undergoing a decentralisation And how come cities are being reclaimed by its citizens? So what is an urban intervention? An urban intervention is a citizen-powered action created to change or improve a situation or solution with a dream of a better society in mind. Why now?
eco – agro educational center | AL/Arch agro-environmental educational farm at the city of Ramat Gan Developing a 40,000 sqm plan that redefine the farm as an educational farm for environmental studies. The first projects that are currently being implemented are: Educational Recycling Center . Preschool at the Farm. Gabbion entry wall made of waste materials stratigic plan recycling wall landscape urbanism at Kofer stream eco – agro educational center Creating Public Spaces which Encourage Strangers to Interact September 3, 2012 by Smart Urban Stage This post is also available in: Chinese (Traditional), Spanish Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case meets Charlie Todd – activist, author and founder of Improv Everywhere - as part of a series discussing the future of the city on Smart Urban Stage Modern cities are full of “non-places” – locations where people are strangers to one another and have no impetus to interact. Amber Case: How do we make public areas where strangers are encouraged to communicate with each other instead of stare into screens? Improv Everywhere: When I moved to New York in the summer of 2001, it was my first time living in a large city. That summer started Improv Everywhere, in part, as a tool to create disturbances that would encourage random strangers to interact with each other. As technology has advanced and we’ve come to a point where a huge percentage of citizens carry around computers in their pockets at all times, communication among strangers has become even less common.
זכות הציבור לגעת גם בנוף האקסצנטרי למדי של עולם האמנות והעיצוב, מדובר ביוצרים שהם ציפורים משונות. הם אינם מתעשרים מעיסוקם, הם משקיעים ביצירות שלהם כסף, זמן, כישרון וזיעה, מתגברים על קשיים שונים ומשונים שנקרים בדרכם, ולעתים קרובות מגלים שכל העבודה הקשה שלהם נמחקה, נהרסה או נעלמה. עובדי העירייה עלולים לצוץ בכל רגע ולסייד את ציור הקיר שעליו עמלו שעות ארוכות. ברחובות שבהם הם בחרו לפעול הכול זמני לנצח, מעורער והפכפך עד כדי בלבול, אז מה בכל זאת גורם ליוצרים לעזוב את האינטימיות המגוננת של חלל הסטודיו, המשרד או בית המלאכה ולנסות להותיר במרחב הציבורי פיסה קטנה מעצמם? "העבודות שלי הן מתנה שאני מעניק לרחוב", מנסה יוחאי מטוס - אמן, מעצב גרפי ומעצב תפאורה לתיאטרון ולמחול - להסביר את סוד המשיכה שלו אל הפעולה האמנותית במרחב הציבורי. מטוס, 34, החל להטביע את חותמו על הרחוב הישראלי לפני כעשר שנים, כסטודנט צעיר לתקשורת חזותית בבצלאל. במקביל לפעילותו ברחוב, מטוס עשה לעצמו שם של אמן שפועל בשדות מסודרים וממוסדים יותר בארץ וברחבי העולם. תחנה בדרך לממסד "פעולה במרחב הציבורי לא צריכה לקשט", מוסיף גולדשטיין. "כמה ימים של טראנס"