MIT's Free Urban Planning Software Will Help Build The Cities Of The Future | Fast Company
Most of the world lives in cities. That number, now at about 3.3 billion people, will keep going up. During the next five years, urban populations are expected to soar well beyond half the world's total. Yet most of those urbanites are also likely to live in poorly, or at least haphazardly, designed cities. The expertise to create a well-planned metropolis is seldom available, especially in the developing world, where 30% of urban populations live in informal slums. Avoiding that future just became a bit easier with the launch of the Urban Network Analysis, an open-source software released by MIT. It measures traits such as "reach, gravity, betweenness, closeness, and straightness," which, in laymen terms, express features such as the number of services, buildings, and resources within a certain walking distance, or the volume of traffic along sidewalks and streets. The UNA toolbox can be downloaded here. [Image: MIT]
Open Source Urbanism - Op-Ed
Where change is perceptible, rapid change makes change itself even more visible. Velocity becomes a concrete condition, not just a measure of speed. Rapid change in cities has highly legible moments—the material reality of buildings, transport systems, re-placements of modest shops with luxury shops and of modes middle-classes with the rich professional class, a bike-path where there was none—and they can be both good and not so good. Further, when rapid transformation happens simultaneously in several cities with at least some comparable conditions, it also makes visible how diverse the spatial outcomes can be even when the underlying dynamics might be quite similar. All of this brings to the fore the differing degrees of openness of cities. I prefer thinking of this as the incompleteness of cities, which means that they can constantly be remade, for better or for worse. Let me take the imagery of incompleteness further. How can we urbanize the actual technology?
Sylvie Faucheux
Urban Omnibus | 50 Ideas for the New City
The Omnibus is all about ideas. From the beginning, Urban Omnibus has been a showcase of good ideas for the future of cities, conceived in the public interest and tried and tested in the five boroughs of New York. So, we have decided to surface some of the ideas that have appeared on Urban Omnibus over the past two years and broadcast them around the city. In April 2011, we released a series of Idea Posters, pasted on fences, scaffolds and storefronts from Jamaica, Queens, to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and many places in between. Below you will find 50 ideas for New York already explored on Urban Omnibus and a space for you to share your own.
Architecture Open Source (OSArc) - Op-Ed
As part of the special report on open-source design published in issue 948, Domus approached Carlo Ratti to write an op-ed on the theme of open-source architecture. He responded with an unusual suggestion: why not write it collaboratively, as an open-source document? Within a few hours a page was started on Wikipedia, and an invitation sent to an initial network of contributors. The outcome of this collaborative effort is presented below. The article is a capture of the text as of 11 May 2011, but the Wikipedia page remains online as an open canvas—a 21st-century manifesto of sorts, which by definition is in permanent evolution.The contributors to this article included Paola Antonelli, Adam Bly, Lucas Dietrich, Joseph Grima, Dan Hill, John Habraken, Alex Haw, John Maeda, Nicholas Negroponte, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlo Ratti, Casey Reas, Marco Santambrogio, Mark Shepard, Chiara Somajni, Bruce Sterling References — R.
Vidéo Ted
Proxima Mobile : applications et services gratuits sur mobile pour les citoyens
Open Source urbanism? @ Exquisite Struggle
Via Baltimore Inner Space blog comes an interesting approach to participatory redevelopment. I have quoted Paul Davidoff's assesment of participatory planning in an earlier post: "Lively political dispute aided by plural plans could do much to improve the level of rationality in the process of preparing the public plan." This level of lively discourse is often exceedingly difficult in developer driven projects where significant monies have already been invested. In many cases the illusive veil of a public participation process may be used to control and appease the opposition. The manipulation of statistics derived from resident surveys works to a similar end. These abuses continue to occur because the financial stakeholders of the new plan feel threatened by the efforts of resident and community members to challenge decisions. and Davidoff's work, it rarely transcended a reactionary methodology. You can submit designs in a variety of formats, including straight Photoshop.
