green streets

Throughout human history, people have long found unique value in living and working in cities, even if for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. Put people together, and opportunities and ideas and wealth seem to grow at a more powerful rate than a simple sum of all our numbers. This has been intuitively true for centuries of city-dwellers.

"What people didn’t know," says MIT researcher Wei Pan, "is why."

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, Pan and several colleagues argue that the underlying force that drives super-linear productivity in cities is the density with which we're able to form social ties. The larger your city, in other words, the more people (using this same super-linear scale) you’re likely to come into contact with.

"If you think about productivity, it’s all about ideas, information flows, how easily you can access ideas and opportunities," Pan says. "We believe that the interaction mechanism is what drives the productivity of the city."

The team of architects from Maxthreads Architectural Design & Planning designed the Taichung City Cultural Centre with the aim of combining nature and innovative technology.

The project defines the northern arrival gateway to Taichung Gateway Park, providing a public hub to the overall master plan. An iconic visual corridor connects the Transportation Centre to the main cultural district of the city through a vibrant pubic space, creating an unconventional and exceptional gathering space for visitors and inhabitants.

Maxthreads’ proposal introduces a strong relationship between the exterior and interior public spaces integrating into the Taichung Gateway Park. The Cultural Centre is designed in conjunction with Taichung Gateway park, and includes the integration of culture, education, tourism, environmental conservation, carbon reduction, energy conservation and sustainability.

From a solar mansion in China to a floating farm in New York, green buildings are sprouting up in cities around the world. Among their many benefits are curbing fossil-fuel use and reducing the urban heat island effect.

The Science Barge is a floating environmental education classroom and greenhouse on the Hudson River in New York. Fueled by solar power, wind, and biofuels, the barge, which was built in 2007, has zero carbon emissions.

Vegetables are grown hydroponically in an effort to preserve natural resources and adapt to urban environments, where healthy soil, or soil at all, is hard to come by. Rainwater and treated river water are used for irrigation.

The owner of the barge—New York Sun Works—designed it as a prototype for closed-loop and self-sufficient rooftop gardens in urban areas.

Visit the link for more examples of green urban projects and intiatives...

Lighting designers are applying the skills of their profession to further the goals of urban design, creating safer, more stimulating, and better functioning cities.

Cities rarely stand still. It is in their nature to evolve, expand, and, in some cases, contract. Whichever way they go, cities are always reinventing themselves, often one neighborhood at a time. Outdoor lighting can be a crucial part of this metamorphosis. Across the U.S., urban regeneration projects are stimulating activity in derelict infrastructure, defunct waterfronts, neglected plots of land, and dilapidated buildings. Though not completely erased, the use of fluorescent tubes and glaring security lights has been scaled back and in their place is a growing appreciation for sensitive, appropriate, and considered lighting.

The arbiters of this decades-long shift are lighting designers. Their role in improving conditions to make safer, more accessible cities is increasingly key to urban design...

Carbon levels in the atmosphere are at the highest levels in 3 million years and while politicians debate what to do about it, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California are putting forth a potential fuel solution, harnessing a carbon-neutral source of energy: the sun.

Solar energy is not a new concept but the team at the Berkeley Lab have created an artificial forest that captures solar energy, converts it into oxygen and hydrogen, which can then be used to power fuel cells and produce renewable energy. The ‘forest’ is actually nanowire trees which absorbs sunlight and then mimics the natural process of photosynthesis that trees and plants usually perform.

Read more and find links at the article.

High-speed rail is still just a dream in America. But why then aren't smart roads a reality?

It is possible to imagine a world in which smart pavement, smart cars, and embedded monitoring and controls would turn highways from gulches that pollute a wide swath of land around them with both particles and noise would become more like rivers.

Read more at the article link...

New research suggests LEED-ND projects can dramatically cut down on driving rates.

Confirming previous analysis, newly published research indicates that real estate development located, designed and built to the standards of LEED for Neighborhood Development will have dramatically lower rates of driving than average development in the same metropolitan region.

In particular, estimated vehicle miles per person trip for 12 LEED-ND projects that were studied in depth ranged from 24 to 60 percent of their respective regional averages.

The most urban and centrally located of the projects tended to achieve the highest shares of walking and transit use, and the lowest private vehicle trip lengths.

Parks, squares, street corners, libraries, schools—these are the important social places in many cities. They are the public spaces where we relax and meet friends; in short, the places that we all share. But there is another kind of shared space that often goes unappreciated as a community hub in today’s convenience-oriented cities: the public markets where we buy our food.

While markets were historically important threads of a city’s social fabric, sanitation concerns and a cultural obsession with convenience led to their demise in many western cities in the 1950s. The “super” markets that replaced these vital public spaces were some of the first of what we now know as big box stores, and today, many millions of people around the world rely on these fluorescent, air conditioned megastores.

But in some cities, even in the developed world, traditional public markets still reign supreme!

Green Health City is an ecologically sustainable development designed to support and promote the condition of physical and emotional human health. Situated in China’s Hainan Province in Boao Lecheng on the Wanquan River, five island districts bring together world-class medical facilities, employ new strategies for green energy production and rethink transportation networking to achieve a sustainable urban prototype.

Pathways toward a sustainable future are forged through strong ties to local identity and respect for history. By establishing a cross-disciplinary and inter-cultural approach to design that is routed in China’s long history, a comprehensive and well considered scheme is achieved.

A number of design firms have drawn up plans for new a Penn Station and Madison Square Garden as part of campaign to rebuild the complex. Renowned studios SHoP Architects, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and H3 were all asked to re-imagine the New York landmarks by the Municipal Art Society (MAS), a nonprofit that campaigns for, among other things, intelligent urban design and planning.

The most radical proposals came from Diller Sofidio + Renfro and SOM, who both submitted wildly complex designs. Their proposal, "Penn Station 3.0" aims to serve "commuters, office workers, fabricators, shoppers, foodies, culture seekers, and urban explorers," with a multi-level complex that's topped by a rooftop public garden. The concept separates out the fast-moving commuters, who are confined to the lowest level, and adds layers of stores, cafes, a spa, and even a theatre, in which people are able to move around at a more leisurely pace. The plan would also see Madison Square Garden relocate to sit alongside the Farley building on 8th Avenue.

Find more information at the complete article.

A conversation with the Arizona-based duo behind San Antonio's "Ballroom Luminoso," among other projects...

Joe O'Connell and Blessing Hancock are two Arizona-based artists who specialize in public art. But they're not the type to build your standard metal sculpture on a public plaza.

The duo operates a 14,000-square-foot fabrication facility in Tucson with 14 other artists, designers, engineers and craftspeople, making art out of fabricated metal, acrylic materials, LED lighting, and electronics.

Looking to find new ways for people to live and interact with art, O'Connell and Hancock create design pieces that help define the space they occupy and encourage interactivity. Their most recent project, "Ballroom Luminoso," debuted earlier this year under an elevated highway in San Antonio. Part of a neighborhood improvement plan, the project aims, through design, to bridge the physical boundary created by the I-10 highway, forming better connections between the different ethnicities and income levels in the area.

The future of urban manufacturing is alive in New York City—specifically (and unsurprisingly) in Brooklyn. This month, in the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard, Macro Sea‘s 'New Lab' opened its Beta Space, a place that gives NY-based entrepreneurs, innovators, designers and engineers an opportunity to launch their businesses and create jobs.

New Lab is a first-of-its-kind advanced manufacturing hub in the Navy Yard’s 220,000-sq-ft Green Manufacturing Center that fosters innovation in design, prototyping, and new manufacturing, ushering in a new era of local production...

Despite improvements in air quality, four in 10 Americans still live where pollution levels are often dangerous to breathe.

There is no doubt that great strides have been made in air pollution in the U.S. Awareness, stricter legislation and improved technology have all contributed to improved air, land and water conditions. Despite the improvements, four in 10 Americans still live where pollution levels are often dangerous to breathe.

Since the American Lung Association began studying particle pollution, almost all of the most polluted cities have consistently remained among the worst. The ALA’s 2013 “State of the Air” report measures cities based on low-lying ozone pollution, as well as both short- and long-term particle pollution. Based on average long-term particle pollution figures collected between 2009 and 2011, 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 most polluted cities in the country...