URBANmedias

Watch the commuting patterns of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

An EU-funded project is building platforms to detect patterns in how people use urban spaces.

Maps don't typically convey time very well. They're static snapshots of a moment in history. A handful of animated maps that do a good job combining time and space using either transit data or geo-tagged social-media hits.

Now a new project, called Geographies of Time, is trying to do something similar with a more typical two-dimensional map. The effort is part of a broader EU-funded projects called UrbanSensing that's building platforms to detect patterns in how people use urban spaces.

A street shouldn't just be about transportation, but also about civic definition and social and commercial interaction.

There is no better place to start using land more efficiently than with our streets, our most plentiful and visible parts of the urban commons. The recent "complete streets" movement has made a terrific contribution to getting our streets right, by insisting that they be designed so as to accommodate all users.

Connectivity is hugely important to a sustainable street network to encourage walking and shorten driving trips by making destinations more convenient. The pedestrian experience should be safe and enjoyable, and should be so perceived.

Other design elements to help turn streets into worthy places are:

Sidewalks with real curbs;On-street parking ;Street trees;Storefronts with elements that shelter pedestrians such as awnings, arcades, and colonnades;Buildings with windows and "other signs of human occupancy such as porches and balconies" for "eyes on the street";Design appropriate to safe motor vehicle speeds.

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...

It is no great revelation that architects tend to look up when exploring a city. It’s the best way to guage size, scale, placement, composition and detail – all the information required to process the qualities of a space or place.

Having spent the last few days looking up and considering the architectural impact of the New York City grid-plan layout, this article takes a particular interest in the domestic scale elements that help to service the city and punctuate the rigidity.

At first the brain identifies the rhythm of the brick formation and the window layouts, it is this assumption of regularity that leaves many with this very valid conclusion based on the verticality of the grid. But in identifying this pattern – the eye becomes more accustomed, searching for further geometries or perhaps more importantly, exceptions to the rule.

In honor of the opening of a new garden in Paris, Reuters has pulled together a list of some of their favorite green spaces.

Here are a couple favorites...

See the big picture of how suburban developments are changing the country's landscape, with aerial photos and ideas for the future

"Tourists and locals experience cities in strikingly different ways. To see just how different these two worlds are, have a look at the map of Washington D.C. above based on where people take photos. The red bits indicate photos taken by tourists, while the blue bits indicate photos taken by locals and the yellow bits might be either."

The growth of these cities will create a host of environmental and health problems.

By 2210, the global population is expected to grow from just more than 7 billion to 11.3 billion — with 87 percent of the population living in urban areas, according to a new working paper by researchers from NYU’s Marron Institute.

Most of these individuals will be in what’s now the developing world — creating a host of environmental and health problems.

If projections are correct, these new urban dwellers will require the world’s existing cities to expand six-fold to accommodate triple the residents, Richard Florida wrote in The Atlantic. Plus, the world will need 500 new “megacities” of 10 million or more, he wrote.

Silent parks. Designing for disabilities. Human-powered data. Garbage anthropology. World-class sidewalks. Floating favelas. Paint as infrastructure.

These are the keys to the cities of the future, according to the most recent TED conference, City 2.0. Last year, for the first time, the TED Prize went to an idea—the future of the city—and a million dollars was divvied up among ten grantees all over the world.

Last week was the first-ever TED City 2.0 conference, featuring several of those grantees plus many other urban leaders discussing their ideas for the future of the city.

The urban ecology framework of Patch Dynamics has been key in watching how city models such as the megalopolis and the megacity interact and generate urban ecosystem change.

Urban Design practices have always been created in response to emerging and overlapping city models and the disciplinary contexts designers find themselves in. The urban ecology framework of Patch Dynamics has been key in allowing me to see how city models such as the megalopolis and the megacity interact and generate urban ecosystem change. One's first thought about a patch may be that of a shape that changes. However, the concept of a patch in this case describes a set of patches or a mosaic that changes over time. This search is not to find or create the best patch mosaics, or those that function in the most resilient ways.

Instead, it is a project of creating urban design practices and strategies for a diversity of urban actors to engage their patches and democratize the resilience cycle in their own ways.

China's next new city will be designed by US firm KPF, next to Hunan's regional capital, around a 40-hectare lake.

Adjacent to Changsha, the ancient capital city of Hunan, the design implements the sort of urban innovation that creates a sustainable and truly habitable environment.

"We can introduce integrated urban innovation," von Klemperer says, "we can combine water transport with localised energy production, cluster neighbourhood centres, advanced flood prevention and water management, and urban agriculture. Meixi is an experiment in future city planning and building. It will serve Changsha as a new CBD, but it will also serve as a paradigm for other Chinese city planners. It's a kind of live test case."

The firm seeks to achieve these goals through its dense, mixed-use urban, plan, with integration with surrounding mountains, lakes, parks and canals. Meixi Lake will eventually be home to 180,000 inhabitants, living in "villages" of 10,000 people, clustered around the canals...