Getting Freaky with the Trash Cans -
Designer Thor ter Kulve turns city fixtures into instant playgrounds.
How to Save Water-Starved Cities -
“A shared problem deserves a shared solution”
Designing a New Town Square for Our Crowded Urban Future
With most of the world living in cities, urban space is going to be at a premium, so we need to design ingenious and important ways to create public gathering spaces. But we can’t just copy the High Line everywhere.
How the Decline of the Traditional Workplace Is Changing Our Cities -
“For decades, cities have reflected the neat separation of work and home, with residences in one part of town, offices and industry in another, and infrastructure (highways, parking garages, hub-and-spoke transit systems) built to help connect us between the two around what has been for many people a 9-to-5 work day. But what happens when more people start to work outside of offices, or really anywhere – at all times?”
Taking its name from an era-appropriate Sonic Youth album, the New Museum exhibit NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star celebrates the chaotic energy and culture of New York in 1993. In order to promote the exhibit as a conduit to the recent past, agency Droga5 arranged for 5,000 of the city’s pay phones to be equipped with bits of location-specific history from some of the people who lived it.
1993 was 20 years ago??
Seeing as megacities such as New York, London, Beijing, Mumbai, and Mexico City can only grow so much, most of the urban growth will take place in smaller cities. The WWF predicts that the highest growth rate of 4.19 percent will occur in cities with fewer than one million residents.
![“Today [2012], Mumbai has the same number of people as the whole of London living in slum conditions.”
-Urbanized](http://25.media.tumblr.com/910b3faee445ec12f7747e01006ed64f/tumblr_mjm0yte7hc1r4d15qo1_500.jpg)
“Today [2012], Mumbai has the same number of people as the whole of London living in slum conditions.”
-Urbanized
“Defining sprawl is a little bit like defining pornography; you know it when you see it.” — Ellen Dunham-Jones, Urbanized
“The city [Mumbai] says that if there is one toilet for 50 people, that is 10 families have 1 toilet seat, it means they have adequate sanitation. But in 1989 the ratio of people to a toilet seat was 900 people to a toilet seat. Today [2012] , it’s come down to 600. Our local politicians say, ‘Oh, we don’t want to build toilets in slums, because it will encourage people to come.’ As if people come to shit.” — Sheela Patel, Urbanized
In Copenhagen, lime green footprints march up to matching lime green trash cans — it’s hard to miss!
[video]
The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10 Diagrams -
A new exhibit from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association showcases the simple visualizations of complex ideas that have changed how we live.
A sculpture-esque waste basket in Helsinki, Finland