Articles – ka-au

The Age of the Smart City: Better Cities Through Smarter Infrastructure

Marite Guevara — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 11:50:18 +0000

A city’s strength is defined by how well it delivers essential services, identifies and responds to the needs of its citizens, and supports equity within its society. The advent of smart cities—municipalities that harness the power of data and the Internet of Things to improve the performance of infrastructure and city services—has unleashed unprecedented opportunities for cities to better themselves and the quality of life of their citizens. These potential gains are not automatic. City leaders will need to balance the cost of integrating new technology with maintaining existing infrastructure, find partners and financing to support the work, and ensure that the poor and vulnerable also share the benefits that accrue. In this article, Nicole Dupuis, Principal Associate for Urban Innovation in the City Solutions and Applied Research Center at the National League of Cities, explores the choices facing cities as they confront this staggering challenge.

More info: urbannext.net/the-age-of-the-smart-city/

Storkeengen: Landscape and Climate Adaption

Marite Guevara — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 11:42:13 +0000

By this new path passing through a flooded area, C. F. Møller’s new landscape design integrates both climate adaption and public nature park in one single project.

The climate adaption project in Vorup, near Randers, resolves the city’s current and future climate challenges by converting the adjacent nature area, Storkeengen (Stork Meadow), into a public nature park.

More info: urbannext.net/storkeengen/

The Evolution of Radical Urbanism

Marite Guevara — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 11:39:04 +0000

What does it mean to be radical architect or designer today? Never before have cities mattered as much to the future of humanity. As David Harvey attests, we have sleepwalked unknowingly into a full-blown “crisis of planetary urbanization”, with acute social, political, and ecological dimensions. Cities are fundamentally places of opportunity – after all, urban migrants continue to be drawn in their millions by the promise of security as well as upward mobility. But cities are too often sites of yawning inequality, where land, housing, infrastructure, and services are transformed into symptoms of exclusionary growth. Faced with contemporary urbanization patterns, we are forced to question how cities and city-making have traditionally operated. More to the point, as architects and designers we are forced to rethink how we can operate within the city, learning from its emerging intelligence and shaping its outcomes to radical and tactical ends.

More info:urbannext.net/the-evolution-of-radical-urbanism/

Model Agribusiness Cities for the 21st Century

Marite Guevara — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 11:35:21 +0000

Agriculture today takes place at a range of radically different scales – from tiny urban farms that feed small neighborhoods to massive industrial operations that produce global food supplies and commodities. Over the past decade, as agriculture has gained popularity in design schools, designers have focused almost exclusively on smaller-scale issues, such as brownfield development in shrinking cities, while ignoring critical opportunities to intervene in large-scale agriculture and the global commodity flows it is connected to. At larger scales, agricultural processes have many stakeholders, such as private companies, non-profits, government agencies, international agencies, and academic institutions. The environmental and landscape impacts are also of greater significance, since the application of chemicals and the alteration of land are taking place over vast territories. ORG Permanent Modernity and P-REX, along with studios and research led by Alexander D’Hooghe and Alan Berger at the MIT Center of Advanced Urbanism, had an opportunity to redefine large-scale industrial agriculture for a project in rural Ghana. The design challenge was to create a vertically-integrated industrial agriculture operation, along with the necessary industrial, residential, and infrastructural components that would be required for an urban settlement of 30,000 people over 15 years.

More info: urbannext.net/model-agribusiness-cities/

Cities of the Future: Challenges of Architecture and Design

Marite Guevara — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 10:57:04 +0000

The urban population is expected to double in the next 40 years, forcing cities to undertake a holistic and sustainable transformation of their model. According to Martha Thorne, Dean of the IE School of Architecture and Design and Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the great challenge of architecture has to do with its capacity to create denser metropolises that have high urban quality and offer residents a better quality of life.

More info: urbannext.net/cities-of-the-future/

Keys to Understanding Smart Cities

Marite Guevara — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 10:51:43 +0000

Cities are the ecosystem, the meeting point for two of the new realities that will define human development in the coming years: on one hand, the intense process of urbanization of the world’s population, and on the other, the spread of information and communications technology (ICT) that will be available to people at every level of society.

More info: urbannext.net/keys-to-understanding-smart-cities/

Critical Ecologies of Posthumanism

Marite Guevara — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 10:48:17 +0000

The ninth issue of the journal New Geographies, titled Posthuman, surveys the urban environments shaping the more-than-human geographies of the early 21st century. Seeing design as a geographical agent deeply involved in the territorial engravings of contemporary urbanization, New Geographies 09 embraces the “planetary” as the ultimate spatiotemporal stage of the posthuman condition.

The journal’s final interlude features a conversation with philosopher Cary Wolfe, in which various theoretical dimensions of posthumanism are taken up in connection with the social, political, and ecological challenges facing us today.

New Geographies: In What Is Posthumanism? (2009), you claim that the “human” occupies a new place in the world, among a larger constellation of other life-forms and “nonhuman subjects,” each with their own “temporalities, perceptual modalities, and their own forms of environment.” On this last point, specifically, how would you articulate an understanding of the environment from a posthumanist perspective? And how would this notion challenge the (humanist) logic of the production of environmental space as a differential field in which humans appropriate, design, and administer—often through institutionalized techniques of exclusion and subjugation—the space of the nonhuman?

More info: urbannext.net/critical-ecologies-of-posthumanism/

Building a Circular Future

Marite Guevara — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 10:42:25 +0000

With Building a Circular Future, we want to challenge and rethink the way we use and reuse resources in the building industry, toward ultimately eliminating the concept of waste.

Today, a building truly becomes a material graveyard by the end of its life. We simply do not consider how to take a building’s superstructure apart, and we do not know how to place a value on all of the resources that get lost in the process. What if, when deconstructing, we could learn from all the precision the industry put into constructing?

In the Danish building industry, we proudly state that we recycle over 87%* of all building waste. That is a measurement of weight, not of quality or economic value. Concrete crunched into road fill, in fact, has an average value of €5 per ton**, 50 times less than that of a new concrete element. Almost all building waste today is being downcycled to the lowest value possible.

The way we demolish our buildings and deteriorate our resources seems wasteful. We believe the key to Building a Circular Future is to make reusing resources into a positive and economically viable business by bringing together the principles of design for disassembly, materials passports, and the circular economy.

Moe info: urbannext.net/building-a-circular-future/

Cities as Hubs Between the Physical and Virtual Worlds

Marite Guevara — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 10:37:59 +0000

Globalization has had an undeniable impact on economic sectors, governments, societies, regions, and companies in every corner of the world. The influence of globalization on capital flows and international commerce has been particularly strong, with cities occupying a key position as hubs between the physical and virtual worlds.

More info: urbannext.net/cities-as-hubs-between-the-physical-and-virtual-worlds/