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]
Sylvie Faucheux
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. Let me take the imagery of incompleteness further. We can think of the multiple ways in which the city talks back as a type of open-source urbanism: the city as partly made through a myriad of interventions and little changes from the ground up.
La ville, avenir de l'agriculture? - Urbanews.fr
Les enjeux de l’alimentation de proximité n’ont jamais été aussi prégnants que ces dernières années. Face à l’explosion des coûts, qu’ils soient économiques et à mettre en rapport avec nos modes de vies, ou écologiques, lorsque ces mêmes modes de vie alimentent les excès et les rejets polluants, se nourrir près de chez soi et de manière responsable est devenu une véritable problématique urbaine. Alors que les idées et les démarches foisonnent autour de la question et que des réseaux promouvant les circuits courts alimentaires se mettent en place, force est de constater que la ville se perméabilise de plus en plus à l’agriculture, transformant jusque dans ses fondements cette activité dix fois millénaire… Quand la ville redessine et transforme les espaces de l’agriculture Bien sur, la ville s’étale, bien sur la ville grignote et digère chaque année des centaines d’hectares de terres arables. L’homme de la ville, dernier agriculteur d’une révolution alimentaire ?
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.
Vidéo Ted
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.
La ville, la campagne et les mailles du réseau
L’opposition entre ville et campagne n’est plus le facteur déterminant de l’organisation du territoire. Nous assistons à une hégémonie des logiques métropolitaines et à l’influence grandissante des dynamiques de réseau. De ce fait, le territoire est amené à définir sa stratégie de développement en terme d’insertion dans les flux et les échanges de toutes natures résultant de l’activité humaine. Il fut longtemps convenu que le territoire pouvait être analysé sous l’angle d’une tension entre ville et campagne, entre centre et périphérie. terme de pollution. Cependant, la dynamique du territoire ne peut se réduire à cette polarisation et des tendances opposées viennent complexifier les lignes de forces qui président à l’évolution d’un territoire. L’évolution de l’économie change en effet profondément les règles de structuration du territoire. Nous constatons donc une convergence de facteurs tendant à effacer l’opposition ville campagne. Ainsi, les territoires entrent dans l’âge du réseau.
