Tag: Cities

Cities of Tomorrow: Refugee Camps Require Longer-Term Thinking

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Former mayor of the world’s second-largest refugee camp, humanitarian Kilian Kleinschmidt notes that the average life of a refugee camp is 17 years, “a generation,” and these places need to be recognized as what they are: “cities of tomorrow,” not the temporary spaces we like to imagine. “In the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people. But the refugees were building a city,” Kleinschmidt told Dezeen in an interview. Short-term thinking on camp infrastructure leads to perpetually poor conditions, all based on myopic optimism regarding the intended lifespan of these places.

Many refugees may never be able return home, and that reality needs to be realized and incorporated into solutions. Treating their situation as temporary or reversible puts people into a kind of existential limbo; inhabitants of these interstitial places can neither return to their normal routines nor move forward with their lives.. On the one hand, assert experts like Kleinschmidt, planners need build up refugee camps to be durable and sufficient places in their own right. On the other, they also need to move refugee migrants toward countries and regions where they will end up virtuously integrated into struggling economies, including (though controversially): areas of nearby Europe with unused housing and high labor needs.

Beyond providing more thoroughly for essentials, Kleinschmidt sees additional opportunities to enable refugees with new technologies: “With a [3D-printing] Fab Lab people could produce anything they need – a house, a car, a bicycle, generating their own energy, whatever,” he said. Unfortunately, governmental bureaucracies and aid organizations are reluctant to push boundaries and try new approaches. More fundamentally: they frequently fail to recognize the need for robust solutions that help facilitate refugees who are themselves working hard to create real places for living.

“I think we have reached the dead end almost where the humanitarian agencies cannot cope with the crisis,” he said. “We’re doing humanitarian aid as we did 70 years ago after the second world war. Nothing has changed.” Kleinschmidt worked with the United Nations and their High Commission for Refugees for 25 years before starting an independent consultancy that continues to address humanitarian issues around the globe.

His previous senior roles included deputy humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, deputy special envoy for assistance to Pakistan, acting director for communities and minorities in the U.N. administration in Kosovo, executive secretary for the Migration and Refugee Initiative (MARRI) in the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, and many field-based functions with U.N.H.C.R., U.N.D.P. and W.F.P. He worked extensively in Africa, Southeastern Europe, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

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Details & Diagrams: $ 1,000 IKEA Flat-Pack Refugee Shelter

Emergency shelters are designed to be short-term solutions, and many cannot withstand rain, wind and sun for more than six months. Yet the average stay in …
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Banksy’s Dismaland to be Reused as Refugee Housing in France

The dystopian bemusement pop-up theme park known Dismaland, a project of UK artist Banksy, is now closed but its dismantled pieces and parts will find second …
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Here Today, Drawn Tomorrow: 16 Future Visions of 10 Cities

What will New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and 7 other cities look like in the future? Concept art depicts them in various states of decay and splendor.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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December 2, 2015
Subway Angels: Painted Figures Spliced into Contemporary Cities

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Gods, angels, cherubs and human mortals from famous historical artworks can be found browsing the beverage display at the corner store, passed out in front of the liquor shop, or riding the bus with an aptly bored expression in these clever remixes.

In his ongoing series Art History in Contemporary Life, Ukrainian artist Alexey Kondakov continues to document a fictional world in which ancient figures find themselves transplanted into modern cityscapes.

Among his hacks: Cesar van Everdingen’s Bacchus, Caravaggio’s David and Goliath and William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr, all hacked to fit into new times and places.

The scenes are so expertly edited it is left to the figures themselves to stand out from each setting through their actions or attire. Madonna, child and lamb are, for instance, a bit of a strange find in an old apartment staircase and cherubs generally aren’t seen on the Earthly plane, at least by ordinary people.

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Sideways Street Art: Muralist Makes Figures Walk on Walls

These layered creations are surprisingly realistic, even in black and white, thanks in part to their scale and reinforced by their shadows and context.
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High Art Hits Streets: Classical Paintings in Modern Settings

If context is critical to understanding art, then what happens to a work when you push a famous piece through time and space to a highly familiar and everyday …
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Secret Lives of Superheroes: Realistically Posed Action Figures

The secret lives of superheroes are far more mundane than you might imagine, with the Black Widow helping the Hulk trim his armpit hair, Spiderman scrubbing …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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November 11, 2015
Floating Blue: Bold Plan to Expand Dense Cities into Open Seas

[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

Ocean cities are a longstanding Utopian dream, but many such schemes fail to address the immediate need of cramped urban centers, many of which around the world are bordered and constrained by large bodies of water.

Blue 21, a Dutch architecture and design group, aims to sustainably extend such cities into adjacent lakes and oceans, alleviating the stress on existing metropolitan areas and providing vital resources (like space to grow food) in close proximity to urban cores. The team has experience building floating homes in the Netherlands but wants to take their experience global and work at a larger scale.

These modular buoyant extensions can be added to over time and used to grow algae, veggies, crops and seafood, producing food and biofuels to support existing populations on land.

At the same time, they can serve to productively process and recycle city wastes and absorb emissions, becoming a productive rather than consumptive part of the regional ecosystem. “As an integrated concept it proposes floating development that can be ‘plugged in’ to existing cities and help them recycling waste nutrients and CO2 that often end up in the environment, polluting it.”

While Blue 21 may not be a solution on the immediate horizon as yet, it represents an approach that bridges the gap between fantastical floating cities and more realistic solutions that engage accessible stretches of ocean. “We are Blue21, starting a Blue Revolution. This is how: by building world’s first floating city with a positive impact on nature. Because we believe our future is on the water for seven reasons: 1. We are running out of land, 2. Cities on land are vulnerable, 3. Water will save us from our addiction to fossil fuels, 4. Water is the new oil, 5. Water is an innovation playground, 6. We can actually have a positive impact, 7. We can do this, now.”

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Only in Russia: World’s First Floating Nuclear Power Plant

It sounds at best far-fetched and at worst frightening, at least at first, but this unique water-based energy station is already under construction and is …
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The Future is a Beach: 5 Artificial Floating Island Cities

If human settlements move off of land and into the water in the future, these artificial islands may become our homes in the wet and salty frontier.
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Cities on Rails: Mobile Master Plan Turns Trains into Towns

Modular thinking is brilliant and infectious, expanding and spreading from industrial-revolution technologies to three-dimensional printing to … cities?!
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[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

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WebUrbanist

September 23, 2015
Alien Architecture: Surreal Cities for Future Worlds

[ By Steph in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Will the architecture of the distant future be recognizable to us based on what we have built up to this point in human history, or beyond what we’re able to conceive? Take a look at any retro-futuristic architectural visions and you’ll most likely see structures influenced by the era in which they were created, but one contemporary illustrator is attempting to take such speculative creations into deep reaches of the imagination.

Graphic designer Mike Winkelman has created a series of digital illustrations that combine hyperrealism with structures that can seem physically impossible, but in a maybe-someday kind of way. Unlike the kind of fantasy architecture that feels totally dreamlike, such as floating houses, these visions often seem to employ technology that hasn’t yet been created.

Winkelman (known as Beeple) is on his eight consecutive year of drawing something every day, and hasn’t missed a single day in all that time. He uses Cinema 4D, Octane Renderer, X-particles, Zbrush and other tools to build these sci-fi worlds, some of which seem like they could be connected in an overarching narrative.

It’s the kind of work, presented sans commentary or explanation, that really gets your brain going imagining what the story could be for each piece. Dozens of these drawings can be found on the artist’s Behance, and select prints are available on Society 6.

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Here Today, Drawn Tomorrow: 16 Future Visions of 10 Cities

What will New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and 7 other cities look like in the future? Concept art depicts them in various states of decay and splendor.
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Future Architecture: 7 Surreal Award-Winning Skyscrapers

On land, by sea, in the air (and in one case: outer space), these winning entries are daring and visionary, defying convention, technology and at times even …
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Walkability & Hyperdensity: 14 Concepts for Future Cities

The city of the future addresses problems like overpopulation, pollution and sprawl by building high-density vertical neighborhoods that are interconnected at …
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[ By Steph in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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WebUrbanist

August 25, 2015
Instant Cities: 3D-Print Your Favorite NYC Blocks on Demand

[ By WebUrbanist in Gaming & Computing & Technology. ]

We are accustomed to being able to click a few buttons and get 2D prints of cities, blocks or buildings, and now a new web app allows you to create your own 3D model just as easily, picking and printing your favorite parts of Manhattan.

Inspired by Terrafab, a similar app that lets you print out custom selected, scoped and scaled sections of Norway’s gorgeous natural topographies, ibldi uses a similar approach but turns it toward America’s largest cityscape.

For now, Terrafab offers more functionality and versatility, spanning an entire country, letting users customize their viewport and allowing selections ranging from tiny to gigantic. It is not hard to imagine, though, similar open map APIs in the near future allowing any section of the planet to be likewise selected and printed.

From Terrafab: “Arguably, Norway has one of the top five most incredible terrains in the known universe. Now you can create your own 3D-printed genuine gypsum heirloom mantelpiece display replica of your favorite part of this formidable landscape in two easy steps.”

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Origami Shelter: Instant Flat-Pack Architecture on Demand

Take a structure, strip away all of the non-essentials, and squeeze out every last unused bit of air space, and what do you get? Essentially, a flat-folded …
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8 On Demand Social Shopping Sites You Need to Share

Social shopping, online marketplaces that revolve around innovative communities, is one of the greatest developments spawned by the social media revolution
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Crawling Cities: 3D-Printed Shells for Hermit Crabs

Hermit crabs carry crystal-clear cityscapes on their backs, thanks to a series of 3D-printed shells by Aki Inomata. The artist scans the insides of hermit crab …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Gaming & Computing & Technology. ]

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WebUrbanist

June 29, 2015
Vertical Cities: 12 Towers Take Urban Density to the Skies

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Taking advantage of virtually endless vertical space within urban centers, entire cities-within-cities could spring up into the skies, packing in thousands of new housing units as well as parks, recreational space, offices, shops and everything else you’d expect to find on a typical block. These 12 residential skyscraper designs build up instead of out, often using staggered or stepped arrangements of stacked modules to maintain air circulation, access to daylight, and views. Rather than creating closed class-based communities, most make their communal spaces open to the public, and reserve the ground level for greenery.

High-Rise High-Density Tropical Living in Singapore

How do you pack 100,000 people into a square kilometer without sacrificing quality of life? WOHA’s entry into a competition to design a vertical city for Singapore devised a greenery-laden ‘lattice city’ made of staggered modules. This porous arrangement ensures that all levels get plenty of fresh air and daylight, free up the ground level for nature reserves and heavy industry, and weave social spaces throughout. The plan was created to be walkable, but large elevators and people movers can zip inhabitants vertically and horizontally as needed.

Stacked Modules in Vancouver

Conceived for Vancouver, this design by Ole Scheeren is made up of stacked rectilinear modules that poke out of the main tower at various angles, projecting the living spaces outward to mimic the spacious feel of living on the ground and create cantilevered terraces. The aim is to reconnect architecture with the natural and civic environment, encouraging social interaction between inhabitants.

Vertical Village in Singapore by OMA

Condo units that would take up a lot of space if there were all placed on the ground are instead stacked in hexagonal arrangements for The Interlace, a residential project by Ole Scheeren/OMA. 31 individual six-story blocks come together to create a network of both private living spaces and communal areas, with eight large courtyards and various terraced gardens.

Vertical City in Jakarta

The city of Jakarta in Indonesia is in need of both higher density housing and green space – but designs like these prove that you don’t have to choose. MVRDV has designed a 400-meter-tall tower called Peruri 88 that integrates housing, offices, retail, a luxury hotel, parking, a mosque, an imax theater and more into what is essentially its own city within the city.

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Vertical Cities 12 Towers Take Urban Density To The Skies

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Vertical Forests: 2 Lush Urban Towers Support 16,000 Plants

Skeptics of improbably green skyscraper concepts might want to take a moment of silence to appreciate the successful construction of these two beautiful …
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Modular Cities: 13 Expandable Solutions for Urban Growth

As urban populations flourish, cities typically expand outward into suburbia or suffer growing pains with static infrastructure that just can’t keep up. …
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Twin Tree-Covered Towers: The World’s First Vertical Forests

Concept designs from far-fetched futurists have toyed with the idea for years, but one firm has finally made the vision a reality: towers extensively populated …
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[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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WebUrbanist

June 18, 2015
Urban Melodies: Multiple-Exposure Street Scenes Remix Cities

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

Capturing the cacophony of urban life, this series of superimposed photographs renders local phenomena, regional monuments and international architecture in a strangely compelling style.

Alessio Trerotoli‘s work has taken him to Rome, Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, New York and other world cities, sometimes shooting in subways or side streets and other times photographing iconic settings.

Each image is comprised of multiple exposures in the same location, creating a layered effect that reflects a sense of movement despite the images themselves remaining technically static.

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Urban Melodies Multiple Exposure Street Scenes Remix Cities

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Double Vision: 33 Examples of Multiple-Exposure Photography

When photographers intentionally capture more than one image per frame, surreal, complex layered images like these 33 eye-catching multiple exposures can …
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Urban Hybrid: Double-Exposure Photos Fuse London & NYC

While photo shoots can be meticulously staged, sometimes the best shots come with an element of surprise – particularly in the chaotic context of cities.
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Little People in Paris: 5 Tiny Street Art Scenes by Slinkachu

The tiny figures of Slinkachu play out surreal scenarios ranging from dramatic to comedic, all against the backdrop of life-sized props that seem giant by …
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June 3, 2015
Retrofuturistic Urbanism: 6 Cities as they Could Have Become

[ By Delana in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

To people of 100 or even 50 years ago, the metropolises of today would look utterly foreign. Our elevated highways, massive airports, high population density and huge skyscrapers would be breathtaking to someone from a far earlier era. But futurists of the past did their best to imagine the world of tomorrow – otherwise known as our today – and came up with some wild imagery.

San Francisco

Above (and at top) is ship engineer and inventor Alexander Weygers‘ vision of San Francisco as he saw it from 1950. The disc-shaped objects near the water are Weygers’ patented flying machine which he dubbed the Discopter. In his visions of future American cities, Weygers imagined large Discopter ports in every city, allowing for safe and convenient travel for the city’s residents.

Los Angeles

Architect Harlan Georgescu envisioned these sky-high mixed-use buildings becoming an integral part of future downtown Los Angeles. The buildings were meant to be 500 feet tall; Georgescu’s design put living, working, dining, shopping and recreational spaces in each building. Every structure would provide homes for 200 families in the space that would normally only support 12 conventional, ground-level homes. His Sky Lots plan included a suspended freeway running between the buildings – then out to the suburbs – to alleviate some of the city’s terrible traffic problems.

Houston

In the 1920s, Houston Post writers took a stab at predicting the city’s skyline in 1980. Note the same type of elevated freeways envisioned for LA, these also leading straight into and through tall buildings. Elevated walkways were also featured in the design, essentially doubling the pedestrian space for Houston residents. Houston did eventually develop a skyline containing plenty of tall, distinctive buildings and elevated roads – it looks like the Houston Post had (mostly) realistic expectations for the future of their city.

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Retrofuturistic Urbanism 6 Cities As They Could Have Become

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Retrofuture Urbanism: 10 Fantastic Cities of the Future

Futuristic utopias have long been the dream of urban planners, sociologists and science fiction writers. These 10 examples showcase some of the weird, wild, …
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Heroic Urbanism: 13 Ultra-Cool Comic Book Cities

Gotham City, Neo-Tokyo, Metropolis – what these and 10 other cities have in common is that they’re just as fascinating as the superheroes that inhabit them.
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Aerial Urbanism: Hyper-Dense ‘Cloud City’ Redefines Skylines

A complex spanning in seemingly all directions, this sky-oriented, cloud-shaped, forward-thinking design has just won the Shenzhen Super City Competition in …
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WebUrbanist

May 8, 2015
Griddy Cities: Aerial Cyberpunk Cityscapes Shot from 7,500 Feet

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

Flying over New York City, San Francisco and Las Vegas, this photographer has managed to both capture the essence of each city he shoots from the night sky above while also turning these places into surrealistic, faux-futuristic versions of themselves.

Using a full-body harness to hang out of helicopters, adventurous artist Vincent Laforet went to great lengths and high altitudes (in some cases nearly 10,000 feet) to take pictures of each setting (NYC and LV shown above, SF shown with making-of video below).

Special permission needed to be obtained to use flight paths normally reserved for passing planes. Tilt-shift techniques make the scale more comprehensible and help highlight areas of focus in each shot. What is truly remarkable, though, is how each set both reflects the photographer’s personal style but also very much embodies the character of each distinct location.

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Griddy Cities Aerial Cyberpunk Cityscapes Shot From 7500 Feet

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Iconic Camouflage: Painted People Disappear into Cityscapes

Unlike some other prominent artists working with more seamless urban camouflage in strange or offbeat settings, this work in NYC by Trina Merry allows for …
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Metropolitan Cityscapes: Maps Honor Favorite Places

These papercut city maps are more than just visual representations of cities; the designers got to know each locale intimately to capture its essence.
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Celestial Cityscapes: Photographing Dubai from Above the Fog

Home to the tallest building in the world, Dubai is a city rich in skyscrapers that seem almost otherworldly when seen piercing through seasonal layers of …
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April 23, 2015
Fantastic Cities: 48-Page Urban Coloring Book Made for Adults

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Coloring books are no longer just for kids, as this one designed for adult colorists illustrates in beautiful black and white. Showing urban scenes both real and imagined, these fictional, actual and hybrid views could take hours each for enthusiasts to fill in, and, psychologists argue, may even profit mental health benefits beyond the fun of simply reliving a childhood activity.

Canadian artist Steve McDonald, the man behind Fantastic Cities, is known for works of a similar style, but these have historically been found in galleries and collections: “small on-site studies that are usually done with pencil/chalk on colored paper and large format studio work which is usually done with pencil & charcoal/chalk with acrylic washes on paper. Steve has also gained a lot of attention for his highly detailed ‘ bird’s eye view ‘ renderings of villages, cities and rural scenes as well as his compositions of machinery and his popular flying vehicle series.”

In this book, Steve selected scenes from major cities like New York and San Francisco, providing aerial drawings of real places but also stylized works based on the architectural and urban character of other cities, all with extreme levels of detail that leave readers with much to color.

There may even be psychological benefits to coloring: “by engaging multiple parts of the brain, coloring allows us to focus on the lines, movements, and colors in front of us, use our imaginations and be creative, and de-stress.” More about the book: “This unique coloring book features immersive aerial views of real cities from around the world alongside gorgeously illustrated, Inception-like architectural mandalas. Available July 7th from Chronicle Books.”

Nor is this an isolated piece – according to the New York Times, “major publishers are seizing on the trend. This year, Little, Brown will release four illustrated coloring books for adults, all subtitled ‘Color Your Way to Calm.’ The books, ‘Splendid Cities’ by the British artists Rosie Goodwin and Alice Chadwick and three titles by the French illustrator Zoé de Las Cases, feature detailed cityscapes with famous landmarks, cafes and street life. Promotional materials for the books emphasize the health benefits of ‘mindful coloring,’ noting that the activity “has been shown to be a stress reliever for adults.”

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Book of Cities: Rise & Fall of 10 Places Over 200 Years

We take it for granted that London and New York will grace the pages of books, but would you be surprised to learn that Madrid and Cairo were once as commonly …
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Pencil vs. Camera: Illusion Drawings Pop Off the Page

You might think artist Ben Heine has Photoshopped himself into his own pencil drawings, but he’s actually standing on top of them. Much like the …
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Pop-Up Pulp: Book Covers Made Into Dramatic 3D Scenes

Pulp fiction cover art is fabulous enough in its own right, but Thomas Allen takes it to new heights with his weird but hilarious pop-up cover art.
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WebUrbanist

April 19, 2015