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Posts Tagged ‘City’

Self-Sufficient City: Zero-Waste, Carbon-Neutral & Car-Free

23 Jul

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

eco friendly city design

It sounds like a conceptual design or science-fiction fantasy, but it is already under construction. Rising in the desert outside of Abu Dhabi, Masdar City will be the world’s most sustainable metropolis with no cars (or skyscrapers) allowed.

pod cars rendered real

Instead of private personal automobiles, the public rapid transit system represents a shift from ‘mass’ to ‘mini’ in the form of small programmable multi-person vehicles – but that is just the beginning.

walkable green city streets

Solar, wind and geothermal sources will fuel the city – sun-powered desalination plants will provide fresh water for inhabitants, which will in turn be carefully recycled (as will other biological waste).

walkable city aerial plan

Practicing what it embodies on multiple levels, this new urban area aims to be the definitive regional hotpot for developing green energy and researching clean technology.

sustainble desert city design

The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology has already been built and more structures are on the way. By 2025, the target population should be up to 50,000 within the walkable 2.3 square-mile perimeter currently planned for development.

sustainable urban design diagram

The United Arab Emirates have long recognized the need to diversify their regional sources of revenue and develop self sufficiency outside of oil and conventional business – this comprehensive, ground-up urban design is the latest step along a new long-term path. The development is a project of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company and has been largely designed by Foster & Partners.

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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City Evolution: Watch Urban Growth in 3D Visualizations

18 Jul

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

City Growth Maps Main

Watch Manhattan multiply and San Francisco soar into the sky in a series of growth animation videos that show the expansion of cities over more than a century. Created by Calgary-based real estate company Cube Cities, the videos utilize developer-reported data of building construction dates to show buildings pop upon top of city maps.

City Growth Maps NYC 1

City Growth Maps NYC 2

3D mapping technology from Google Earth provides the base of the videos, and animations show construction as it occurs through each decade. The videos highlight the busiest decades for growth, which is most visible in New York City during the 1920s, San Francisco during the ’60s and Toronto during the ’70s.

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City Evolution Watch Urban Growth In 3d Visualizations

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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Urban Apps: 13 Interactive City Maps, Tools & Guides

15 Jul

[ By Steph in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]

Urban Apps Main

Chances are, even if you’re a lifelong resident of a particular city, you don’t know every nook and cranny, every food truck location, or the lore of every interesting local building. Apps for smartphones, tablets and other gadgets are making big urban centers feel smaller than ever, making it easy to catch a ride, find cheap eats, check out street art and make new friends.

Eat Cheap – Roaming Hunger

Urban Apps Roaming Hunger

Find out where your next meal is parked with Roaming Hunger, an app that shows real-time food truck locations in your area. The app not only displays the trucks on a map, with their hours at that location, but also allows you to sort results by meal, and browse menus. Additional apps are city-specific, like Street Food App, which currently shows schedules for Boston, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver.

Maps and Travel Guides – City Maps 2Go

Urban Apps City Maps 2Go

Want access to maps while traveling abroad, without gobbling up roaming data or lurking in a spot that offers wi-fi? City Maps 2Go downloads maps for the cities of your choice for offline use, including millions of POI (restaurants, bars, hotels etc.), 500,000 Wikipedia entries for sites and attractions, and travel guides. It’s avaiable for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Connect – MeetMe

Urban Apps MeetMe

Among the most popular apps to show you who’s nearby and looking to meet new people, MeetMe gives both social butterflies and the shy an easy way to connect. You’ll probably find more people looking to date than to make new friends, and it might be easier to just walk up to someone and introduce yourself than spend your time scrolling through photos, but hey – whatever works.

Avoid Your Friends – Hell is Other People

Urban Apps Hell is Other People

Maybe, instead of making new friends, you want to avoid the ones you already have. There’s an app for that, too. Hell is Other People will show you where your friends are based on check-ins on Foursquare, Facebook, Instagram and other networks, and provide ‘safe zones’ where you can hang out without being recognized. Of course, it only works if your contacts are avid users of social media, and you might find yourself relegated to unexpected places in the city.

Find Street Art – 1AM Mobile

Urban Apps Street Art

This free photo app called 1AM Mobile lets users pinpoint, share and discover street art in their own communities before it’s gone, as it often is within days or weeks of completion. Shoot photos of street art and the app will map them, date them and credit you as the photographer before sharing them worldwide.

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Urban Apps 13 Interactive City Maps Tools Guides

[ By Steph in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]

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Paper City Animation: “Rise & Fold” of a Fragile Metropolis

01 Jul

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

paper city animation project

Unfolding like a pop-up book in real time, this incredible little built landscape of buildings and bridges, trees and mountains, lampposts and benches rises from nothing then fades back into the oblivion from whence it came.

paper unfolding built environment

A summary from the creator of this cool short animation, Maciek Janicki: “The streets are paved with paper. This delicate animation follows the charming rise and fold of a fragile metropolis. Captured by an unseen helicopter, the narrative unfolds through winding roads, erupting forests and emerging mountains. Paper City grows in one fluid take, with skyscrapers rising from the page – only to crumble, wrinkle and gently crease back into the ground.

Janicki is a motion graphics artist and computer animator from London, England, whose work often focuses on the intersection of built environments, everyday objects of offbeat animation. Some of his other projects, experiments and tests can be viewed via the videos above.

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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Sky Park: Design Idea Floats City Block Over Penn Station

13 Jun

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

sky park penn station

Out of four recent proposals for a radical overhaul of Penn Station in New York City, this concept by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP is far and away the most dramatic – and arguably the most inspiring as well.

sky park new york

Drawing on the success of The High Line, an elevated park in the same city, this project solution from SOM proposes lifting city life to new heights and integrating a new version of Madison Square Garden, boldly suspended in midair.

sky park section slice

Below, the main station itself sits as a dome over the underground transit hub. Meanwhile, the mega-block is anchored by towers at its four corners, with offices occupying the lower floors and residential stories above.

sky park from below

On the one hand, this multi-layered result consolidates central activities around a newly-refocused core. On the other, it opens up shared green park space on a series of levels, blending intentionality with optionality.

sky park som diagrams

While conceptually simple, the design is … challenging from an engineering standpoint, to put it mildly, and more idealistic than realistic at this point. Hanging so much structure over such a distance stretches the limits of the imagination, but that practical weakness is also the visionary strength of the proposal, for better and worse.

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

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Small Worlds: Strange & Shocking Miniature City Scenes

17 May

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

surreal model architecture

There is no unifying theme to these surreal depictions of urban architecture and landscapes, save perhaps their imaginative improbability and singular creator, Frank Kunert, a German photographer and his bemused sense of wonder.

surreal crafted city scenes

Each is at once clearly a model yet quite lifelike, lovingly crafted, painted and photographed. Some show impossibilities seemingly for shock value alone, while others contain a subtle message – some commentary on politics, religion, television or other aspects of everyday life.

surreal architecture model images

The resulting scenes question function, accessibility and the role of architecture, exterior and interior design in shaping both public and private experience.

surreal structural montage scapes

It is also worth noting, too, that none of them are post-edited – they are created sans Photoshop and shot with an analog camera. The process and product are closely related, and each creative choice is made carefully by hand.

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

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Vertical Horizon: Urban Photographs Turn City Upside Down

08 May

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

vertical horizon hong kong

Hong Kong has to be one of the most-photographed cities on Earth, but these shots present a rarely-seen perspective by documentarians or pedestrians … unless they look straight up.

vertical urban photo shoot

From Vertical Art Space: “Romain Jacquet-Lagreze is a French graphic artist with a Masters in multimedia and art from East Paris University. His interest in photography began during his period of working in Los Angeles and Tokyo, and subsequently blossomed into a passion after his arrival in Hong Kong.”

vertical urban built environment

His Vertical Horizon series emphasizes the vast scale of tall structures, but also the “heterogeneous character” of the built environment – traditional alongside modern, scrappy versus refined, small set against large.

vertical city landscape photos

While some of his images are taken from the top down, or at an angle, many of the most powerful ones are straight-up vertical captures. Somehow, these more predictable approaches lack the striking gravitas of their deceptively-flat cousins.

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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The Wilds of Panama City: New Street Art Animals by ROA

26 Apr

[ By Steph in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

ROA Panama City Street Art 1

The streets of Panama City are now crawling with exotic birds, iguanas, lemurs and other creatures measuring up to three stories in height after a visit from famed Belgian street artist ROA. Following his exhibition in Brussels last February, ROA made his way to the Latin American nation to work on new mass-scale pieces in his signature monochromatic style, set against broad stripes of color on stained, peeling urban surfaces.

ROA Panama City Street Art 2

ROA Panama City Street Art 3

Animal are ROA’s favorite subject, and the artist often chooses species that are native to the areas in which he’s working. This faunal imagery contrasts with the stark concrete and asphalt spaces of the city, bringing in a connection to nature as well as some spectacular art that people from all walks of life can enjoy as they go about their daily routines.

ROA Panama City Street Art 4

ROA Panama City 5

“Since I was a kid I drew animals, so I wanted to paint like I draw, but more plastic and looser. I gave it a try on the wall… I got inspired to go up to paint in left-behind factories and hidden places and experiment with lines and scales. I was still enjoying it because every wall is different; the environment, the social life around it, the external conditions, the depiction, the challenge is always there.”

ROA Panama City Street Art 6

Check out ROA’s previous work in Mexico City as well as some panoramic pieces and lenticular art, which changes depending on the angle from which you view it.

[ By Steph in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Perfect Pitch: Impossibly Starry City Skies in Blackest Night

22 Apr

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

pitch black skies

Massive power outages give us rare glimpses of darkened cities, but in normal conditions, there is simply no way to see the starry skies above the typical urban metropolis – but one photographer has found a way to simulate them.

pitch black starry skies

Thierry Cohen uses a multi-step process to create stunning visualizations (dubbed Darkened Cities) of would-be, could-be sights from New York to London, Shanghai to Sao Paulo … ones that the ordinary eye will rarely or never see naturally.

pitch dark night space

Cohen takes a series of shots of each of the cities themselves, and carefully removes illumination from the equation. Night sky photos from the same latitudes (adjusted for time and angle) are then layered into the background, creating a seamless illusion.

pitch photo edited cities

The results are at once mesmerizing, revealing the unseen potential for views of space right where we live, but also somewhat depressing – these are scenes that no one can actually ever see outside of deserts, at least unless disaster strikes.

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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Lawless Metropolis: Kowloon Walled City, Then and Now

09 Apr

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Kowloon Walled City 1
Twenty years ago, a dank, lawless, congested and compacted lawless city located just outside Hong Kong was evacuated and destroyed, putting an end to the nearly century-old settlement first created as a Chinese military fort. Kowloon Walled City was packed with at least 50,000 inhabitants in 6.5 acres just before its demolition in 1993, and its history included a period of mob rule with sky-high rates of prostitution, gambling and drug use. Today, it’s the Kowloon Walled City Park, a tranquil place modeled on traditional gardens of the early Qing dynasty.

Kowloon Walled City 2

The former fort became an enclave when Britain gained control of the New Territories, which is one of the three main regions of Hong Kong. During World War II, as the Japanese occupied Hong Kong, the walled city’s population began to multiply dramatically. Once Japan surrendered, China announced plans to take back the city from Britain, and even more refugees poured inside, increasing the number of squatters to 2,000. Unable to drive them out, both China and Britain washed their hands of the situation, allowing it to rule itself.

Kowloon Walled City 3

But it was hardly a democracy that rose inside Kowloon in response. Underground mob groups increased already-rampant crime, taking control of brothels, gambling parlors and opium dens. Hong Kong police would only attempt to infiltrate the city in large groups.

The architecture of Kowloon Walled City was haphazard, rising vertically with such narrow alleyways on the interior that sunlight rarely penetrated to street level. Pipes constantly dripped onto pedestrians. Children climbed to the rooftops to play. Many interior apartments had no windows. These factors came together to give it a dystopian feel, popularizing it as a setting for novels and games.

Kowloon Walled City 4

Exasperated with the unsafe, unsanitary conditions, China and Britain mutually agreed to tear it down. In its place, a 330,000-square-foot park was created, completed in 1995. Paths and pavilions inside are named after the streets and buildings of the vanished Walled City. Some artifacts, like entrance plaques and the city’s south gate, are on display. Where the city’s 300 interconnected buildings once stood are now floral walks, ponds and carefully cultivated gardens. Catch a glimpse into Kowloon Walled City’s fascinating past at the website of photographer Greg Girard.

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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360Photography

Posts Tagged ‘City’

Self-Sufficient City: Zero-Waste, Carbon-Neutral & Car-Free

City Evolution: Watch Urban Growth in 3D Visualizations

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City Evolution Watch Urban Growth In 3d Visualizations