PUBLIC MARKS with search world

The City of Toronto (City) now grants you a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use, modify, and distribute the datasets in all current and future media and formats for any lawful purpose. more

The italian magazine WIRED asked us to draw a map based on the scenarios developed by the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto to help the reader in the net of ideas and hypothesis built by 7000 influencers from all over the world.

By removing the unnecessary, this New York City map-cut reveals the “paths, nodes, circles, boulevards, parks and streets” of the greatest city in the world.

On November 5, Urban Age will inaugurate an intensive two-day conference on the future of cities in Istanbul, an expanding metropolis and one of the worlds first global cities. 100 innovators of urban change from 15 countries, half a dozen mayors, renowned scholars and authors side-by-side with architects and developers leading major urban regeneration projects around the globe will offer presentations about urban transformations in 25 cities. The conference will engage an invited audience of over 300 urban policymakers, academics, designers, planners and developers to explore the vast and complex challenge of contemporary city making and the interconnected issues of the impact of the global economic condition on world cities, the effect of climate change on urban sustainability and the role of urban design in creating socially cohesive environments.

The increasing urbanization of many parts of the world coupled with other global issues such as environmental pollution, energy consumption, and resources shortage are resulting in major urban crises in many parts of the world. In an effort to explore and map the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Al-Fateh University and the Center for the Study of Architecture in the Arab Region (CSAAR) have joined together to organize an international conference on sustainable architecture and urban development.

The pay gap between executives and the average American worker has always been pretty big, and seems to have increased as the world's economy grows. But with the recent recession bringing the most desperate financial conditions the world has seen since the Great Depression, one could be excused for expecting this gap to be reduced.

Managing News is both a product and a platform. Out of the box it can help your communications team manage a brand reputation, allow geographically dispersed clusters of NGOs stay on the same page, or act as a simple thematic news planet to share feeds with the world. It can also serve as a platform to build highly custom data aggregators that suck in everything from CSV to RDF to custom XML formats and that need unique workflows and visualizations. Managing News is built on Drupal and uses Features, which makes it highly extensible.

Ptolemy writes that geography is the study of the entire world or large sections or countries of it, while chorography is the study of its smaller parts--provinces, regions, cities, or ports.

you said: “Especially given the by-now-clichéd recognition that we’ve decisively become an urban species”

It is indeed very interesting to think about urban systems design given there was a major move toward cities. That said I have the feeling that this move comes with, at least, three issues:

1. access to the “thought” urban environment,

2. the space left where 50% of the population is still living,

3. the space of this growth

There are many areas in the world where the growth of the cities is made by people without access or a limited access to the thought urban environment. Poor people living in slums or just in a space which is not part of the work of urban planner per say. In a recent exhibition about slums I went, it was very interesting to see that the organic structure of the slums was making possible for the individuals to create a rich and meaningful space, driving sometimes to less criminality than more traditional areas of the city. The slum is a forced collective creative space for survival.

The rest of the population, the 50% living in deserted areas are the forgotten of this story. It’s indeed more “fun”, interesting for researchers, sociologists to observe and think about the density in urban space (richness of interactions) more than the low level of activities in the “countryside”. Though there are equal challenges there in terms of design and space organization, access to services, etc.

Finally, is it really cities which are growing? What we call urban space often relates to the city center, but I have the feeling that the growth is happening in the in-between space (suburbs), which is again a complete disaster in terms of design, even more so in rich countries. The private space is becoming a space of non-creativity, dead areas of non activities. Someone, who wants to start a small business in between two buildings on the grass of a random suburb of a rich city, will not last for very long. Complete different dynamic than the slum where unregulated areas give the opportunity of creative solutions for surviving or living.