PUBLIC MARKS with tags architecture & societé

Richer couples! Cheaper mortgages! Millions of unwanted houses! Despite all this, young home owners declined for 30 years, even before the Great Recession. Here's how the American Dream shrank.

In Comuna 13 of Medellin, Colombia's largest city, a recently built 1,260-foot long escalator snakes across the hillside shantytown in six separate divisions. As part of the neighborhood's larger urban regeneration project, this massive outdoor escalator cuts down the time to traverse Comuna 13, reportedly one of Medellin's poorest and most violent neighborhoods, from 35 minutes to six minutes on foot.

An imbalance in the opposite direction characterizes the contemporary marriage market in China. The Chinese government’s one-child policy, combined with a cultural preference for sons and technologies that permit selective abortion, have helped to create a large sex-ratio imbalance among young Chinese. For every 100 women in that group, there are now more than 120 men.

D’ici un an et demi, l’immeuble presque centenaire du 780, rue Saint-Rémi, dans le quartier Saint-Henri à Montréal, sera rasé pour céder la place à l’échangeur Turcot.

Photo by Robert Mottar in New York Magazine, December 1969.

The results may be primitive by professional standards, and structurally unsound when confronted with hurricanes and earthquakes, but they nevertheless reflect considerable inventiveness and ingenuity in the face of daunting economic and social conditions. Their very existence is a a manifestation of human spirit and community.

Modern infrastructures are extra large. They facilitate the connection between major urban nodes and allow cities to expand. They are designed to maintain the large and their existence signals the dissolution of the small. They cross the deep valleys, bypass the difficult roads and shortcut the peaks; thus dissolve the small, distant and hard to reach nodes and communities.

This classic book looks at the spaces between buildings, the streets, plazas, and other open spaces of the city and how their design affects people and vice-versa.

Depuis 2001 Encore heureux imagine des projets entre architecture, art et design. Créer plus de confort, inventer de nouveaux usages ou susciter l’émerveillement, tels sont quelques uns de nos axes de travail

There are 621 ghost estates across Ireland now, a legacy of those hopeful years. One in five Irish homes is unoccupied.

If the country immediately used them to house every person on the social housing list, there would still be hundreds of thousands left over.

The current relationship between community and the goods they rely on is faceless, and with the decline of subsistence hunting due to changing migration patterns, the connection to food is disappearing.

In Tokyo, where every sliver of land is at a premium, a few feet of unused private property near the front entrance of an apartment building can be used to sell muffins. A patch of storefront space transforms into an ad hoc vegetable stand for a farmer or a consulting space for a fortune-teller.

This map represented the city not as a static network of streets, buildings, and spaces, but as a series of traces that aggregate over time to represent the city as different people traverse it.

These techno-social practices remade space in the Japanese city in new ways, transforming the paternalistic communities of city streets and subway cars into private territories for women and children.

The project also didn’t much consider the crews of low-wage farm workers that would be needed to plant and harvest the crops of the ambitious vertical farm; presumably these crews would share elevators and stairwells with the residents of the market-rate condos above.

In this series of pictures, the two photographers - father and son - present Shanghai between fiction and reality as the ‘city of tomorrow’. The focal point of their photographic work is the architecture of the city’s streets, a critical investigation and analysis encompassing the subject of urban landscape. In a long-term project begun in November 2002, they have been documenting the metropolis Shanghai as an urban composition, a man-made architectural living space and enviroment of unprecedented and unimaginably gigantic dimensions. The resulting images are of immense visual beauty.

Here, under the flight paths, everything is designed for the next five minutes.

Through plans, sections, diagrams, charts and scale drawings,

49 cities are observed statistically and presented in an unprecedented comparative study, the result of a research project conducted over

several years. Despite the fact that they never actually existed, this history of utopian urbanism provides a remarkable insight into our

understanding of the contemporary metropolis.

small family house

location: nerima tokyo

foot print: 28.24 sqm

These are self-constitutive acts; the state constitutes itself as an agent of modernity vested with the power and authority to control space, dictate the meaning of urbanity, shape the evolution of the public sphere, and suppress contending ideologies.

Sustainable design is not only about energy efficient buildings: Designer should also think about whether they can change people's behavior towards the environment. Can architecture do that?

The article then explores the role of city users and their interactions with the spaces in which they are living, and offers advice to designers who aim for more people-environment fit designs.

Sustainable design architect Edouard François’s latest project changes the face of social housing in Paris. The project, Eden Bio, features terraced houses arranged along pedestrian alleys set within densely planted organic gardens. The upper level units will be reached by external timber gantries and staircases enclosed in greenery. The 100 social housing unit development will be completed in early 2008.