The Living City Design Competition invites project teams from around the world to imagine how existing cities might be retrofitted to achieve all twenty imperatives of the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most rigorous green building standard. Like the standard itself, the competition reflects our belief that humanity has all of the necessary tools and skills to resolve the environmental, social and economic crises of our day. If we are to live up to our potential, however, we must first clearly define what a truly sustainable society would look like. With that powerful and practical vision in mind, we can begin working toward the future we hope for. Read more…

As of last month, travelers catching an American Airlines flight out of New York’s JFK airport have a new option for killing time before their boarding call: an 8-by-12-foot digital display, conveniently located between security and the departure gates, that lights up and announces “Welcome to the Smarter City!” every time someone walks within six feet of its huge, colorful screen.

Passersby who are suitably enticed to check out the gizmo will find an interactive touch-screen display showcasing IBM’s recent foray into large-scale, digital-technology-driven solutions for smarter, more livable cities. Specifically, users will be able to explore six neighborhoods of a hypothetical city, and learn about the various smart systems that IBM has imagined for them—things like coordinating police and fire department responses to emergencies by shared data systems, or centralizing health-care information to allow citizens easy access to their medical records. Bright and cheery touch icons lead the way to fancy animations, impressive graphs, and videos of mayors telling you how IBM solutions have transformed their cities.

Nifty stuff—but since when has IBM cared about smart cities? Read more…

The International Living Building Institute recently launched the Living City Design Competition in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This international competition calls for design teams to re-imagine the future of our cities and use photorealistic renderings to demonstrate how current technology could transform existing cities into Living Cities—communities capable of achieving all 20 imperatives of the Living Building Challenge 2.0. The first prize is $75,000 plus media coverage and the second prize is $25,000. In addition, the National Trust for Historic Preservation will award a separate prize of $25,000 for the entry that most powerfully integrates a city’s existing built assets and architectural character into a vision for its future sustainability.

At first glance it may seem surprising that the National Trust is not only helping to promote this design competition, but also offering a substantial prize of its own. Why would an organization dedicated to preserving our cultural heritage make such a substantial investment in a design competition about the cities of the future?

The answer tells you something very important about both the National Trust and the Living City Design Competition. Read more…

A rendering from PALO Arquitectura Urbana’s proposal for La Boca, a working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires

The Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) celebrates its 25th anniversary this year with an ambitious new exhibition at the Center for Architecture, in New York. A year in the making, Our Cities, Ourselves presents positive, sustainable urban visions for ten cities around the world. Developed in close collaboration with local architects and policy makers, the visions are the true successors-in-spirit of such urbanist dreams of yesteryear as Futurama, but with one big difference—the automobile is conspicuously absent. Read more…

While green roofs have increasingly made headlines as solutions for environmentally sound design in an urban environment, more often than not they are found only as expensive additions to new constructions. Translating the concept for mass production at a cost-effective rate—and for easy implementation on pre-existing buildings—has posed a bit of a dilemma. As a result, although it is already clear what kind of positive impact a green roof can have in terms of energy conservation and aesthetic appeal, there has yet to be much opportunity to measure the widespread impact of green roofing on an urban scale.

Recently, however, Natalie Jeremijenko, an aerospace engineer and an environmental health professor at New York University, may have come up with a solution. Read more…

Click the play button to watch our executive editor, Martin C. Pedersen, explain how a 1961 New York City zoning ordinance led to a profusion of “crappy little parks” in his Yorkville neighborhood. (Click here to watch the two previous installments of “My Banal Neighborhood.”)

Every summer since 2007, the editors of the self-consciously upscale magazine of “global affairs” Monocle have assembled a list of the world’s most livable cities—in their words, “urban settlements where human life can thrive because they are easy to navigate, diverse, pulsing and full of opportunities.” I generally find these kinds of best-of lists irresistible, and Monocle has always used an appealingly idiosyncratic set of metrics (including the number of cinema screens and outdoor seats; the quality of the local architecture; the average amount of annual sunshine; the robustness of public transit; and the government’s commitment to diversity, tolerance, and sustainability.) The problem is, their criteria keep turning up the same cities year after year. Not exactly the same ones—but close enough to make the so-called Quality of Life Issue increasingly predictable and even dull. Let’s take a look at the rankings for the last three years: Read more…

Click the play button to watch Metropolis’s executive editor, Martin Pedersen, deconstruct the “strange, almost mutant form” of a building in his Yorkville, Manhattan, neighborhood—one that appears to have been designed entirely by real estate lawyers. (Click here to watch the first installment of “My Banal Neighborhood.”)

One of the great treats in working on our “1-5-10 Issue” was talking to experts and inviting them—urging them, really—to speculate on the future. Toronto-based Ken Greenberg—our urban-planning talking head—is currently working on a book, due out next year, on the future of cities, and he took the opportunity to ruminate on all of the changes he sees on the horizon. It was a fascinating and far-ranging talk. We took highlights from our interview for the print edition, but Greenberg’s expansive view of cities is worth a longer look online.

What do you see on the ground now in urban planning? What’s engaging you and the clients you’re working with?

I’m pretty convinced we’re in the midst of a transformation which is probably as profound as what happened immediately after the Second World War, when we got all excited about automobiles and in a sense turned our backs on cities. There are all kinds of things that are propelling this. Some of it has to do with the environment; much of it has to do with the cost of energy. I don’t know if you know the book that came out recently called Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. It was written by Jeff Rubin, a former chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce who actually resigned to write this book. From an economic standpoint he is talking about peak oil and the effect it’s going to have on cities. Right now I’m in the midst of a series of skirmishes, as people adjust to this new reality and we change our entire tool kit when it comes to how we deal with cities.

How is that tool kit changing?

Almost everything that we’ve inherited and put into practice in the post-WWII decades has in some way become obsolete. Read more…

Photos: Bureau for Open Culture

Drivers delayed by the red light on the corner of East Long and North Washington Streets, in downtown Columbus, Ohio, may hear more than just the hum of idling vehicles. If they crack their windows this winter, they are likely to catch a disembodied voice emanating from a nearby parking lot. “Parking lots,” the voice asserts. “It’s what we are. We should preserve them. They’re cultural property.”

This suggestion arrives courtesy of Audible Dwelling, a temporary installation of two houses designed by Learning Site, a collective made up of Denmark’s Rikke Luther and Sweden’s Cecilia Wendt. The capsule-like structures act like an oversize stereo, amplifying a 15-minute-long narrative—written by the British theorist Jaime Stapleton and read by the Berlin-based artist Cassandra Troyan—loudly enough for anyone in about a three-block radius to catch an excerpt.

To understand why the artists would care to broadcast commentary on parking lots to idling commuters, it helps to have some background on the city’s recent history. Read more…