To get one large point out of the way: In the new book, The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc, several contributors rapidly acknowledge the oxymoron of the title as well as the practice of owning a car in the former Soviet Empire. The private automobile, that avatar of western individualism, is difficult to square with collectivist notions. And once its owners were at the wheel, these socialist automobiles were often difficult to reconcile with notions of mechanical reliability. More than one contemporary joke appears in the text; the introduction, for instance offers,  “Why does a Trabant have a heated rear window? To keep your hands warm when pushing it.” All that aside, the collection of essays edited by Lewis Siegelbaum, is a fascinating look at automobile use, production, and urban planning behind the Iron Curtain. It reveals a system that, if far from socialist or egalitarian in origin, created a culture of automobile use distinct from the western world.

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Mayor Bloomberg at the NYC Big Apps 2.0 awards ceremony, photo: Kristin Artz/Office of the Mayor, via the New York Times.

How do you take the enormous amount of critical information gathered every day by city agencies and make it actually useful to citizens? On the City of New York’s DataMine web site, just looking through the list of datasets generated by the Department of Transportation alone is enough to give you a headache. Enter the annual NYC Big Apps competition – a call to software developers who can mine this data and find ingenious ways to put it at the fingertips, or keyboard clicks, of the average New Yorker. This April, winners received a total of $20,000 in cash, the wide exposure their work deserves, investment meetings with BMW, and a chance to talk to Mayor Bloomberg about their ideas.

Here’s a round-up of this year’s Big Apps:

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The proposed new State Center Complex in Baltimore

Last week, the Seattle-based architecture firm Mithun announced that it will be a consultant on both the State Center Complex in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Great River Park Project in St. Paul, Minnesota. As large-scale exercises in urban redesign, the two projects couldn’t possibly be more different, so Mithun’s multidisciplinary researchers and designers will definitely have their work cut out for them.

The State Center is a vital transit hub at the heart of Baltimore. When it was built in the 1960s, it replaced a vibrant urban neighborhood with a 28-acre, single-use campus of government office buildings.  Last year, the State Center began work on a 15-year, $1.5 billion project to undo that damage and re-invent itself. Mithun has been named as one of the design firms who will help integrate the State Center into the urban fabric, creating a mixed-use community through public-private partnerships. The proposed plan will introduce housing, retail, and parks while relocating the government offices currently occupying the complex. The transit hub will now also be a sustainable, walkable neighborhood, in keeping with the principles of New Urbanism.  Read more…

La Marqueta, between 111th and 116th streets in Harlem, New York, was once the place to drive a bargain on plantains and avocados. But it never recovered from a slow decline in the 1970s, and several attempts to revive it have failed. Luckily for neighborhood residents, however, La Marqueta was built under the tracks of the Metro North rail line. That has given the Harlem Community Development Corporation (CDC) a rather bright idea. With the Center for an Urban Future, an independent think tank, the Harlem CDC is arguing that it is time to give Harlem its High Line.

The High Line has become a sort of urban-planning stereotype by now. Just tagging a project with the words “High Line” defines it instantly—community-led revival of defunct infrastructure for the creation of public space. The presence of an elevated, preferably abandoned rail line is, of course, vital. So the Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago, the Reading Viaduct in Philadelphia, and the Embankment in Jersey City have all lined up for their very own High Lines, but these projects are little more than replicas of what has already been achieved in New York. Thankfully, La Marqueta is actually an entirely different proposition, in spite of the overused descriptor. Read more…

The architect Guy Zucker inserted an elegant, light-filled penthouse into this 1960s-era apartment building on Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. Photo: courtesy Z-A Studio

It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but during a recent 12-hour flight from New York’s JFK airport to Tel Aviv, two Midwestern evangelical tourists on their way to the Holy Land could be overheard excitedly swapping notes on top upcoming destinations—Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Masada, the Dead Sea. “Why would you even want to go to Tel Aviv?” asked one, for whom the city was clearly an airport and little else. “I don’t know, the politics?” offered his friend. The unintentional punch line (last time we checked, Jerusalem was still the seat of government in Israel) was made all the more comic for its blithe indifference to the recent buzz over the city’s regeneration. Tel Aviv is the secular antithesis to everything that ancient Jerusalem represents; it’s young, cosmopolitan, progressive, energetic, and gritty. And in the past few years—as numerous magazines have been tripping over themselves to report—it’s seen a rising generation of artists, architects, filmmakers, restaurateurs, fashion designers, and other creative types.

I was headed there for the architecture. Tel Aviv is home to both the largest and densest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings in the world, and to an impressive array of new projects by emerging and established architects. Specifically, I was in town for Houses from Within, a 48-hour event during which the city opens its doors and allows access to all kinds of buildings, large and small, public and private, historic and contemporary, obscure and celebrated (more than 160 sites in all). This urban steeplechase, now in its third year, is an ideal (if exhausting) means by which to assess the current moment in the city’s rebirth, and to see up close how the often contradictory municipal attitudes toward development, planning, and preservation play out in the built environment. 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…

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.”)

One of China’s historic tourist destinations is set to get a new, “super green” makeover. The architecture firm Woods Bagot has won an international design competition to transform the XiXi Wetlands region outside the city of Hangzhou in southwest China.

Hangzhou has been a tourist hub for centuries. Its famous West Lake was a favored haunt of the Chinese Emperors, and now the city wants to make the Xixi Wetlands a second tourist magnet. The Woods Bagot design, spread over 12 square miles, includes hospitality facilities, residential areas, and public spaces, all clustered around five square miles of wetlands. There will be an “entertainment zone,” complete with a humongous outdoor movie screen; a “cultural zone” with suitably futuristic-looking buildings; and water features everywhere.

But the development’s key feature will be its low carbon footprint. Read more…

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…