We’re still waiting on our flying cars. But back in 1923, the magazine Science and Invention assured readers they were just around the corner. And to top it off, the buildings of tomorrow would be built to “solve” the traffic problem.
The world is rapidly becoming more urban, but as cities grow in size, their impact on Earth’s biodiversity grows in step. As a new mapping effort led by landscape architects at the University of Pennsylvania shows, the conflict is far more dire than most of us appreciate.
When you think of Paris, you probably think of narrow, tree-lined streets. But consider some of its most famous monuments: They’re ringed by several lanes of busy vehicular traffic. Now the city is promising at least half of that space will go to pedestrians instead of cars.
Once a tiny counter-culture gathering on a San Francisco beach, Burning Man has ballooned into what could be considered an impressive experiment in rapid urbanization. Last year, the population of Black Rock City, which is erected for the festival in the Nevada desert, swelled to over 70,000.
If we want to someday live on Mars, spaceships won’t be enough. We would need a Martian city—and this is how we might build one.
A quick survey of any big-box store will show you that Americans devote far too much real estate to the parking of their vehicles. But wait, argue businesses, we need that parking for our customers! Yet even today, on the biggest shopping day of the year, chances are the parking lots near you are nowhere near full.…
“The Bronx is burning.” Throughout the 1970s, hundreds of buildings went up in flames in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods. But nowhere were the fires more prevalent than The Bronx, where on a single night in July 1977, 400 blazes were raging. And flawed urban planning data was to blame.
Riding through a city on a bike lane that’s separated from cars feels great. But when you roll up to a light, the infrastructure often vanishes, leaving you feeling vulnerable as you cross busy lanes of traffic. Now a new type of intersection might keep cyclists safer and more visible. And it was created by a designer…
Recently, SuperSkyScrapers held an interesting architectural competition in Mumbai, India: how do you tackle housing shortages in densely populated regions around the world? The competition was focused on one type of repurposed resource: shipping containers.
I promise, you have nothing better to do than look at these photos of funny signs, submitted for this week’s Shooting Challenge.
In what the AP calls a “hastily called news conference” this morning, Boston mayor Marty Walsh announced that he will “refuse” to sign its host city contract unless he’s sure taxpayers won’t be paying the bill if the games go over budget.
If you live in a post-industrial city, odds are good that it’s got its share of abandoned, blighted transit infrastructure. Some cities demolish it, some cities let it fester, and other cities repurpose it. In Seoul, they’re choosing the latter.
Detroit is known for many things: its once-bustling auto industry, its repurposing of empty factories, its musical history. But public transport wonks know it for something else, an unusual historical fact about its road system.
For many of us, cities that are easier to traverse on foot are better places to live. If you’re one of those people, you might be curious to know which of America’s cities actually are the most walkable. A new study by the real estate and brokerage website Redfin breaks it down.
Will cities in the future be re-designed to function "like sponges," to cope with droughts that will only become more severe thanks to climate change?
We've all looked out at the night sky and wondered at how much the stars look like strings of cities. But there's more than a passing resemblance—according to a team of astrophysicists who compared the two, there's a much deeper connection at work. We aren't just made of stars, we act like them too.
Imagine taking a scenic gondola tour through Boston's historic Back Bay as Red Sox fans saunter towards Fenway over arched bridges. Not far away, the Charles River Basin is padded by wetlands that soak up the rising sea water. This surreal scene, a sort of Venice in New England, could be the reality in a few years.
As cities grow, their populations become more diverse — on a species level. As we move into the future, many wild animals will be living in urban areas alongside humans and their pets. Now, urban planners are figuring out new ways to make urban species diversity possible — without killing anyone.
Something bizarre happened overnight: New York City's population grew to the size of Shanghai's, swelling from 8 million people to 24 million. It's like a natural disaster, but this tidal surge is made of human needs. Here's how we'll rebuild the city to make room for them all.
Eleri Harris has a new comic on Medium about the utopian plan for Australia's capital city of Canberra. Two idealistic American architects, Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahoney Griffin, won a competition to design what they believed could be the greatest planned city in the history of the world.
