BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   South Korea   The flood-resistant Oceanix Busan prototype was unveiled on 26 April 2022 in New York – at the second United Nations roundtable on Sustainable Floating Cities – as a follow-up to the Oceanix City concept presented in April 2019. A fruit of collaborat

MVRDV   China   Traditional neighborhoods in China, known as hutongs, have for centuries been the standard form of settlement for people that moved from the countryside to the growing cities. With its basic structure of houses around courtyards, the Hutong combines

MVRDV   Netherlands   In contrast with urban plans where the structure is rigid and predictable, the proposal for the development of Almere Oosterwold is based on freedom of both individual and collective initiatives. The area of 43 square kilometers, located at the edge

MVRDV   China   Over the last twenty years, the incredible economic growth of China has led to enormous urbanization, with massive migrations from rural to urban areas. Though impressive in size, most of these urban developments are rather monotonous, lacking divers

The New York Times   Erin Griffith   Conor Dougherty   A former Goldman Sachs trader moved to the Bay Area to make it in tech. He ended up buying rural land with money from some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest people.  What if you built a new city from the ground up? The idea has tantalized urban pla

Eduardo Prieto   Lumpen people wander the streets of the Quartiere Tuscolano; bicycles wheel from the borgate to the new working-class districts; a helicopter flies over the empty grounds of the Aqua Claudia transporting a Christ statue to St. Peter’s… Such scenes fr

Enrique Morillo   “Our cities are ill.” From Mesopotamian settlements to the medieval city, and especially after the Industrial Revolution, urban cores have altered to accommodate demographic growth and adapt to social advances. But with the exacerbated neoliberal mod

Pablo Canga   Spain takes an ugly turn. The systemic corruption and intellectual anemia of the Franco dictatorship sowed the seed of a story of ambition and abandon that was only reinforced, when the regime ended, by a mediocre political class, and which has led t

The Economist   Modern timber buildings can be cheap, green and fireproof.There is a global race to build the tallest wooden skyscraper. The record was held by Mjostarnet, an 85-metre tower on the shore of Lake Mjosa in Norway, which hosts flats, a hotel and a swimm

Alberto Ballesteros   There are many Chicagos besides that of the postcard picture: the rough Chicago of meatpacking that Sandburg lyricized, the sordid Chicago of gangsters that Algren novelized, the marginal Chicago of Chicanos where Sandra Cisneros grew up. The same go

Alejandro Bernabeu   Chicago’s cool. So begins ACS’s tenth book on cities, though it’s not that simple. The myth of Chicago is not only due to its place and history. Its hydraulics, buildings, and bridges are important, but not enough to cover the city’s significance. Ne

LSE   Ricky Burdett   Jean-Louis Missika   The media has been quick to predict the premature demise of New York, London or Paris. Yet it is difficult to learn lessons about the impact of the pandemic on major cities, because it is not over. Surveys and statistics are very popular, but often m

The Economist   As economies reopen, activity is spreading outward from city centres. The economic recovery from the covid-19 pandemic is lopsided in many ways. Vaccinations have allowed some countries to bounce back rapidly, even as others struggle. Demand is surgi

The photography series by Manuel Álvarez Diestro is a look at the growth of new Chinese cities from the windows of bullet trains moving 350 km per hour. China’s railway network links up 550 cities. From Beijing to Shanghai, Tianjin, or Xian, later fr

The Norman Foster Foundation  presents the ‘On Cities’ Masterclass Series, a series of thirty-minute-long masterclasses which explores the most pressing and compelling topics related to contemporary cities. Given by twenty leading experts in the fiel

Forbes   David Nikel   Sweden’s northernmost town is on the move, building by building. Because of the risk posed by expanding mining operations, the entire town center of Kiruna is being relocated approximately two miles to the east. More than 20 buildings of historical v

The Guardian   Amanda Sturgeon   Buildings covered in plants do more than just make the cityscape attractive – they contribute to human wellbeing and action on climate change. Our cities are dominated by glass-faced edifices that overheat like greenhouses then guzzle energy to cool

Luis Fernández-Galiano gave a series of lectures over different years for the Friends of the Prado Museum Foundation: ‘Jerusalén y Babilonia en el siglo XX’ ‘Del Gabinete al Campus: las transformaciones de la sede del Museo del Prado’ ‘El clasicismo

Ignacio Nieto de la Cal   The astonishing ease with which an imported microscopic virus is bringing our current wellbeing and the global economy down on their knees is making us rethink our way of living and reconsider our priorities. It is starting to look less like just a s

Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, has made public the kingdom’s plans to build a 170-kilometer linear city for a million inhabitants. Car-less and carbon-free, The Line – as it has been named – is part of a larger project called Neom

Norman Foster   Speaking before a gathering of mayors from 41 cities, Norman Foster shared his optimistic view of the pandemic as an uplifting opportunity.

Richard Florida    The New Urban Crisis is a historical watershed. How we respond to it will determine whether our cities, suburbs, and nation will successfully forge a new era of sustainable and inclusive prosperity, or fall victim to our growing inequities and divide

Fascinated by the surrealist structures of megacities and urban landscapes, as well as by modernity and its environmental and social consequences, photographer Ryan Koopmans, born in 1986 in Amsterdam and raised in Vancouver, studied at the Universit

Eduardo Prieto   Rome, 35 ad. An epidemic strikes a city recently decked with marble monuments. A city, moreover, that has since time immemorial boasted the Cloaca Maxima, which Augustus had ordered cleaned, enlarged, tended to by a maintenance corps, and placed unde

José María Ezquiaga   Over the past years, reminding each other that the decisive battle against climate change would be waged in cities, little did we know that these were in for another battle, an insidious, cruel, invisible one. The great epidemics of the past have lef

Ana Paricio   More than fifty years has it taken our cities to earnestly subject their developmental objectives to revision, and make them address life more directly. It was Jane Jacobs who brought about this change of direction. The question “Where are the people

Luis Fernández-Galiano   City air makes us free; city air kills us; and city air saves us. Urban humanity lived a drama in three acts: the bourgeois revolution ended feudal or class servitude, because as the medieval German saying goes, Stadtluft macht frei; the industrial r

Jorge Dioni López   Privatización, turismo, vivienda, especulación, tráfico... Por qué cada vez es más difícil vivir en las ciudades