Urban Design

The paper attempts to outline the urban visions and architectural ideas and vocabulary behind the formation of the large urban conglomeration in Japan, South Korea and China, and how the seeds of Western planning theories and architectural design practice have helped shaping and building the contemporary cites along the vast regions of Asia Pacific Region, and frame a local language in envisioning the city of the future.
Reflecting on the contributions from East Asia to the discourse of planning and design a city for the future as promoted by single actors, larger cultural movements and national elites fostering economic ambitions and political agendas of autocratic forces (e.g. from the experimental cities by the Metabolists in Japan, to the more “pragmatic” urban development projects fostered by local and national governments in South Korea and China), the paper tries to explain the key socio-economic factors and engines which have dramatically and radically transformed the skylines of the most dynamic and growing influential area of the world at the dawn of 21st century; it also aims at describe the origins of the various forms and elements of the modern built environments which have been shaped and molded by these same forces, and how/whether these urban forms embodies a true genuine East Asian vision of the city of the future, and what is the current trend in terms of new urban forms and architectural design research at the beginning of 21st century.

With the increase of refugee movements since 2014 in Europe and the Near East, the debate of how to plan appropriate shelters and emergency accommodation has gained a new momentum. Established techno-managerial approaches have been criticised as inappropriate and the professional community of planners and architects was increasingly drawn into debates for alternative solutions. This article traces the “innovations” that promise better, more effective, and more humane emergency shelters using the examples of the “Tempohomes” in Berlin as well as the Jordanian refugee camps of Zaatari and Azraq. In both cases, planners were employed to address the ambivalent reality of protracted refugee camps and include “lessons” from failures of earlier solutions. While the article acknowledges the genuine attempt of planners to engage with the more complex needs and expectations of refugees, a careful look at the results of the planning for better camps reveals ambivalent outcomes. As camps acquir...

How can we develop a political critique of urban form at the time of a tall building boom? Pointing to limitations of interpreting towers as representations of finance and power, I introduce an understanding of skylines as phantasmagoria of capitalist culture: a dazzling image that abstracts from the commodified urban landscape by promoting its further commodification. I show that both professionals who argue for and those who argue against the construction of tall office buildings in London approach the city’s ‘new skyline’ as an easily marketable visual reproduction that is defined as a compositional whole: a bounded composition with St Paul’s Cathedral at its centre. I claim that this approach and the widespread idea that commercial skyscrapers ‘destroy’ the historic cityscape assume an element of integrity that is ideological and which itself must be ‘ruined’. My argument for a shift of the ways in which cityscapes are viewed draws on Walter Benjamin’s critical montages and allegories. I explore his reading of ruins as emblems of the fragility and destructiveness of capitalist culture and his understanding of ruination as a form of critique. My argument for ruining the cityscape’s ‘beautiful appearance’ focuses on compositional wholeness and symbolic coherence. In so doing, I provide an interpretation of skylines that sheds light to the ways in which financial capitalism is justified by a specific way of viewing the city and the ways in which it is embedded in texts that are deemed to be socially meaningful.

This essay describes a research project that aims to shape ecological urban design practice in two Asian Mega Deltas. This is important because many important ecological concepts such as urban heterogeneity become more abstract when considered in relation to everyday life. However, these concepts are key to meeting sustainability goals through supporting the components of resilience. The research project engages heterogeneity through the type of democratic visuality and spatial imaginary afforded by aerial photography and satellite imagery. This inter-referenced visuality, created by airplanes, satellites, sensors, interfaces, and handheld devices, is new. It operates differently from older models of cartography, map, plan and master plan making in ways that are important to understand, and to use. In order to describe the two Asian Mega Deltas, this essay uses inter-referencing not only along a visual dimension, but it is also engaged as a syncretic mode of comparison that aims to bring Indian and Chinese people who live in and from the deltas toward a closer understanding of their differences. Therefore the two Asian Mega Deltas,
the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghana and the Yangtze, are aligned in the drawings that illustrate this essay not only in relation to nation states, but also in relation to shared experiences and practices that explore oceans, rivers, and city making in a mega delta environment.

Early modern Amsterdam was an ultra-modern city, laid out conforming to the triple demand of functionality, beauty and profit; a city that takes a unique place in European urban history because of its location, design, and impressive scale. 'Metropolis in the Making' tells the story of Amsterdam becoming one of the largest cities in Europe in the seventeenth century. Amsterdam was one of the cradles of capitalism, but at the same time one of the most meticulously planned cities in the world.
After the Fall of Antwerp in 1585, Amsterdam took over its position as the main trade hub in northwestern Europe. The city grew rapidly to become the central harbour town – and one of the largest European cities. The boom in harbours and industry went hand in hand with an explosive population growth. This resulted in two huge city extensions in 1613 and 1663, multiplying the territory of Amsterdam by five. Around the old town, the now famous ring of canals was constructed. Beyond this residential zone mixed-use and industrial districts were laid out, with a series of harbour islands along the borders of the IJ. This book deals with the question how Amsterdam’s administration managed to realize these immense projects from the viewpoints of urban design, infrastructure, logistics, and finance.
The first part of this book is dedicated to the extension projects. A thorough analysis of all remaining administrative archives and a great many cartographic documents has enabled the author to reconstruct the decision process about the scale, design, and realization of the extensions. The second part contains chapters concerning land use, public space and water management. 'Metropolis in the Making' tells the story of one of the cradles of early modern capitalism and at the same time one of the most meticulously planned cities in the world.

This article contains information about the importance of preserving the historical objects as a vital condition of a normal development of historical cities. The main legislative and regulatory documents in the fields of protecting of cultural heritage, preserving the traditional character and reconstructing of the lost objects are mentioned.
The analysis of the legislation of preserving the objects of cultural heritage, the current regulations and practices of their implementation in Ukraine give grounds for considering importance of improving the regulations with the consideration of numerous violations of conditions and restrictions of urban planning of the cities with the status of historical sites.
One of the important topics of the formation of traditional historical character is the re-creation of the lost objects of cultural heritage with the consideration of their role in the city-forming, using as an example the reconstructed in 1999-2010 the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odessa.

This paper deals with contemporary discourse regarding urban revival, elaborating the Educational Campus as a paradigm for global innovation. The objective is to examine the significance and capacity of education and its spatial articulation for social incubation and overall urban development. Furthermore through case of the city of Nis it was demonstrated the possibilities for connecting capacities and priorities in order to build a theoretical ‘platform’ for systematic urban design package in respect to the local resource. The new needed identity for the city of Nis in the time of transition from former industrial into the modern competitive city, can take many forms. Here was argued that, while there is the absence of a formal response to neoliberal governance regarding the strategic urban development, new Educational Campus paradigm might be solution for urban revival. This paper has examined possibilities of formation of the University Campus within the city core as a plausible...

Field trip publication on the subject of everyday conversations and dispersed initiatives in changing urban landscapes in Agra, India. Produced by students from Diploma Unit 6 and Degree Studio 7 at the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Design at London Metropolitan University in 2006/7. Edited by Stefanie Rhodes and Bo Tang.

La questione dei rifiuti coincide con la questione ambientale e con
l’emergenza della questione sociale; la gestione dei rifiuti incide sulla qualità urbana, condiziona il decoro delle città, entra nello spazio pubblico. Il tema ha assunto una dimensione pervasiva, planetaria.
È un paradigma, si presta a molteplici interpretazioni e slittamenti di senso. Naturalmente, non si esaurisce alla gestione della spazzatura. . Anche la città ed il territorio con le loro dinamiche di funzionamento e di trasformazione producono scarti, rifiuti, rovine e macerie.

As cities compete globally, the Smart City has been touted as the important new strategic driver for regeneration and growth. Smart Cities are employing information and communication technologies in the quest for sustainable economic development and the fostering of new forms of collective life. This has made the Smart City an essential focus for engineers, architects, urban designers, urban planners, and politicians, as well as businesses such as CISCO, IBM and Siemens. Despite its broad appeal, few comprehensive books have been devoted to the subject so far, and even fewer have tried to relate it to cultural issues and to assume a truly critical stance by trying to decipher its consequences on urban space and experience. This cultural and critical lens is all the more important as the Smart City is as much an ideal permeated by utopian beliefs as a concrete process of urban transformation. This ideal possesses a strong self-fulfilling character: our cities will become Smart because we want them to.

The books opens with an examination of the technological reality on which Smart Cities are built, from the chips and sensors that enable us to monitor what happens within the infrastructure to the smart phones that connect individuals. Through these technologies, the urban space appears as activated, almost sentient. This activation generates two contrasting visions: on the one hand, a neo-cybernetic ambition to steer the city in the most efficient way; and on the other, a more bottom-up, participative approach in which empowered individuals invent new modes of cooperation. A thorough analysis of these two trends reveal them to be complementary. The Smart City of the near future will result from their mutual adjustment. In this process, urban space plays a decisive role. Smart Cities are contemporary with a ‘spatial turn’ of the digital. Based on key technological developments like geo-localisation and augmented reality, the rising importance of space explains the strategic role of mapping in the evolution of the urban experience. Throughout this exploration of some of the key dimensions of the Smart City, the book constantly moves from the technological to the spatial as well as from a critical assessment of existing experiments to speculations on the rise of a new form of collective intelligence. In the future, cities will become smarter in a much more literal way than what is often currently assumed.

Every year magazines, within the design community and from without, publish top ten (or bottom ten) lists of cities to live in. Invariably, they’re bracketed as the “best” or the “worst.” For the former, Metropolis magazine based its criteria for its list of top ten international cities on the magazine’s “core” values:  “housing, transportation, sustainability, and culture.” Copenhagen topped their list while Portland, Oregon (the only US city) finished at number 10.  Singapore came in at number 4, that doesn’t really seem fair as it’s a city-state like San Marino, but with an even higher per capita income.

The worst cities, by comparison, are typically judged by such things as the likelihood of your car being where you left it after dinner and a movie, the wait time for being mugged at a bus stop, or the number of people mortally wounded while celebrating their home team winning a national championship. In the recent past Manchester, England, Detroit, Accra (Ghana), and Port Said (Egypt) have vied for the top of this bottom spot.

That said, the one thing going for Metropolis’s list, is that their criteria centers on what makes a city not just livable, but “the best.” And, they put their values (or metrics) out front for all to see. I’m here this evening, in part because both questions mean much to me: livable and great.

L’arte, nelle sue diverse declinazioni temporali ed espressive, ha offerto innumerevoli interpretazioni dello spazio agricolo. L’artista ha costruito visioni, memorie, strutture percettive, il tutto estrapolando dallo spazio fenomenologico frammenti emozionali, selezionando precise inquadrature, attraverso un’azione volontaria che scarta, sposta, riconfigura, ricompone, modifica, racconta. Il suo lavoro è quello di svelare anticipatamente un paesaggio e di presentarlo alla collettività.
Con l’opera “Le spigolatrici” (Parigi, Louvre) del 1848 di Jean-François Millet, comincia un nuovo modo di guardare la campagna. Idealizzata dalla pittura romantica e resa emozionale dai paesaggisti, questa propone, dal realismo francese in poi, una dimensione nuova che contempla gli aspetti economico, sociale e urbano. Da allora la campagna, non è più percepita come natura ideale, luogo degli avvenimenti mitologici, ma spazio della produzione agricola connessa alla città.
Gli artisti si concentrano su nuovi temi iconografici: il lavoro dei campi vi è incluso. Si costruisce un nuovo linguaggio, temi diversi per un nuovo importante committente, la borghesia. La perdita del carattere “mitologico” e “ludico” dello spazio agricolo, presente nelle pitture di Giorgione e Goya, rappresenta un evento culturale. La campagna, da spazio allegorico, luogo di ninfe, di dei, di battaglie, di rivelazioni sacre, diventa fisica, rappresenta e accoglie i riti del proletariato.
Nella “casa all’Estaque” (Berna, Kunstmuseum) del 1908 di Georges Braque si percepisce, attraverso il linguaggio cubista, la de-costruzione del paesaggio urbano/agricolo e la sua ricomposizione originale. Significativi sono i contributi di Herich Hecker con “primavera in Fiandre” del 1916 riconducibile all’esperienza del Brücke; i lavori di Paul Cézanne riferiti a “la Montagne Sainte-Victoire” ed in particolare la tela di Filadelfia del 1904; il “Paesaggio raggista” del 1912 (San Pietroburgo, Museo Russo) di Michail Larinov e le sperimentazioni di Kazimir Malevic, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee e Giorgio De Chirico.
Attraverso i secoli, dalle decorazioni della sala di villa Livia del I secolo d.C. (Giardino della villa di Livia, Roma, Museo Nazionale Romano) è un susseguirsi di visioni dello spazio agricolo fino alle opere pittoriche di d’Inessa (artista siciliano) che propongono un paesaggio denso di memorie, di pregnanze, di ridondanze. Acquarelli che ricompongono le esperienze di Cézanne, di Turner, di Picasso in chiave contemporanea per descrivere un paesaggio malinconico e fiabesco.
Negli anni ’60 e ’70 gli artisti della Land Art, Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra e altri, contribuiscono a connotare l’ambiente con un oggetto-scultura effimero e minimalista che costruisce l’identità dei luoghi. “Con la Land Art è direttamente l’ambiente, su cui interviene l’artista a divenire esso stesso una forma estetica fruibile come opera d’arte.” Il lavoro segue procedure che appartengono al fare dell’architettura: scavare, aggiungere, unire, piantare, bucare, ecc . Questa forma d’arte costituisce un contributo significativo nella lettura, percezione e costruzione del paesaggio. I nuovi materiali dell’arte sono il suolo, lo spazio, la luce, lo sguardo, la memoria: tutti elementi utili per riconfigurare lo spazio agricolo o per meglio comprenderlo.

Da una visione contemplativa e visionaria all’esercizio del progetto.
L’arte, anche quella letteraria, ha costruito paesaggi, determinando la configurazione dei luoghi. Pensiamo alla letteratura bucolica di Virgilio, di Petrarca. Nel XVI secolo in Spagna Garcilaso de la Vega (Toledo 1503 - Nizza 1536), poeta e guerriero, costituisce un caso emblematico. Pluma y espada riassumono la sua natura, il suo destino. Garcilaso, attraverso i suoi scritti, contribuisce a configurare il paesaggio di limite di Toledo. Suggerisce una precisa modalità insediativa relativamente all’espansione della città verso la “Fabbrica delle armi”. Tra la città storica e la nuova espansione uno spazio agricolo, reso sistemico dalle mura arabe. Le permanenze archeologiche e agricole costituiscono l’armatura organizzativa di questo spazio che mantiene per secoli la sua configurazione fino alla presa d’atto da parte della comunità di Toledo: mantenere due coni ottici privilegiati per godere della magnifica veduta del “casco historico”.
“Le città invisibili” di Italo Calvino rappresentano un documento utile per comprendere il rapporto tra forma, simbolo e funzione. Le campagne urbane descritte nel capitolo “le città continue 4” permettono di ricostruire un processo di trasformazione usuale. La cancellazione della memoria, dello spazio agricolo che diventa scarto, residuo. Italo Calvino permette di cogliere l’essenza della trasformazione urbana, dello spazio limite non solo sul piano fisico ma su quello della percezione emozionale.

The goal of this unit is to build into the mindset of the students a sociocultural and anthropological understanding of space and place. The key method that this unit aims to provide the students with centers around the notion of empathy in understanding the needs of users, which, in this case, is not just the immediate clients or users of the space proposed for them but also the communities and polity surrounding it. The emphasis of this unit is on the “urban solutions.” In order to achieve this empathy, students will engage in qualitative research methods such as participant observation, open-ended interviews, and analogous and inquisitive participation. In this unit, we will be looking at a real project that is in the centre of public and media attention. Students will think about how this complex community of people are living, selling, maneuvering kinship and business practices through space and time. It is crucial to understand the context, the people and the culture; as there is a real need for design that integrates all of the above. This unit will give the students the training in the methods by which they can systematically collect ‘thick social data’ to
integrate into this urban design lab.

Based on the author's artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, The Nomadic Listener is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and New York, among others.
Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attunes to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the occurrences of life movingly interwoven with memories, associations, desires, and reflections. Readers are brought into a tender map of contemporary urban experience and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in traveling. The Nomadic Listener includes parallel drawings based on the original audio recordings and appears as ghostly renderings of the corresponding experiences. The recordings are published by Gruenrekorder and accessed through a QR code in the book.

Abstract:  This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class-ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”-based rather than in class-sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.

This volume has been prepared under the auspices of the project entitled, ‘Competition Reforms in Key Markets for Enhancing Social & Economic Welfare in Developing Countries’ (CREW Project). This project was implemented by CUTS in four countries: Ghana, India, Philippines and Zambia, and across two common sectors: Staple Food and Bus Transport with the support from DFID (UK) and BMZ (Germany) facilitated by GIZ (Germany). The aim of the project was to highlight the relevance of competition reforms for social and economic welfare in developing countries, and motivate other countries, governments and development partners to accord greater attention to the subject of competition reforms. In view of this overall aim of the project, with inputs from the project advisers CUTS designed the final conference of the CREW project on a broader theme to talk about ‘Relevance of Competition & Regulatory Reforms in Pursuing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Developing Countries’. The theme was thought to be both contemporary and relevant in view of the adoption of the SDGs a couple of months before this final conference. In addition to the support it received from DFID (UK), BMZ (Germany) and GIZ (Germany), the conference also received support from the World Bank, G-77 Secretariat and the OECD. CUTS is grateful to all the above organisations for supporting the conference, and indeed also the production of this volume. We acknowledge the support from the members of the Project Advisory Committee of the CREW project, who contributed to make this conference a grand success. Special thanks to Clement Onyango and colleagues at CUTS Nairobi for their support and tireless efforts in the run-up and during the conference. We gratefully acknowledge the hard work and patience of all the paper authors for contributing extremely interesting individual chapters to this volume. We are also thankful to those friends of CUTS who reviewed the draft papers – Eleanor Fox, Tania Begazo/Martha Licetti (World Bank), Rafaelita Aldaba, R S Khemani, Frederic Jenny, Payal Malik, Allan Fels, David Ong’olo, Ashwini Swain, Peter Holmes and John Davies/Lynn Robertson (OECD). We are indebted to Mukhisa Kituyi, Secretary General, UNCTAD for writing an encouraging Foreword – and we hope to continue to receive his and UNCTAD’s support. We greatly appreciate the diligence of Madhuri Vasnani and Garima Shrivastava for editing and Mukesh Tyagi for preparing the layout of this report. Special thanks are due to Ashutosh Soni for his excellent coordination of communication with authors and reviewers of papers of this volume. We acknowledge the efforts of all the members of the CREW team, especially Cornelius Dube, Shreya Kaushik and Neha Tomar. Last but not the least, this report would not have seen the light of the day without the skillful direction, and overall guidance of Pradeep S Mehta, Secretary General, CUTS. He took special interest in this volume and went through each and every paper carefully himself. Words alone cannot convey our sincere gratitude to each and every individual who have contributed in every small way towards bringing out this volume. But it is only words that this world thrives on. We express our sincere gratefulness to all such individuals, without whom the publication of this volume would not have been possible.

l progetto persegue la costituzione di un sistema di collegamenti tra centro storico e fascia costiera, mirando all’integrazione dei diversi comparti che rappresentano la molteplice e mutevole realtà della città e del suo intorno. Centro storico, periferia, strutture portuali, insediamenti per il turismo, aree di interesse naturalistico: l’infrastruttura fornisce l’occasione per riappropriarsi del valore dei luoghi ed offrirlo a cittadini e a visitatori esterni.

This paper focuses on the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), established in 1976 by Spazio e Società’s founder Giancarlo de Carlo (1919-2005). This educational laboratory – an extension to Team X – invited students and acclaimed practitioners from different universities around the world to rethink urban form. During ILAUD’s formative years, the physical and social environment of Urbino functioned as a frame of reference: all participants were invited to develop strategies for urban interventions, based on a thorough understanding of the marks left by social, historical and topographical transformations on the physical space. The role of the designer, according to De Carlo, was to empathetically engage with - or read - the pre-existing layers of meaning and relationships and to articulate them through the activity of drawing.
By contrasting the studio briefs of the two first ILAUD residential summer courses in Urbino to a series of highly illustrative student drawings, this paper sheds light on the different and often contradictory implementations of this method of reading by drawing. This paper furthermore argues that this experiential planning method became a tool in enabling a critical stance vis-à-vis the figure of the architectural historian and traditional ‘linear’ historiography. Reading by drawing was an attempt to retrieve an ‘essence’ which was believed to be ‘truer than history or words’, and thus involved a search for an architectural knowledge that was embedded in architectural and urban form.
The paradigm of direct experience will be framed in the disciplinary exchange between historians and architects in the 1960s and 70s. In the works of De Carlo’s contemporaries such as Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo Rossi and Vittorio Gregotti, direct analyses of urban form for instance often displaced texts. Staged in a binary opposition to textual history, the method of reading by drawing upheld a promise of a more democratic and participatory way of perceiving the built environment and thus formulated a response to the alienation engendered by the post-war urban environments.

This article contains information about the importance of preserving the historical objects
as a vital condition of a normal development of historical cities. The main legislative and regulatory
documents in the fields of protecting of cultural heritage, preserving the traditional character and
reconstructing of the lost objects are mentioned.
The analysis of the legislation of preserving the objects of cultural heritage, the current regulations
and practices of their implementation in Ukraine give grounds for considering importance of improving the
regulations with the consideration of numerous violations of conditions and restrictions of urban planning of
the cities with the status of historical sites.
One of the important topics of the formation of traditional historical character is the re-creation of the
70
lost objects of cultural heritage with the consideration o f their role in the city-forming, using as an example the
reconstructed in 1999-2010 the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odessa.
Key words: legislation and regulations o f preserving the objects of cultural heritage, historical
environment, the reconstruction of the lost objects

The increase in pipeline manufacturing for process industries calls automation of welding system (AWS) in tune with today's demand for accuracy in welding, increased productivity with lesser resources and enhanced profit. Manual welding results in more manpower requirement, low productivity, and low weld quality etc. Automatic welding removes all above problems thus making system itself superior to manual welding system. In this paper, automatic welding system is designed and developed for welding of 'V' Groove in Pipes. AWS based on Embedded / Microcontroller with mechanized output control system is developed for Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) technique. Moreover, system is simple and economical.

Rwanda, less than a generation removed from the 1994 Genocide, is experiencing a period of economic ascent and population growth. Its capital city, Kigali, is expected to triple in size within a generation, and positioned to become a premiere hub of commerce in central and eastern Africa.

Amidst this optimism, however, is limited land and material resources. Food security is in tension with environmental concerns, and government aspirations are often in friction with daily, individual struggles for subsistence.

Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda explores the pressing challenges and opportunities to be found in planning, designing, and constructing a healthy, equitable, and sustainable city. Asking “what is an authentic-yet-modern, prosperous-yet-feasible African city, Rwandan city?” Smith, Berlanda, and colleagues conducted research on Rwandan activities of daily living and how these routines are connected to space-making practices and the Kinyarwanda terms that describe them.

Through a culturally informed view of urban and rural lifestyles and spaces, Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda presents principles and proposals for neighborhood development in the challenging context of Kigali’s informal settlements. With one billion people living in informal settlements worldwide, a number expected to double by 2030, the lessons learned in Rwanda provide a complex, fascinating, and urgent study for scholars and practitioners across disciplines and around the world.

A collaboration between Island Press and the University of
Utah’s Department of City & Metropolitan Planning, this
series provides a set of tools for students and professionals
working to make our cities and metropolitan areas more
sustainable, livable, prosperous, resilient, and equitable. As
the world’s population grows to nine billion by mid-century,
the population of the US will rise to one-half billion. Along
the way, the physical landscape will be transformed. Indeed,
two-thirds of the built environment in the US at mid-century
will be constructed between now and then, presenting a
monumental opportunity to reshape the places we live. The
Metropolitan Planning + Design series presents an integrated
approach to addressing this challenge, involving the fields of
planning, architecture, landscape architecture, urban design,
public policy, environmental studies, geography, and civil
and environmental engineering. The series draws from the
expertise of some of the world’s leading scholars in the field
of Metropolitan Planning + Design.

The need for studying culture as the most significant and determining factor in determining new ways to approach urban design and sustainability of cities has been gaining recent worldwide attention since the turn of the twenty-first century (Hawkees, 2001; Beynon, 2010 and 2013; and Opoku, 2015). In this regard, the Kathmandu Valley, possessing centuries old towns with a strong culture-driven urban design can be considered a product of cultural sustainability . It is high time for the professionals of the built environment (related with Kathmandu and Nepal) to understand the relationship between culture and urbanism, so as to attain the goal of creating culturally sustainable cities. This chapter focuses on discussing the meanings of Cultural Sustainability in terms of architectural and urban design and presents preliminary visions to incorporate the paradigms of Cultural Sustainability for a new theory of urban design for the Kathmandu Valley.

Urbanization refers to the increase in the proportion of people living in urban areas and it leads to the urban expansion. Urban expansion is the indications of urbanization and it greatly affects socioeconomic growth and the decision making process for urban development policies. Therefore analyzing the patterns of land use change is an essential issue and it is needed for land use planning and future land management. Kolkata is one of the major metropolitan cities in India. The percentage of land use change in the 'City of Joy' is less in city core areas and it is much high in city peripheral areas. The physical expansion of the city grew linearly in south-easterly and south-westerly direction beside the eastern side of the river Hooghly as we have seen in the recent satellite imageries. Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA) is spread over 1875.04 Sq.km (Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority, 2006). To analyse the expansion of the Kolkata city Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS) tool has been applied because it is very useful tool for analyzing land use changes on spatio-temporal scale. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the spatial expansion of Kolkata city and to study the growth rate in the municipalities around Kolkata city within Kolkata Metropolitan Area. Side by side an effort has been done to find out the spatial patterns of land use change and vegetation cover change and lastly to identify the patterns of recent land use change within Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA).

Swing is made of delicate musical movements on a constant rhythmic support, light and vibrant. The rigid pattern of tempo is diluted under the subtle variations which write the musical argument. Similarly, there is also an architecture which plays swing and likes to do it far away from the noise of the soloist, sheltered by the urban form. We discover this architecture in its aim to extend its gaze beyond the constructed limits, a way to build the city that still relies on the inductive reasoning rather than on the application of general principles. An urbanism that allows deformation and shocks, a perfectly irregular city. We discover this swing in the five degrees of rotation of the Stockholm Library by E. G. Asplund - error or subtlety? It manifests itself in the subtle inflections of repetitive and sober K. Fisker housing blocks - standard or intent? It appears strongly at the Particolareggiato per l’area di corso del Popolo by M. Ridolfi and W. Frankl in Terni - delirium or formalism? We can find it in the ripples of the Bonjour Tristesse ghost. “ ... To tear , to chip, to split, to cut ... “ wrote Richard Serra in his 1967 Verb list concerning the manipulation of urban form. Are these subtle deformations of urban architecture a strong argument in the definition of our cities? Once the swing discovered that silence was also music. Is not this silent architecture both a reflection and a model of the urban form?

Translation and first revised edition of an essay, printed on pages 176/177 in "Lernen von O.M.Ungers" (Learning from OMU). The publication was released on occasion of the exhibition and symposium carried through by College VI of Technical University of Berlin and the Institute for Architecture in 2006. (1) (Additional remarks, not part of the original German version, are italicized) Whoever crossed Fall Creek suspension bridge in the evening hours in late fall of 1976, in order to reach (the eastern part) of Cornell University Campus, had to pass inevitably the parking lot behind Sibley Hall. Right there, at the eastern back-front of the building, housing the Department for Architecture, one could clearly notice the life-size silhouette of the MAGRITTE MAN with the Bowler hat, in the window adjacent to Sibley Dome on the first floor. (Today blocked off by Milstein Hall)

Può la densità essere lo strumento analitico di interpretazione dei fenomeni urbani e contemporaneamente un parametro progettuale di prefigurazione dello spazio architettonico? La densità nelle sue diverse accezioni e unità di misura, costituisce un nodo di grande rilevanza per l'interpretazione dei fenomeni urbani e degli spazi architettonici. Incoraggia una riconciliazione dello sguardo quantitativo con quello mirato alla lettura qualitativa, riavvicina discipline disgraziatamente disgiunte nell'attuale pratica, suggerisce mezzi e stili di vita che sono alla base del nostro habitat. Ciò che infatti ha da sempre caratterizzato la città non è solo la sua dimensione ed il numero degli abitanti, ma un secondo fattore fondamentale: la densità appunto, o meglio un valore di densità minimo in grado di produrre divisione del lavoro, varietà di funzioni e attività, complessità della struttura sociale. L'architettura progetta distanze oltrechè volumi, la densità ne è quindi un parametro centrale; l'urbanistica e la progettazione urbana, utilizzando il calcolo della densità come livello minimo di pianificazione, dovranno tendere a configurare in futuro le città, influenzandone gli aspetti non solo numerici, ma anche tipologici, morfologici e spaziali. Riscattato dalla computistica, il fattore densità, si trasforma allora in una variabile urbana in grado di definire la forma attuale della città, divenendone strumento di misurazione e di progetto.

As Manuel de Solà-Morales noted, urbanity relies on the variety and quality of relations between things, materials and human beings. Considered as such, how are we to achieve an underground urbanity? This paper seeks to address this question through a focussed reading of a number of European urban projects from the 20th century; all of which put special care into ensuring the quality of their subterranean passageways. We begin with the carrefour à giration, which was designed by Eugène Hénard in 1906, in order to identify four fundamental attributes of this kind of urbanity: legibility, spatiality, accessibility and activity. We then continue with a qualitative analysis of the 1933 Blå Bodarna passageway designed by Tage William-Olsson and Holger Blom in Slussen (Stockholm). Looking ahead some decades later, the sequence of passages under the Vienna Ring, built during the mayoralty of Franz J. Jonas, provides a good example of how fundamental the connectivity to the underground public transport system was to the success of these spaces. Finally, the article closes with a review of those underground places found in Santiago Calatrava's Stadelhofen Station and the Stationsplein by Manuel de Solà-Morales: from the carrefour à étages multiples to the 'inner street'.

The Slussen urban project designed by architect Tage William-Olsson and engineer Gösta Lundborg between 1929 and 1935 in Stockholm, synthetically expresses the emergence of the automobile in the European cities at the beginning of the 20th century. The combination of more than thirty previous proposals highlight the evolution of a space in contradicting confrontation with infrastructure and the attempts to give an urban form to a strategic place between Gamla Stan and Södermalm. This article will summarise these declines in 5 successive  stages: from the Slussen as a discussion in hydraulic engineering to its first urban considerations, from the Slussen seen as a matter of architectural composition to the first irruptions of the road forms, from the Slussen as a “traffic machine” to the discovery of its own aesthetic, from the gray Slussen to the architecture embedded in its interstices and finally, the understanding of Slussen as a fragile and unstable piece in the urban landscape of the “Venice of the North”. This evolution allows Slussen to be highlighted as a paradigmatic record of the implosion of traffic on the European city and a pioneering example of the interesting relationship between infrastructure and urbanity.