The Architecture of the City

“The unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence,” wrote Italo Calvino in his masterpiece Invisible Cities. Beyond designing the Ecole Normale Supérieure Cachan in Paris and the Columbia University Campus Plan in New York City, architect Renzo Piano has spent last year looking for fragments of happy cities around Italian suburbs with a team of six young architects.

Ma Yansong of MAD recently presented a 600,000 square meter urban design proposal for the city of Nanjing titled, “Shanshui Experiment Complex,” at the 2013 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture in Shenzhen, China. The concept takes into account the culture, nature and history of Nanjing while reconsidering the methodology in which Chinese cities are built.

Yasong’s vision of a natural urban environment calls upon traditional Chinese values, veering away from a purely functionalist approach to city-making. Thus, the rigidness of the “box” is replaced with flowing lines that rhythmically rise to create a series of smooth spaces and volumes resulting in a more natural (looking) skyline.

China's next new city will be designed by US firm KPF, next to Hunan's regional capital, around a 40-hectare lake.

Adjacent to Changsha, the ancient capital city of Hunan, the design implements the sort of urban innovation that creates a sustainable and truly habitable environment.

"We can introduce integrated urban innovation," von Klemperer says, "we can combine water transport with localised energy production, cluster neighbourhood centres, advanced flood prevention and water management, and urban agriculture. Meixi is an experiment in future city planning and building. It will serve Changsha as a new CBD, but it will also serve as a paradigm for other Chinese city planners. It's a kind of live test case."

The firm seeks to achieve these goals through its dense, mixed-use urban, plan, with integration with surrounding mountains, lakes, parks and canals. Meixi Lake will eventually be home to 180,000 inhabitants, living in "villages" of 10,000 people, clustered around the canals...

More than 230 tall buildings of over 20 storeys are currently proposed, approved or under construction in London, according to an independent survey which also claims that 80% of the planned towers will be for residential use.

The Bass and Flinders Gateway development in New South Wales, Australia sits at the threshold of Wollongong and the greater Illawarra region, with the Illawarra Escarpment as the backdrop and inspiration behind the design concept- an aesthetic and metaphoric link to the building’s central location at the heart of the coastal plain between the mountain and sea, resonating the energy and history of the city.

To manage the transition between the city center and its outskirts, the profile of the buildings vary, layered as the topography of the escarpment, fine-tuned to moderate between the scales of the city, the domestic to the civic, the shed to the office tower. 
At the heart of the development is a central green space, permeable to cyclists and pedestrians, importantly connected into the Wollongong city grain and its local precinct. Designed to encourage social interaction and foster a sense of community that works positively with the developing urban plan and commercial strategy of the city rather than in competition it. 

In the article entitled “It’s Alive,” the design team at engineering firm ARUP envision a city building in the year 2050 that includes flexible modular pods, urban agriculture, climate-conscious facades and intelligent building systems. ARUP hopes the proposal will ultimately answer the question, "As city living takes center stage, what will we come to expect from the design and function of urban structures and buildings?".

ARUP’s futuristic skyscraper will be a “smart” building that will plug into a smart urban infrastructure, and cater to an expanding and technological society. By 2050, the global population will reach nine billion, 75% of which will live in cities. Significantly, this date will also mark a generation of adults that have lived their entire lives engaging with smart devices and materials. The design theory is that the population of 2050 is likely to be in constant flux, and therefore buildings and materials that surround this urban lifestyle must also be capable of evolution and change.

ARUP has imagined a building of the future that produces more than it consumes. Alongside the sustainable construction, the design will feature photovoltaic capability to capture and transmit energy using on-site fuel cells. In addition, energy will be harnessed from elevators or similar internal systems, along with wind turbines and algae-producing bio-fuel pods...