Tennessee lawmakers tried to make Nashville’s buses illegal, a dude pissed in a reservoir and Portland has to flush 38 million gallons of water, and—let’s say it all together—the rent is too damn high. This is your weekly look at What’s Ruining Our Cities.
This building vaguely shaped like a jack is actually a proposed transportation hub and residential complex for the New York borough of Queens. Perched above the 7 subway line, the spiky structure would combine a spiraling internal concourse with conveniently shaded yet sunlit apartments. [designboom]
It’s architecture awards seasons right now, with honors and medals being doled out with what seems like daily regularity. Thankfully, the AIA’s 2014 Housing Awards breaks up the march of zillion-dollar projects with something a little more real: Places where normal humans actually live.
If you think 3D printing is only good for making flimsy paperweights, then you’re pretty much right. A group of audacious Dutch architects, however, have just begun 3D printing an entire canal house in Amsterdam. Is the first 3D printed house a gimmick? Definitely! Is it an experiment that pushes the possibilities for 3D printing technology and architecture ? Maybe!
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Could moving out of a bad neighborhood actually be worse for kids? A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that relocating families to a more affluent environment can cause children to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder—especially boys.
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They’re being targeted as harbingers of evil as their buses chug through otherwise inaccessible, gentrified neighborhoods. Now San Francisco’s tech workers are fighting back with a networking event called the Tech Workers Against Displacement Happy Hour, that, in addition to sounding like a whole lot of fun, hopes to gather attendees who are "sick of being blamed for SF’s housing crisis."
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Science fiction is often charged with naïve technological optimism and historical amnesia. But for present-day Californians struggling with a wide range of environmental and social problems, science fiction might just provide the perspective we need to successfully pivot from the boom times of the twentieth century to the messy prospect of the century ahead. It won’t be the techno-futurist elements of science fiction—miraculously clean energy sources, flying cars, off-planet factories—that are going to save us, though. The classic works of science fiction have a different, more fatalistic side that speaks more usefully to our current condition, awash as we are in the environmental and social consequences of the Golden State’s postwar boom.
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It’s been a tumultuous week in San Francisco. The city’s transit agency held hearings to regulate the ubiquitous tech buses, but protesters say the buses have already ruined the city’s real estate. It’s a What’s Ruining Our Cities San Francisco Special Edition.
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Phoenix, Madrid, even Astana: These are the cities we tend to hold up as examples of the havoc that construction booms—and busts—can wreak on a housing market. Ireland is in the news less, but its situation is just as dire; thousands of brand-new Irish homes have sat empty for years. And now the government is demolishing them.
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In a week defined by a powerful story about poverty and homelessness in New York, a bit of a bright spot: The City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development chose a scheme for a truly massive affordable housing development in Queens—all told, the development it’s part of will add a whopping 5,000 units to the neighborhood.
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