Marcia Caines

artwork Mario Suarez, image Cluster

Today cities are home to over half of the world’s population, and according to The United Nations Habitat report, this figure is set to reach 75% by 2050. The success or failure, growth or decline, of cities directly contributes to the overall condition of the planet and the wellbeing of the global population. Cities both provide solutions and pose challenges to 21st century living, and this is why they are the subject of so much discussion.

the city’s power structures and the interaction between key individuals within the public, private and civil sectors, need to acknowledge the importance of learning in order for it to be translated into innovation and reform.

Globalization, the recession, climate change, digitalization and decentralization have determining affects on cities of all sizes and are radically shaping their organizations, strategies, systems, production, and consumption. Exposed to a global world, cities are under increasing pressure to make profound changes in order to prosper in the future. This is especially true for intermediate-sized cities, which struggle to keep up with the pace and development of powerful metropolises while competing with their counterparts on a global level.
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Good news! The fundraising campaign ‘Drinking Water for Haiti’ - a volunteer grassroots donation appeal devised to provide the Haitian population with personal water purification devices: LifeStraw® - was closed successfully.

We would like to make a heart-felt thanks to everyone who contributed to this project and whose support and generosity will change the lives of the earthquake survivors in Haiti.

Going beyond our expectations a total of $4,922.44 USD was pledged, which means safe drinking water for 720 families. The LifeStraw® filters will be shipped to the Santo Domingo airport in the Dominican Republic where they will be trucked to Belladere, Haiti and be distributed by missionaries of the International Baptist Church (Iglesia Bautista Internacional).
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What: Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront
Where: Museum of Modern Art, MoMa, New York
When: March 24 – August 9 2010
Who: P.S.1 and MoMa. Barry Bergdoll chief curator of architecture and design MoMa

On March 24 the Rising Currents exhibition will open at the MoMa of New York, it is the last phase of the unique and innovative ongoing program conceived by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Centre in Long Island City to address the potential of climate change on New York’s coastline.

The exhibition will be showcasing the proposals evolved by five multidisciplinary teams – architects, landscape designers, urban planners and artists - during an intensive architects-in-residence held at PS1 from November 16 2009 to January 8 2010. The subject of the teams work was to rethink New York’s waterfront in face of rising sea levels due to global climate change.

Each of the five teams SCAPE, Matthew Baird Studio, nARCHITECTS, ARO/dlandstudio and LTL: “not chosen on the basis of a design, but rather on the basis of a promise for interdisciplinary innovation, working on problems that are global in implication but local in application and design” was assigned a different study area of the Upper Bay waterfront to develop new visions for a resilient and sustainable city.

The project proposals, which focus at large on ‘soft’ proposals, encompass energy production and use, ecological health, sewage overflows, and global green shipping they can be viewed, followed and discussed on MoMA/P.S. 1’s Inside/Out blog, where expert guest bloggers are contributing to the program with their perspectives on the work developed by Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

Metropolis by Rob Carter - Last 3 minutes from Rob Carter on Vimeo.

Above is the last 3 minutes of Metropolis a stop-motion animation movie by Rob Carter made from images printed on paper. In the time-lapse video Carter physically manipulates aerial still images of the city of Charlotte, North Carolina (both real and fictional) to create a landscape in constant motion representing 70 years of the city’s development.

Watching the animated history of Charlotte pop-up and unfold through time, from the first house in Charlotte to the discovery of gold, from the cotton-age to the modern city and concluding with the architectural transformation of the economic boom gives us an idea of what it must be like to be a city. In 9 minutes and 30 seconds with buildings and towers springing up all over the place Metropolis reflects on the the unlimited urban growth of cities over time and “our paper thin significance no matter how many monuments of steel, glass and concrete we build.”

( Via Pop-up City)
Full version: 9 mins and 30 secs on Rob Carter.net

Image from sci-fi thriller DISTRICT 9 via Yukon Science fiction Writer

What: A Workshop of Experimental Architecture on the urban border-conditions
Where: Johannesburg (SA)
When: Aug 23 – Sept 10 , 2010
Who: RIEA.ch Research Institute for Experimental Architecture

In a rapidly growing urban world, slums and informal settlements provide shelter for a sixth of the planet’s population and unless effective action is taken they are likely to become the most common form of dwelling on earth by 2030.

Parallel to this critical situation lies another inconvenient truth that architecture as a profession is affecting no more than 5% of what is built every year around the world.

This sounds like the loudest call for Architecture to re-assume its political content and broaden its field of action, or to eventually accept, as a discipline, its irrelevancy in facing new and inevitable urban challenges.

The Silent Borders Workshop, organized and lead by RIEA.ch, will take the megacity of Johannesburg as a case study to investigate the spatial and mental borderlines generated by diverse social, economic, technological and cultural conditions that meet, mix and clash within the city.
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