Design and Planning
Discover how experts drive innovation in urban design, infrastructure, adaptive reuse, and community‑centered planning
It is easy to paint a black-and-white picture of China’s environmental policies. But in this book, Julie Sze is able to bring a more nuanced view. The professor from the University of California, Irvine, looks at eco-cities and explores prominent examples in China that involved global engineering and design firms.
Ten buildings—all completed during the past five years—blend sustainable design strategies with automated technologies that control building systems and give occupants detailed information on resource use.
Combining the work of 26 experts, the editors of this book argue that better coordination in state- and national-level planning would provide more efficient infrastructure investments, greater resilience to climate change, and increased equity in economic development.
Lord Richard Rogers, an internationally renowned architect recognized for people-oriented building design and development, has been named the 2015 recipient of the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development, the Institute’s highest honor. Rogers, founder of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners in London, is being recognized for his career-long focus on creating sustainable communities that thrive by providing a high quality of life for all residents.
San Francisco’s shoreline—once cut off from downtown by an elevated highway and a series of inaccessible piers—now offers a series of transit-accessible open spaces that link surrounding communities to the shore. How can cities better existing ports?
In this probing analysis, based largely on contrasts between the United States and Europe, planning scholar Sonia Hirt offers new and refreshing insights into zoning’s fault lines and asks why, despite recurring attempts at reform, it has yet to overcome the challenges outlined a century or more ago.
The map inside the front cover of Bjarke Ingels’s new book is a rapid corrective to anyone tempted to reckon his Alexander-like conquest of the globe before turning 40 years old as merely figurative, exploring commissions from Lappland in northern Scandinavia to Doha in Qatar and dozens of coordinates in between.
Despite the record harsh winter of 2014–2015 that dumped 111 inches (281 cm) of snow on the city of Boston and the not-so-distant (2012) memory of the near-hit of Hurricane Sandy, instituting measures to safeguard against the effects of climate change and rising seas will not be an easy sell with the region’s utilities, property owners, government agencies, or general public.
Ten high-tech companies are redefining the workplace. The following projects include adapted textile factory buildings and liquor distribution warehouses, workplaces with amphitheaters and secret rooms, and a net-zero-energy structure.
Last year, the California Supreme Court ruled that a project proposed through the citizen initiative process and subsequently approved by a council—without a public vote—was exempt from a California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review, overturning a lower court decision. Now, a project can potentially avoid months of costly CEQA-related delays if a developer raises enough signatures for an initiative and the council or board simply ratifies the project.
The role of open space in cities was the focus of a panel at ULI’s recent Fall Meeting. Will Rogers, chief executive officer at the Trust for Public Land offered tips on ways to make the spaces cultural assets that connect with local populations, while other panelists gave practical examples of parks and industrial brownfields that have been reimagined as cultural resources.
What’s creative and different in modern master-planned communities (MPCs) was the focus of a ULI Fall Meeting panel that shared lessons learned from conception, launch, and execution of new MPCs. “We’re trying to create ‘the new real,’ ” said Susan Hebel Watts, vice president of real estate development for WestRock, which is building four MPCs outside of Charleston, South Carolina.