The city of Chicago will have a new public park on an elevated railway, thanks to a community lead initiative with some planning help from ARUP, Ross Barney Architects, and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. The park is 3 miles (5 km), making it twice as long as the High Line Prokject. The park is mainly being funded by Federal transportation funds; the first phase is scheduled to open in 2014,
New York City officials broke ground on Phase 1 of the new Governors Island Park. The first two built sections will be Hammock Grove, and Liggett Terrace.
Florian Riviere is an urban hacktivist who reorganizes the city for fun. For his take on how cities are for people, read the interview here.
Also take a look at the Venice Biennials program on Spontaneous Intervention
Larrisa Fassler’s work uses different conventions of maquettes, plans, sections, elevation and projections to map the most banal and unimaginative areas through the practices of every day life. She also aims to undermine the rationality of architectural measure by re-working units of data with of length and height with “number of footsteps” or “me+arm+hand”. Fassler maps cities into new systems of connections and networks that trace relationships rather than geographical location, to emphasize topological over topographical information
Read about a nice example of citizens reclaiming and improving a heavily neglected public space. Even more at their blog
The Red Stair Amphitheater project in Melbourne, gives the public space a new quality for an open space. It creates curiosity and is able to establish a new hot spot close to the waterfront. The Red Stair Amphitheater had been realized by Marcus O’Reilly Architects.
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Eric Fischer creates an urban geography of free speech and communication, using mapping data to represent cities in an imaginative graphical way. Check his flickr for methods of mapping where he uses tourist vs local, race and ethnicity, or geotagging from mobile devices.
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Conceptual Devices are a design firm in Zurich started by Antonio Scarponi. “ Design should not be based on formal principles – but always on an idea of society.” GLOBE / HEDRON is a bamboo greenhouse designed to organically grow fish and vegetables on top of generic flat roofs.