IMPROVING JAMAICA BAY PARKS
Mayor Bloomberg, along with representatives of the US Department of the Interior, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the New York City and State Departments of Environmental Conservation, this week announced a joint project to …
PREPARING FOR IRENE
As Hurricane Irene approaches, City and State agencies are preparing for the worst while hoping for the best. States up and down the east coast, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, have declared anticipatory states of emergency. Mayor Bloomberg has announced a mandatory evacuation by 5pm Saturday for Zone A of New York City (click here to download a map of the NYC Hurricane Evacuation Zones…
LOW COST, HIGH SPEED SHELTERS
The Tokyo-based firm Shigeru Ban Architects (SBA), known for its ecologically sensitive, flexibly programmed structures, is seeking financial support for their effort to help victims displaced by the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. SBA plan to deploy simple, cardboard and paper partition shelters, originally…
The calamitous combination of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and the subsequent tsunami that hit Japan earlier today has flooded cities, crumbled buildings and left a still-unknown number dead, injured and stranded. Updates and reports are still coming in, but, as expounded on in this Times article, Japan’s stringent building codes and a comprehensive system of seawalls helped to stave off what could have been even more extensive damage and higher death tolls. Preparedness and…
Hurricane Earl is coming! Or at least passing by. Though early reports stated that the storm might hit New York City hard, current forecasts are far less ominous. But maybe we shouldn’t rule out landfall yet. BLDGBLOG tells us that cities might actually attract passing hurricanes due to the jagged topography of urban landscapes. The irregularity of city land cover can result in an air vortex…
Last week Mayor Bloomberg appointed David Bragdon, former president of the Oregon Metro Council — an elected regional planning agency — and a rumored mayoral candidate in Portland, to head up the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, …
In a disaster-prone world, to say that crises present opportunities has become a morbid cliché. Yet, nonetheless, the impulse to help requires context, planning and understanding. In the past few weeks, we’ve heard how the low-density sprawl that encourages a high …
Natural disasters: how can we improve?
Panel discussion with Martin Bell OBE, Dame Barbara Stocking (Oxfam GB) & Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity)
May 25, 2010
Royal Geographic Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London
A mixed and studious crowd gathered at …
