New Project, Second Growth, Calls for Ideas & Contributors

As the world’s cities are expanding exponentially and new growth is visible everywhere, Second Growth is a project to think about patterns of succession for these ubiquitous environments, whether found on the vast peripheries of the cities of China, in new developments in India, or in the mass housing projects that checker Europe and America.

We all know the pattern: the disengaged, uniform, towers, employment at a distance, a life without streets, no culture, minimal infrastructure, boredom, estrangement, the concrete denial of neighborliness. Therefore, we focus in particular on those that are the legacy of modernist writ, spaces of single use, designed for cars, often standing in alienating isolation, and informed by the powerful fantasy of individual buildings afloat in fields of green.
 
Second Growth is a speculation about strategies for transforming these places into sustainable, humane, equitable, and beautiful environments. The ambition of the project is not to investigate this too general condition but to propose–with aspirations both practical and polemical–forms and directions for its transformation.

Second Growth Crowdsource: We invite contributions in the forms of texts, designs, and documentations that address issues at the intersection of cities, design, urbanization, and sustainability.

Imagining a Sustainable New York

In New York City, 66 year old Michael Sorkin – architect, urban planner, and critic – runs Terreform, a non-profit devoted to architecture that is both urban and green. Two years ago, Terreform began a project called New York City (Steady) State, which investigates the possibility of “urban self-reliance.” Its goal is to figure out what a sustainable New York might look like.

By imagining an ideal city, the thinking goes, you make a better one more likely. How would such a city function? And what would it be like to live on its leafy and fruitful streets?

Read the full article here.

Thinking City Limit: How Localizing is the Key to Our Urban Future?

What is the actual extent of the city? As megacities, sprawl and megalopolitan regions increasingly characterize urbanization, it gets harder and harder to recognize either the location or the logic of boundaries. But, while our cities are no longer walled, each is still enclosed in multiple visible and invisible membranes that define it both internally and in relation to the planet.

Full length article can be found here.