City is a complex, self-organized system, in which various sub-systems interact with each other whereby urban orders emerge dynamically. Due to lacking of sufficient knowledge about the urban system, urban planners and designers had to work within a simplified concept framework. This oversimplified methodology has been influencing the debate about the urban sustainability. Although the so-called new data environment now provides possibility to acknowledge this kind of complex interrelationship, future-proofed theories and methodologies of urban planning and design are still deficient in related practices. Base on the quantitative understanding of urban orders, this paper aims to explore the issues on understanding the relationship between the urban orders and the meaning of sustainability in the new data environment, to establish a methodological framework of data augmented sustainable planning, and to reassert how to achieve the value rationality in urban planning and design through the exploration on instrumental rationality.
In this article, the interviewee, senior urban planner Peng Wang, suggests a broader definition for Big Data, considering which as a methodology. Combining introduction of case studies, he offers insights on the issues of how Big Data influences planners’ practice, the misunderstandings in planning industry about Big Data, the obstacles in the research and application of Big Data, as well as Big Data’s future development.
This article introduces the background and design concept of the CITYIF Planning Cloud Platform, shows practical cases based on the Cloud platform, and describes how can CITYIF support offline events and provide online application services through taking use of Internet, Geographic Information System, social perceptions, etc.
The amount and complexity of data navigated during the design process is growing exponentially. Yet, notation conventions in architecture fail to record our design systems or models and default to documenting just the singular output they produce. The scientific community, particularly those dealing with “big data” computational models, has been wrestling with multivariate information visualization for quite some time. By studying the challenges and solutions to big data visualization, architects can re-invent drawing conventions to include meta-notation — a notation to describe the design and its underlying system of variables and constraints.
In Designed for the Future①, author Jared Green, who writes about cities and design for numerous publications, asks eighty of today’s most innovative architects, urban planners, landscape architects, journalists, artists, and environmental leaders the same question: What gives you the hope that a sustainable future is possible? Their imaginative answers show the way to our future success on earth and begin a much-needed dialogue about what we can realistically accomplish in the decades ahead. As an excerpt, this article introduces the author’s conception and intent of this book, and selects some inspiring ideas contributed by three leading landscape architects.
The availability of big data on human activity is currently changing the way we look at our surroundings. In this article, we present a technique and visualization tool which uses aggregated activity measures of mobile networks to gain information about human activity shaping the structure of the cities. Based on ten months of mobile network data, activity patterns can be compared through time and space to unravel the “city’s pulse” as seen through the specific signatures of different locations. Furthermore, the tool allows classifying the neighborhoods into functional clusters based on the timeline of human activity. The approach and the tool provide new ways of looking at the city structure from historical perspective and potentially also in real-time based on dynamic up-to-date records of human behavior. The online tool presents results for four global cities: New York, London, Hong Kong and Los Angeles.
On Broadway represents life in the 21st century city through a compilation of images and data collected along the 13 miles of Broadway that span Manhattan. The result is a new type of city view, created from the activities and media shared by hundreds of thousands of people. The project uses approximately 40 million data points and images and includes an application and an interactive installation.
Sea Change is a research initiative on sea level rise that advocates for a long-term coastal resiliency strategy for the Greater Boston area. The Sea Change team tapped into Sasaki’s interdisciplinary practice and also collaborated with experts in engineering, academia, advocacy, and policymaking to engage in preparedness planning at the building, city, and regional scale. Sasaki curated an exhibition, Sea Change: Boston, to showcase this research, highlighting Boston's vulnerabilities and demonstrating design strategies for resilience. Events and digital media associated with the exhibition catalyzed a conversation among designers, city officials, real estate leaders, and academics about a specific call to action: to develop a regional resiliency plan for the Greater Boston area.
New York City's urban forest provides numerous environmental and social benefits. Street trees compose roughly one quarter of its canopy. This map shows the distribution and biodiversity of the city's street trees based on the most recent tree census. The map is more than a way for identifying the placement of trees: it provides a record of planting history and an important tool for planning.
With current models predicting aquifer depletion as early as 2080, the American Great Plains region approaches a critical threshold that will test the resilience of its productive landscape. In response, this project challenges the Jeffersonian grid by speculating that the future landscape will be annually reorganized by hyper-local climate prediction that responds to micro-topography and soil typologies. A series of dynamic landscape infrastructures collect and interpret data to define a Meridian of Fertility where short grass prairie ends and insurable productivity begins.
“Have you seen the Arana①?” is a feature length documentary that interweaves contemporary narratives with a tribal myth, exploring effects of rapidly changing landscapes on lives and livelihood. The film is set in Wayanad, a region in South India, rich in bio-diversity and threatened by indiscriminate “development”.
Winner of several national and international awards①, one citation reads: “… is elegant, patient, meditative, and subtle. The director gently moves her audience towards a deep appreciation of the tribal, mythical connections between humanity and the ecosystems that sustain us all.”②
Initially conceived as a film on the agricultural crisis, my experiences over five years of research helped in understanding complexity of challenges faced by the people of Wayanad. By linking mythical-past with ecology, integrating contemporary concerns with contours of a terrain; I looked for ways to unravel multiple layers of meaning intertwining people and landscape.
Staring through the window of a Chinese high speed train on my way home from Shenzhen to Wuhan, I saw landscapes framed by the context of the train; its windows, its acceleration. This frame with a speed of 300 km/h gives a new perception to the outside landscape, as the railway route itself creates new forms of political economy. The video installation “Arriving Landscape” is an experimental documentation of this experience, while also an observations of Chinese travelers’ experience inside. The video serves as a critical medium for both representation and research; what you see is equal to how you see, both inevitably associated with the development of the contemporary railway infrastructure, urban and rural development, speed and politics.