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Shack/Slum Dwellers International_CITIES exhibition
2011. Courtesy of SDI. Shack/Slum Dwellers International is pioneering a set of tools to build more inclusive cities through redevelopment and upgrades.
MIT’s CityCar and the Future of Uncertain
Over the next two weeks on the Cooper-Hewitt Design Blog, students from an interdisciplinary graduate-level course on the Triennial taught by the Triennial curatorial team blog their impressions and inspirations of the current exhibition,‘Why Design Now?’. Just what, exactly, is MIT’s CityCar? It is a car, yes, and a tiny one at that. It looks...
Bill’s Design Talks: David Owen and Our Green Metropolis
New York City is widely considered an ecological nightmare—a wasteland of concrete and high-rises, diesel fumes and traffic jams, garbage and pollution. But, in the groundbreaking work of contrarian environmental thinking that is Green Metropolis, David Owen declares New York City as the greenest community in America. In Green Metropolis, David Owen conceives a new...
Why Design Now?: Eco-Laboratory
Why? Vertical farming is a new approach to fresh-food distribution that provides urban centers with healthy food grown within the controlled environment of a multistory building. Eco-Laboratory successfully merges a neighborhood market, dwelling units, a vocational training facility, and a sustainability educational center for the public into a financially viable downtown residential development.
Why Design Now?: Masdar development
Why? Masdar is a self-contained, sustainable city currently being built on the desert outskirts of Abu Dhabi. Its design pushes new approaches to alternative energy applied to architecture and engineering on an urban scale. A vast experiment, it aims to be the worlds first car-free, carbon-neutral, zero-waste city powered by renewable energy sources.
City Views
Dhaka, Bangladesh   Preparation for the next exhibition in the Design for the Other 90% program series brought me to numerous informal communities in mega-cities throughout Southeast Asia. As the world becomes more urban – over half the world now lives in cities – there is much to learn from locations that have been dealing...
Guangzhou Bus Rapid Transit System_CITIES exhibition
2010. Director/editor: Brian McAllister. Courtesy of: Institute for Transportation & Development Policy. Guangzhou Bus Rapid Transit (GBRT) is a sustainable high-capacity transportation system that saves its passengers 32 million hours of commuting time a year by using infrastructure improvements such as dedicated bus lanes, intermodal integration with subway lines, a bike-sharing system, pre-ticketing smart card,...
Social Changemakers
Join in a Twitter-based Social Entrepreneurship Chat organized by Ashoka. The real time discussions on social entrepreneurship issues take place the 1st Wed of the month, 4-6PM US Eastern Time. The next conversation on Wed, July 1, focuses on mobile innovation. Ashoka is now partnering with the Lemelson Foundation on a new initiative to support...
Mobilizing Resources
The majority of India’s poor still live in rural villages, while the many living in the urban areas have increasing purchasing power. In response to this growing disparity an Indian organization, GOONJ, has developed a large-scale resource mobilization initiative to re-use surplus clothing from the urban consumers to the rural poor; rather than simply giving...