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It's as if we're witnessing the rise of the walled cities in Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, where neo-Victorians live in isolated, nanotech splendor while other people live in cardboard boxes. This image shows the stark contrast between the slums and the mini-city called Hamilton Court in Gurgaon, India.
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This gorgeous image of a floating city is one design team's idea of what New Orleans might look like in the future. Let me add to that: a better future, where urban design is graceful, humane, and forward-looking. Their idea is to create low-cost houses that are buoyant, and that survive floods by welcoming the Mississippi River into the city.
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Urban history is littered with the dead bodies of scrapped public transit projects. When eager commuters and car companies turned the automobile into the most popular form of transit in the world in the twentieth century, many cities set aside plans for expanding their public transit systems, such as the electric tram system planned for regions feeding into Melbourne, Australia. In some cases, city planners actually ripped out existing transit systems like Los Angeles' once-enormous cable car network. What would these cities and others look like if their public transit systems had continued to thrive and we lived in a world without cars? We've got five alternate urban histories of public transport for you below.
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art
city of the future
If you have too many cars on the freeway, the best thing to do is go vertical and build a skyscraper road system. Here is one possible way to do that, layering roads on top of each other until the traffic thins out. Perfect for Los Angeles, where it often takes three hours to cross town on the freeways. [Core Form-ula via Next Nature]
This piece of conceptual art, entitled "We Never Learn," shows a dangerously overpopulated world with floating cities, parks, and layers that threaten to blot out the sky. Of course, that doesn't mean we wouldn't want to live there, flying cars and all. Although if you hit the ball out of one of those parks, good luck getting it back. And life on one of those lower levels is probably a horrible experience, at best. You not only get all the falling detritus from above, but very little sunshine as well. Still, for some reason the whole thing is hauntingly beautiful.
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Ecocity Builders is a group that does eco-friendly urban projects. They've just posted some cool images of what a typical urban downtown looks like now, and what it would look like if the city were redesigned to be a pedestrian space made with recycled materials. Above, you can see the "before" picture. Click through to see the "after."
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Most cities built before 1900 weren't designed with cars in mind, and traffic jams are often one of the results. As we move towards a future that is looking increasingly urban, we're likely to see more traffic scenes like this one, in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India. We're also likely to see more traffic jams created by war zones, and by climate change. Want to see what those look like?
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morning spoilers
Last month in Leipzig, Germany, the world's most enormous drill bit emerged from this wall. It was boring a subway tunnel. Want to see the drill up close?
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Dionisio Gonzalez makes photo mashups of urban spaces, converting every kind of city architecture into twisted, brokedown shanties that look a bit like a Brazilian favela and a bit like chunks of mirrored highrises. Marginal II, above, is a great example of his work. It's a sharp rejoinder to designs that portray future cities as all gleaming towers and green parks. Some of his stuff is so realistic you'll think it's an actual favela . . . until you look carefully. Check it out after the jump.
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A team of architecture firms has released the first sketches of plans to rebuild the New Orleans waterfront. (Final plans will be announced in February.) They include developing trails and buildings a four mile stretch along the Mississippi River, giving people more access to the water and views of its serpentine banks. At the center of the project is this bent warehouse (above), which will be broken in half (below) to create a glass-enclosed parklike area where people can take in views of the river. Images courtesy of TEN. 
urban planning
apocalypse
The car of the future will have sleek plastic on the outside, but hand-woven seats on the inside. Harsha Ravi's designs for the car of 2017 won Wheels magazine's design prize. They're an awesome mixture of high-tech (cutting-edge carbon-neutral bioplastic) with zero-tech. It's all part of an urban car that's customizeable and cheap, but also green.
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A new campaign wants to rename 42nd Ave. in Portland, OR to Douglas Adams Blvd in honor of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author. The group's site claims that renaming the street will show Portland's commitment to the arts and the environment. Insert your own joke here about how this would be a "mostly harmless" change that would make us thankful for fish or whatever. [Blue Oregon]
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