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In 2011, construction will begin on Forwarding Dallas, a hilltop-inspired community that combines renewable energy and rooftop greenery with practical and cost-effective design. Could we be looking at the model for sustainable urban architecture? More »
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Science fiction imagines strange and wondrous cities in our future, but many are less paradise than prison. We take an ill-advised vacation inside the cities that will never let you leave. More »
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Korean-born, Barcelona-based artist Lee Jang Sub takes blueprints of city roads as they existed in different eras and overlays them on top of each other to create art that shows the way urban spaces evolved crazily over the centuries. Here you can see Paris, a jumble of roads that developers built without really thinking ahead to the future. This kind of haphazard, overlapping road construction is what creates chaotic city streets and traffic snares all over the planet. More »
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Future cities will eliminate gridlocked roads by offering personalized tram cars that can whisk us to any destination in the city, on-demand, and with little to no delay. You'll be able to experience this cutting-edge form of urban transport when the ULTra system debuts at Heathrow Airport later this year. Each electric car rides around on a concrete guideway, its movements controlled by a central computer. It could be safer, cleaner and more efficient than any current method of moving people around cities. More »
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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. More »
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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." More »
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Sure it's cool to destroy New York, but it's even cooler to destroy Los Angeles. That's why Omega Man, the 1970s version of I Am Legend, took place in Los Angeles. Viral decimation is only one of the many ways LA has been crushed, according to a 1998 book by Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear, in which the irascible social critic gives us a helpful list of how LA is destroyed in 145 scifi/disaster novels. Of course nukes top the list, with a whopping 49 books wiping out LA in a big blast. But you'll be surprised by some of the lesser-known forms of LA-elimination. More »
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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. More »
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