Flyover Farm by Fresh & Local

Via Mumbai Boss, comes the story of Flyover Farm by Fresh & Local which is aiming to add farms on top of existing Mumbai buildings, and they have a Kickstarter:

Fresh & Local is a movement to facilitate urban farming in Mumbai. We started in the spring of 2010, in reaction to the lack of fresh and organic produce, and the lack of resources and support for urban farming in the city. We research and develop best practices, design gardens and garden products, host gardening workshops and work in partnership with NGOs and individuals to set up kitchen gardens across the city.

Fresh and Local’s Flyover Farm project is a natural progression and culmination of the work currently being carried out.

This is all really interesting, but seeing the existing building stock which is generally of poor construction and knowing how much soil is required to grow fruit and vegetable plants, I fear that not many building can support the weight of these roof farms. I applaud the project, since we have lots of roof space in Mumbai, and the quality of vegetables will undoubtably be better than the ones grown on the sides of the suburban railways.

Conversations with Lebbeus Woods and Thom Mayne

If you’re exploring just the level of organizational types because that’s usually what we do—we organize the world and we literally concretize it. We bring a certain order. That order is a response to how we locate ourselves in the world in philosophical terms—in the total sense; all the disciplines….

I’m looking for…or I am challenging…or I am myself searching for what that means with those organizational forms. I am looking for something that I see as more contemporary and that is connected to the 21st century thinking and it seems as though it’s moving from the mechanical to the biological. There is a thrust that is becoming clear to us in terms of where we look for our ideas, right? We are paralleling in terms of the modern notion of who we are.

I’m looking for something that is discursive, that is understandable, that doesn’t depend totally on personal facility, meaning it’s private—because these are collective projects. I work with another person that is actually drawing the specific nature of the model.

And I would have said that the formation of these are first and foremost the operational strategy, which is the most powerful thing. Then, after that, it’s some combination of my critique; my development of that process and my engagement with the person actually mechanically putting them together. So it is a very complicated, already collective process of even how they come together and it’s not by me at all.

From Conversations with Lebbeus Woods and Thom Mayne.

Big Box Stores Linked To the Presence of Hate Groups – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities

The recent surge in hate group activity is a concern to many citizens and policymakers. We examine the roles of socioeconomic factors measured at the county level that are hypothesized to account for the presence of such groups, including social capital and religious affiliations.

Both social capital stocks and religious affiliation exert an independent and statistically significant influence on the number of hate groups, as does the presence of Wal-Mart stores, holding other factors constant.

Big Box Stores Linked To the Presence of Hate Groups

Manhattan Memorious

Before a city becomes a thing of steel, concrete and glass it is a theater of visions in conflict.

As a city ages, the visions do not die but come up against the physical and ideological resistance of the place and its people. The city we see today is the direct result of radical visions, gradually changing the way the future is realized. This is an account of a Manhattan that could have been – might have been. A phantasmagorical Manhattan where the visionary meets the everyday – the absurd and the sublime. The island as we know it is but a pale reflection of a city designed by visionaries – a city of mad, incongruous utopias.

Shigeru Ban – Nomadic Museum for Ashes and Snow

Unite d’Habitation – Five Buildings by le Corbusier

Shame on me, but I knew that there was more than one Unite d’Habitation by le Corbusier, but I didn’t realize that there are five:

The first and most famous of these buildings, also known as Cité radieuse (radiant city) and, informally, as La Maison du Fada (French – Provençal, “The House of the Mad”), is located in Marseille, France, built 1947-1952. One of Le Corbusiers’s most famous works, it proved enormously influential and is often cited as the initial inspiration of the Brutalist architectural style and philosophy.

The Marseille building, developed with Corbusier’s designers Shadrach Woods and George Candilis, comprises 337 apartments arranged over twelve stories, all suspended on large piloti. The building also incorporates shops with architectural bookshop, sporting, medical and educational facilities, a hotel which is open to the public, and a gastronomic restaurant, Le Ventre de l’Architecte (“The Architect’s Belly”). The flat roof is designed as a communal terrace with sculptural ventilation stacks, a running track, and a shallow paddling pool for children. The roof, where a number of theatrical performances have taken place, underwent renovation in 2010. It has unobstructed views of the Mediterranean and Marseille.

Marseille, France 1947-1952

Nantes-Rezé, France 1955

Berlin-Westend, Germany 1957

Briey, France 1963

Firminy, France 1965

Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect

Robert J. Sampson’s important new book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, challenges prevailing notions of community decline. Sampson, an urban sociologist who is the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University, argues that our communities continue to matter a great deal and that our lives are powerfully shaped by where we live. William Julius Wilson lauds the book as “one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated empirical studies ever conducted by a social scientist.”

via The Enduring Effect of Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities.

Ring Roads of the World

The Rice School of Architecture took ring roads from two dozen international cities, layering the ring roads at the same scale, and color coded them. The result is Ring Roads of the World, for their 2012 lecture series.