Crowd-Funding The Soft City
A couple of weeks ago we published our Top 10 Trends for 2012. The number 1 in this list was the rise of crowd-funded urbanism. Looking back after only three weeks, we must conclude that we’ve been pretty right on this :-). We’ve stumbled upon a couple of new initiatives that use crowd-funding to make cities […]
1,000 Posts On Pop-Up City
Dear readers, This is Pop-Up City’s 1,000th post. We made it, baby! When we started blogging in the Spring of 2008 during a short trip to Berlin, we couldn’t imagine that this blog would grow into a rich source of new ideas, trends and designs that shape the city of the future. We hope you […]
Oakland’s Pop-Up Neighborhood
As of today, pop-up projects have always been small private initiatives on the scale of a shipping container or temporary shop. These initiatives are interesting, but not exactly the interventions that change a complete city or neighborhood to a better. A very interesting question is whether or not the pop-up trend can become a strategy […]
Tetsuo Kondo’s Elevated Forest Path
On his amazing City of Sound blog Dan Hill recently described a tour through a forest near Estonia’s capital Tallinn. What made this trip spectacular was Tetsuo Kondo’s suspended ramp that flows trough the 300-years old woods of Kadriorg. The ramp allows visitors to explore the forest from a totally different perspective as it adds a layer of experience to the landscape. […]
Tree Bench: A Mobile Sitting Unit For Urban Parks
As part of his ‘Aandeboom’ series, which means something like ‘attached to trees’, the Utrecht-based spatial designer Rogier Martens has come up with a remarkable design for a pop-up bench for urban parks and landscapes. Invited by the Dutch city of Amersfoort to design a temporary bench for a local park, Martens created this Tree Bench. […]
The Most Expensive Picture
One and a half month ago, Sebastian Stadler, Stefan Jandl and Carlo Jörges launched ‘The Most Expensive Picture’. The idea behind this website is simple, straightforward and brilliant — Swiss Photographer Lukas Wassmann has uploaded the first picture to the site for 1 dollar. Anyone can pay to have their image featured on the website […]
Luminous Micro Toilets Against Public Urination
The Spanish street art collective Luzinterruptus has made an installation that should prevent people from using the streets as a toilet. Eighty urine containers were filled with yellow liquid and led lights and attached to walls, posts and trees at Plaza de San Ildefonso in downtown Madrid. The objects are meant to illuminate the streets during […]
Kitchen On The Move
The Stadtpark collective is a Vienna-based architecture and design group founded by Anna Rosinke and Maciej Chmara that mainly focuses on flexible, nomadic and modular buildings, furniture and objects, for instance their Mobile Gastfreundschaft project. Recently they have been touring Austria with this mobile installation, which comprises a kitchen unit with sink and gas hob, a separate sideboard and […]
PleaseCycle Introduces Bicycle ‘Air Miles’
Bicycle culture is adopted as one of the solutions to increasing traffic congestion problems in many world cities. But that’s not the only thing — creative class guru Richard Florida claims that bicycle-friendly metros “are richer, better-educated, and more fit than non-biking places”. But how to stimulate bicycle culture in cities? PleaseCycle, a London-based start-up, […]
Igloos In The Alps
A new modular temporary hotel just opened doors in the Swiss Alps. The accommodation is beautifully situated on the snow-covered mountain slopes near the village of Les Giettes and consists of 15 luxurious and self-sufficient suites that look like traditional igloos. As we presented in our Top 10 Trends for 2012, modular hospitality is a new […]
Guerrilla Gardening In East London Potholes
Decorating potholes is cool. Guerrilla gardening is (still) cool. East London is cool. So what could be cooler than guerrilla gardening in potholes in East London?
Architectural Pick-Up Lines
The Internet cannot get enough of Ryan Gosling, who became the single target of a wide range of funny Tumblr blogs covering a wide variety of academic and topical subjects such as typography, film studies, medieval history, Shakespearean literature, biostatistics, feminism, international development and political science. For all the architecture geeks out there, here’s a […]
Nykredit’s Floating Office Building
In order to improve the transparency and openness of mortgage bank Nykredit, Schmidt Hammer Lassen designed its new headquarters next to Copenhagen’s harbor. The bank’s brand-new HQ, one of the largest corporate buildings in Denmark, consists of a ten-storey glass structure with an atrium flooded with natural light. The combination of glass and light does […]
A Storage Locker For Dogs
According to PSFK, dog theft is an increasing problem in Europe and the United States. Well, there’s a solution that’s perfectly in line with our 2012 trend Design for Animals… Hundehiet, which means Dog Den in Norwegian, is a storage locker designed for dogs. For just 10 Kroner (some $1.72), people can keep their dogs […]
Trend 1: Crowd-Funded Urbanism
Crowd-funding has become extremely popular over the last years. Lots of cultural, artistic and design initiatives have already been made possible thanks to platforms like Kickstarter. But will this work for urbanism too? Yes, it does! The idea of paying together for those things we really like, starts to win popularity in the urban profession in 2012. The first crowd-funded urban projects have been realized in cities around the United States and also in the Netherlands we have encountered some great examples. In these times of financial crisis with a lack of confidence in financial institutions and governments, this kind of funding will gain importance in urbanism. Urbanism will be paid by the crowds, which will mean that the crowds will be having influence as well.
