The role of architecture involves the creation of cities as much as the individual buildings that make up those cities. Below are two ostensibly different perspectives on the world's cities that demonstrate the challenges facing efforts to house and feed 6 billion people. The first, from TED involves the creation of mega-communities growing seemingly beyond their capacity to be viable.Robert Neuwirth on our "shadow cities" Video on TED.com
Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities, finds the world’s squatter sites -- where a billion people now make their homes -- to be thriving centers of ingenuity and innovation. He takes us on a tour.diigo tags: TED, architecture, cities, community-planning
The second involves Shrinkingcities
which involves established urban cities disappearing.Whether in the USA, Britain, or Belgium, Finland, Italy, Russia, Kazakhstan, or China: everywhere, cities are shrinking. The dramatic development in eastern Germany since 1989, which has led to more than a million empty apartments and to the abandoning of countless industrial parks and social and cultural facilities, has proven to be no exception, but a general pattern of our civilization.