Utopian Hours: Manifesto for a New City Making, the first festival dedicated to innovative city making, is a rallying call for city planners, experts, makers, shapers, activists and developers to imagine new forms of city-making through conceptual innovation, showcasing some of the most inspiring ideas of recent years. This groundbreaking event launches for the 7th

How can we achieve residential retrofitting at scale, because improving the performance of a home brings widespread economic, social, and environmental benefits. On display from 10 May – 20 October 2023, ‘Retrofit 23: Towards Deep Retrofit of Homes at Scale’, a new exhibition at the Building Centre, curated by Lucy Bullivant, explores these issues. The need to

In Love with the World, Anicka Yi’s aerobes installation gracing the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern includes xenojellis and planulae, aquatic and terrestrial. These floating hybrid eco-tech machine species (mobile thanks to UAVs) develop individual and group behaviours over time, influenced by elements in the ecosystem. What if AI could learn through the senses rather

Groundbreaking educationalist Neil Pinder, in his talk for Temple Bar Trust (6 October 2021) argues for the need for architects and all built environment professionals to adapt their use of language to relate closely to the context of the audience. The power of words, phrases, the spoken word – summed up as language – is

Tara Gbolade is the latest architect to give a talk to Temple Bar Trust on 18 October 2021, chaired by Lucy Bullivant. She presented some of Gbolade Design Studio’s architecture and policy projects as case studies, highlighting how the practice responds to environmental, social and economic sustainability priorities, with the ultimate goal of designing kinder

Wed 10 June 2020, Day 44 of the 100 Day Studio: Lucy Bullivant, founder of Urbanista.org, reads from ‘A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the fight for a place to call home’ by Laura Gottesdiener, as part of Bedtime Stories, a nightly series of broadcasts on Instagram curated by Alicia Pivaro for The 100 Day

The London Festival of Architecture (LFA) – having announced that ‘Power’ would be the theme of the 2020 festival, updated this in April during the UK pandemic lockdown to confirm that ‘exceptionally, for this year, our festival in June will be a new digital festival with the wider core public programme taking place later in the

Dancing Architects is leading Architectural Body/Urban Choreography, a workshop in Ostuni, Puglia, Italy, running from Tue 16-Sun 21 July 2019, with founder, architect Takako Hasegawa and dancer/choreographer Julie Anne Stanzak (Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch) to explore the cross-pollination of architecture and choreography.

All political parties need to promise to build enough social housing, and that means 100,000 genuinely affordable homes per year for the next 30 years. Future proofing cannot wait. It starts now.

Dwell in possibility’, the next issue of Urbanista.org goes live in Jan 2020 with interviews with London-based Karakusevic Carson Architects and Mexico-City based Francisco Pardo, a review of Mole Architects’ Marmalade Lane co-housing in Cambridge, an essay by Norwegian participatory design specialist, architect Alexander Eriksson Furunes, and features discussing Future Homes for London, a conference staged by the Royal College of Art’s School of Architecture and Riga’s reinvention of its urbanist legacy.

Serpentine Augmented Architecture, a global open call for creative practitioners to design groundbreaking architectural structure to be developed and experienced in augmented reality (AR) on site at the Serpentine Gallery in summer 2019, has been launched (1 Feb 2019) by the Serpentine Galleries in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture. The deadline for entries is

The Pixel HUT is a visual and interactive structure – part architecture design, part performance installation – challenging the identity and function of the primitive hut, which has now been presented in three different iterations. It’s an ongoing interdisciplinary design research project by HUT Architecture in collaboration with Universal Assembly Unit and Dinner at 29.

A major international symposium staged in October 2016 to discuss the new SIBAU – Seoul International Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism – anticipated a paradigm shift in Seoul’s architecture culture and co-created regenerative urban design processes How can a city be experimental with itself? In Victorian times in the UK philanthropists applied notable social experiments

Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, one of the three Baltic States, and formerly a Soviet republic until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, when it regained its independence and became a democratic republic, has just half a million inhabitants, while overall across its fifteen counties there are 1.3 million. The 2015 Tallinn Architecture Biennale,

An exhibition pavilion, design-build structure workshop and discussion programme, created by a unique team from the UK, Norway and China for the national, regional and thematic pavilions section of the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture Shenzhen, 5 December 2015-28 February 2016. Exhibitors including: WORKSHOP architecture, Assemble – announced on 7 December 2015 as winners of the

The BIO-URBAN Design Lab, led by Marco Poletto and Claudia Pasquero – founders of ecoLogicStudio and leaders of the BIO Urban Design Research Cluster of the MArch Urban Design programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL – embarked in a research trip to the Sonoran desert in Arizona in March 2014.

The Urban Design Group’s National Urban Design Awards 2014 were presented on 12 February during an evening showcasing some great examples of urban design work produced throughout the UK over the past twelve months. Lucy Bullivant’s title Masterplanning Futures was awarded the 2014 Book of the Year Award and, in describing the title, the Urban

Lucy Bullivant and Thomas Ermacora present Rebooting the Masterplan Limewharf Vyner Street, London, E2 9DJ Urbanista.org, in conjunction with the Recode Gallery at Limewharf, continues its popular series of events with Rebooting the Masterplan, two evening talks and discussions investigating contemporary progressive masterplanning ideals and strategies, staged in collaboration with the Urban Design Group. The conventional masterplanning model

Featured in both the book Anglo Files: rising UK architecture (Thames & Hudson, 2005), one of my publications, and Space Invaders, the British Council international touring exhibition, 2001-3, I curated with Pedro Gadanho (a catalogue is still available, and a series of video interviews filmed by Elliott Chaffer is now a collectors’ item), the irrepressible

The New Generations Festival – 28-30 November 2013 – in Milan will be one of the high points of a research project led in 2012 and 2013 by Itinerant Office. The New Generations research, led by Itinerant Office, the architectural practice founded by Gianpiero Venturini, has for the last two years been analysing the impact

Masterplanning Futures, Lucy Bullivant’s latest book published by Routledge in 2012, has been shortlisted for the Urban Design Group’s Francis Tibbalds Award. For the fourth year running, the Urban Design Group (UDG) Awards programme will include a Book Award named in memory of the exceptional UK urban planner Francis Tibbalds, who championed the causes of good urban design until his

The Serpentine Sackler Gallery, a building with an extension designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, will open to the public in Kensington Gardens, five minutes’ walk away from the Serpentine Gallery itself, on Saturday, 28 September 2013. A conversion of The Magazine, a former gunpowder store dating from 1805. At 900m2, it gives the Gallery, led

Super-Seeding, the latest international architectural symposium in the acclaimed Proto/e/co/logics series curated by architects Alisa Andrasek (Biothing) and Bruno Juričić and staged by MLAUS, the Mediterranean Laboratory for Architecture and Urban Strategies, a private institute of architecture founded in Croatia by architect and academic Bruno Juričić, will be held on Saturday 24 August 2013 from

The FRAC Centre in Orléans, the largest cultural collection, gallery and research centre of architecture and art in France outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris, will open its doors on 14 September in a new location, reaffirming its identity as one of the city’s leading assets. The former 19th century ‘Subsistances militaires’ army base site on

What if London’s buildings grew according to the amount of data they generate? Stephan Hügel (@urschrei) and Flora Roumpani (@en_topia) two PhD students from The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, have been working on a system to read in Twitter data to CityEngine and link the geo locations to building outlines. ‘As part of our

Like John F.C. Turner, the British-born architect who in the 1970s and 1980s influenced some of the World Bank’s most progressive urban programmes, we believe that decision-making and initiatives on housing related issues are better left at the local level. This is especially true in contexts such as Mumbai, where government-led schemes and incentives to

Play Me, a video exploring patterns in children’s play across cultures, was produced in 1997 by Helena Bullivant, the film producer and Director of Fierce Bird Films for the highly successful international touring exhibition Kid size: The Material World of Childhood for Vitra Design Museum, Germany, co-curated by her sister Lucy Bullivant, curator, author and founder of Urbanista.org, and Jutta Oldiges, curator at Vitra Design Museum, which toured globally for a phenomenal eight year stint. Clearly, such a unique, cross-cultural, anthropological-design historical focus had rarely been applied to this absorbing, seminal topic affecting everybody around the world.

Architecture has a massive capacity for cultural agency, and yet in the last few decades it has only marginally addressed the issue of its social relevance. Until recently, global conflicts, political and ecological migration, overpopulation and the explosive formation of slums certainly did not play a central role in the research, planning and training in

In an endeavour inspired by the metabolic processes of wine production, Bodega, Enological Metabolism, one of the many Architectural Association Visiting Schools for architects and architectural students* to be staged this summer will be held in Barcelona from 12-26 July in collaboration with the ETSAB (Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona) and the Facultat d’Enologia

HOPE City, a £6.6 billion IT hub at Dunkonaa, a suburb of Accra, the capital of Ghana, intended to foster technological growth and attract firms in the global ICT sector to the West African country was launched earlier in March by Ghanaian President John Mahama. The Italian architectural practice OBR (Open Building Research), founded in

The Design Museum will present one of its most speculative design exhibitions to date from 1 May (to 26 August 2013), by leading avant-garde designers and educators Dunne and Raby. United Micro Kingdoms: A Design Fiction explores multiple perspectives on a fictional UK, with the country devolved into four self-contained counties or ‘micro-kingdoms’ which are

The first International Award for Public Art (IAPA) has been awarded to Tiuna el Fuerte Cultural Park, Caracas,Venezuela, a self-initiated project by Alejandro Haiek Coll, Eleanna Cadalso and Michelle Sánchez de León of the architects collective Lab.Pro.Fab (Venezuela). By occupying underused land within the city of Caracas, the project addresses the city’s lack of green space and fulfils

The third Lisbon Architecture Triennale (12 September-15 December 2013) has announced the participants in its programme. The event, entitled Close, Closer, is being prepared with a reduced budget this year due to the economic crisis, and will, according to José Mateus, the Triennale President, address ‘the complex issues posed by the crisis that plagues us.’

The award-winning Paris and Basel-based architecture and urban design practice AWP led by Marc Armengaud, Matthias Armengaud and Alessandra Cianchetta has won the competition for the post-industrial redevelopment of Orée de Crissier municipality to the west of Lausanne in Switzerland. The scheme is for the urban design of a 68,000m2 site with 390 housing units,

Toyo Ito, the 71 year old architect whose architectural practice is based in Tokyo, Japan, will be the recipient of the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was announced today by Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation which sponsors the prize. The Pritzker Prize honours annually a living architect whose built work demonstrates a

On 1 Feb 2013, the Organizing Committee of Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture announced its decisions concerning the curatorial positions for the 5th UABB*Shenzhen (Urbanism/Architecture Bi-City Biennale), which will open in Shekou, Shenzhen, on Friday 6 December 2013. It is the latest edition of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture founded in 2005

The prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture is an exciting opportunity for a young architect to spend three or six months in Rome, and be a member of a vibrant residential community of architects, artists and researchers. It provides an extraordinary opportunity to study the contemporary architecture of Rome, as well as its historic context. The Prize

On 4 March officials from the City of Copenhagen, local community members and the design team gathered to celebrate the start of construction of Amager Bakke (Amager Hill), the new waste-to-energy plant replacing the by now anachronistic Amagerforbraending plant next to the site which recovered energy from waste for the city and its region for

On 4 February the Guangzhou Municipal Government announced that West 8, the international office for urban design and landscape architecture, had won the Guangzhou Fangcun Huadi (Flower Village) Sustainable Masterplan competition for a 2050 hectares (450 of which is wetlands) in southern China. Appropriately enough, in view of the fact that West 8 are Dutch, it

The Cities and Green Growth – Urban Evolution conference in Stockholm (23-24 May 2013) will investigate how cities embrace the challenges of urbanization and the shift to a green economy through green growth, and consider the potential of cities and regions globally to foster economic growth and reduce environmental impact through innovative policies and political

Fit Cities – Fit World 2013, an international conference at the Greater London Authority and at Hackney Marshes Centre, a venue by the London Olympic Park site, held from 18-19 March will analyse the ways in which health has been placed the centre of urban regeneration plans for the Olympic legacy through ‘active design’ principles.

Veronika Valk, the Estonian architect, has won her country’s Young Architect Award 2012, a competition held annually by Union of Estonian Architects with the support of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia to encourage innovative and creative thinking by young architects. This accolade recognizes her diverse, original and bold activities in the field of architecture, extending

Lime Wharf is a new Hackney based futures gallery and artistic laboratory on Regent’s Canal in the heart of East London’s creative quarter on Vyner Street, which opened in spring 2013. ‘It’s an innovative and experimental centre which welcomes both artists and scientists to collaborate on residencies, think tank gatherings and exhibitions’, says founder and curator, creative

The Cycling Visionaries Awards programme highlights new ideas to evolve cycling cultures around the globe, seeking to support young individuals from different backgrounds and cultural contexts engaged in the evolution of cycling as their impact is key to the future of urban mobility. Participate in the global discourse on urban cycling! Send in your ideas and projects

The LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, a multidisciplinary cultural centre that supports artistic exchange and fosters relations among society, art, science, technology and creative industries in Gijón (Principality of Asturias), Spain, has launched a call for proposals for Next Things 2013 – Next Space, the Second Global Art & Technology Challenge, in conjunction with Telefónica I+D, the research and

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will be the Director of the 14th Venice International Architecture Exhibition to be held in 2014, from Saturday 7 June to Sunday 23 November, a now extended version as long as the 6 month Art Biennale, it was announced on 8 January 2013. He takes over from David Chipperfield, the British

The Festival Ideas City 2013 will take place in downtown New York from 1-4 May 2013. As the world’s resources continue to be endangered, depleted and destroyed there is a need to imagine new solutions and to develop innovative approaches and practices. Rather than focusing on deficits, say the organisers, Ideas City 2013 will encourage