After decades spent in thrall to the car, which brought it epic traffic jams across an ever-expanding urban sprawl, the Brazilian city of São Paulo has finally decided to try something different. Image courtesy Prefeitura de São Paulo The plan calls for an overhaul of the city's building code in order to accomodate taller mixed-use buildings. Fernando Haddad, the mayor of this metropolis of nearly
Dear Mayor Bill de Blasio: Along with many other architects and urbanists, I'm looking forward to your taking office this month as mayor of New York City, and working to implement the theme of your campaign, the elimination of the increasingly radical disparities that underlie that 'tale of two cities' you so frequently spoke about—a tale, increasingly, about two nations.
As the world's population of informal-settlement dwellers races to the 1.5 billion mark, designers and planners must play a central, if redefined, role.