Category Archives: Regeneration

Paris goes in search of its lost looks with ‘manifesto for beauty’

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City leaders concede ‘trashed Paris’ campaign has a point and commit to beautification

Paris city authorities have published a “manifesto for beauty” containing plans to spruce up the City of Lights, where an online campaign highlighting ugliness and filth has piled pressure on mayor Anne Hidalgo.

Deputy mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said that several recent initiatives from the Socialist-Green alliance that runs the capital would be scrapped, including allowing Parisians to plant their own gardens on public space.

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Johnson should repay north of England voters with private investment – report

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Research argues ministers should create economic ‘big bang’ for area that turned Tory in last election

The prime minister should repay voters in the north of England who lent the Conservatives their vote at the last election by unleashing billions of pounds of private investment, according to a report.

It argues that ministers should aim to harness the “restless radicalism” from those who voted for Brexit in 2016 and the Conservatives in 2019 by creating an economic “big bang”, along the lines of the Thatcherite deregulation of the City in the 1980s which reinforced London’s position as a global financial centre.

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Battle for Brixton’s soul as billionaire Texan DJ plans 20-storey tower block

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Residents vow to stop Taylor McWilliams’s scheme to develop a site that looms over the famous Electric Avenue street market

The outcome of the fight may help shape London’s future skyline. In one corner is a Texan millionaire DJ and property developer who has put forward plans for a 20-storey office block in Brixton, next to a conservation area and the district’s famous Electric Avenue.

Taylor McWilliams’s property company Hondo, which owns most of Brixton market, claims the proposal will “deliver” 2,000 jobs in the area and generate £2.8m every year for the local economy.

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From garden streets to bike highways: four ideas for post-Covid cities – visualised

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As the pandemic wreaks havoc on existing structures, we look at some visions for post-Covid cities – and how they hold up

There is a huge, looming, unanswerable question that overshadows our cities, like an elephant squatting in the central square. Will a Covid-19 vaccine or herd immunity return us to “normal”, or will we need to redesign our cities to accommodate a world in which close proximity to other people can kill you?

After an anxious summer in the northern hemisphere, during which those of us who were able to safely do so mimicked a kind of normality with limited socialising on patios and in gardens, winter is coming – and it will test the limits of our urban design. Regardless of whether we “solve” this latest coronavirus, humanity now knows how vulnerable we are to pandemics.

Can we mitigate the effects of the next great disease before it happens? And has the colossal disruption to the way we work and travel created a renewed impetus to organise cities in a more sustainable, more pleasant way?

We asked four architecture firms to share their visions of what cities should do, now, to better design everything from offices to streets to transport – and we have analysed each one – to help inoculate our cities against a disease that is proving so difficult to inoculate against in our bodies.

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With the closure of another club space, the scene that revived Berlin is being lost | Michael Scaturro

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The dance community helped reunify East and West Germany in the 1990s, but gentrification is slowly killing it

I was in bed when my friend Alfonso called me. “It’s the last party at Griessmuehle,” he said. “It’s the last Cocktail there. Throw on some clothes. We’re going.”

Cocktail d’Amore is one of a handful of landmark Berlin parties that have made the German capital a centre of LGBTQ+ youth culture over the past two decades. It took place in a venue called Griessmuehle, an old East German grain mill that people enjoyed because one moment you might be kissing on shower tiles, the next dancing in a silo. Sadly, it is to be demolished this spring to make space for a resort hotel. It certainly wasn’t an architectural jewel like the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall or Museum Island – but clubs, along with cheap studio space and vibrant subcultures, are what made Berlin the city so many love today.

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Should a notorious Buenos Aires slum become an official neighbourhood?

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Turning Villa 31 into a barrio will bring greater stability and prosperity, say city authorities, but the plan is stirring deep resentments about ownership and identity

For many Argentinians, especially those from Buenos Aires, Villa 31 is a household name. It is the most famous – and notorious – slum in Buenos Aires, synonymous with poverty and violence (it has the second-highest murder rate in the city), and with the narcotráficantes (organised drug gangs) and paco, a cocaine paste that destroys communities in Argentina.

As inflation climbed to 55% last year and the national poverty rate crept to 32%, the neighbourhood lurched further into the grip of gangs, such as the Sampedranos. Murder stories from the villa dominate headlines, the most recent one being the discovery of a woman’s dismembered corpse in March.

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The $500m Shed: inside New York’s quilted handbag on wheels

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This puffed-up cultural citadel was meant to be an endlessly evolving, telescopic arts complex. But the glistening billionaires’ playground rising up beside it had other plans

It seems fitting that the cultural centre of New York’s latest luxury private development should look like a quilted Chanel handbag. Rearing up at the northern end of the High Line on Manhattan’s reborn West Side, the Shed presents a 10-storey wrapping of puffed-up diamond cushions to passersby, standing as the gaudy gateway to Hudson Yards – the most expensive real estate project in US history.

While it might fit in with the gilt-edged world of Swiss watch boutiques and Michelin-starred chefs that awaits in this $25bn private enclave, it is an unlikely costume for what the project’s architect and originator, Liz Diller, insists is “simply a piece of infrastructure” to support whatever artists want to do. “It’s not precious,” she says of the $500m building. “It’s muscular and industrial, just meat and bones.”

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