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The Smart Urbanism Research and Development Collaborative was established five years ago as an independent, free-thinking, open-source organisation. It focuses on what a better, appropriate 'new normal' for urbanism might look like in an increasingly complex, informal and local world. Massive Small is our way of showing how we can do this. Our team has collaborated on a number of groundbreaking publications from writing national policy, urban design guidance and a range of polemics on the subject of urbanism.

New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually continued to reform many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies.

What is the World Urban Forum? The Forum has become the preeminent conference on all things urban. It brings together government ministers, mayors, diplomats, grassroots women's organizations, youth and slum dwellers groups, planners, engineers and architects, academics, and the private sector as partners working for better cities.

SFI's Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research effort is creating an interdisciplinary approach and quantitative synthesis of organizational and dynamical aspects of human social organizations, with an emphasis on cities. Different disciplinary perspectives are being integrated in terms of the search for similar dependences of urban indicators on population size - scaling analysis - and other variables that characterize the system as a whole. A particularly important focus of this research area is to develop theoretical insights about cities that can inform quantitative analyses of their long-term sustainability in terms of the interplay between innovation, resource appropriation, and consumption and the make up of their social and economic activity. This focus area brings together urban planners, economists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and complex system theorists with the aim of generating an integrated and quantitative understanding of cities. Outstanding areas of research include the identification of general scaling patterns in urban infrastructure and dynamics around the world, the quantification of resource distribution networks in cities and their interplay with the city's socioeconomic fabric, issues of temporal acceleration and spatial density, and the long-term dynamics of urban systems.

Urban Imprint demystifies how interactions between the built environment and human activity impact economic, social and ecological value. Working with planning and real estate industry professionals, Urban Imprint then leverages that know-how to develop evidence-based sustainable planning, design, and development solutions.

Designers, programmers, data scientists, and artists alike are invited to take up the challenge: merge and compare mobility data sets from three cities-San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich-and draw meaningful insights. Winning projects will showcase the power of open governmental data and facilitate the knowledge exchange between cities. Juried prizes include round-trip airfare to one of the participating cities and funding from Fusepool, the European / Swiss Datapool, for developing the project into an app.

The MIT Senseable City Laboratory aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale. Director Carlo Ratti founded the Senseable City Lab in 2004 within the City Design and Development group at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, as well as in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. The Lab's mission states...See More

The Athens Charter, or Charte d'Athènes was a document about urban planning published by the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier in 1943. The work was based upon Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) book of 1935 and urban studies undertaken by the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in the early 1930s.

I like to think that in Melbourne a debate like the Zunz lecture would be couched in different terms. At the very least, the proposition might be something like "great urban design makes great cities" or, preferably, "great urban design makes a better city". They both recognise that it's not individual buildings that make a difference but the overall feel of the city. The latter also acknowledges that the physical environment is only one factor that contributes to making a city great.

Soulful Cities is a coalition of innovators, urban designers and social equity pioneers fostering cultural development in newly urbanized areas.

CEOs for Cities is a civic lab of today's urban leaders catalyzing a movement to advance the next generation of great American cities. CEOs for Cities works with its network partners to develop great cities that excel in the areas most critical to urban success: talent, connections, innovation and distinctiveness.

Urban planning in the 20th century sprang from that horrified perception of 19th-century cities. Oddly, it began with Ebenezer Howard. In a slim book, self-published in 1898, the man who spent his days transcribing the ideas of others articulated his own vision for how humanity ought to live-a vision so compelling that half a century later Lewis Mumford, the great American architecture critic, said it had "laid the foundation for a new cycle in urban civilization."

Sustainable Cities Collective is an editorially independent, moderated community for leaders of major metropolitan areas, urban planning and sustainability professionals. We look to aggregate content and provide resources for all who work in or are interested in urban planning, sustainable development and urban economics. Looking at issues such as transportation, building practices, community planning & development, education, water, health and infrastructure, we hope to create a community where people can get involved and learn about the advances in how cities are becoming smarter and greener in the 21st century.

The SmartCode is a unified land development ordinance for planning and urban design. It folds zoning, subdivision regulations, urban design, and optional architectural standards into one compact document. Because the SmartCode enables community vision by coding specific outcomes that are desired in particular places, it is meant to be locally customized (also known as "calibrated") by professional planners, architects, and attorneys.

The Street Plans Collaborative is an urban planning, design, and research-advocacy firm. We strive to create high-quality public spaces, and believe that the key to reversing the harmfulmn effects of suburban sprawl is to promote compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. We thrive on working with our clients, partners, and other likeminded organizations to improve the quality and function of the built environment. We seek to increase the effectiveness of multi-modal transportation as a means to creating more competitive and sustainable 21st century towns and cities.

Our goal is to advance urban sustainability and shared prosperity through initiatives in transportation, water, climate, and public policy. We coach city leaders, advise decision makers, and find new ways to solve challenges.

New Urban Mechanics is a network of civic innovation offices. Across the network, we explore how new technology, designs and policies can strengthen the partnership between residents and government and significantly improve opportunity and experiences for all.

Existing patterns of urban and suburban development seriously impair our quality of life. The symptoms are: more congestion and air pollution resulting from our increased dependence on automobiles, the loss of precious open space, the need for costly improvements to roads and public services, the inequitable distribution of economic resources, and the loss of a sense of community. By drawing upon the best from the past and the present, we can plan communities that will more successfully serve the needs of those who live and work within them. Such planning should adhere to certain fundamental principles.

The Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne - CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) was an organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959, responsible for a series of events and congresses arranged around the world by the most prominent architects of the time, with the objective of spreading the principles of the Modern Movement focusing in all the main domains of architecture (such as landscape, urbanism, industrial design, and many others).

There's an important debate taking place right now, as you know, about what will happen to the suburbs and particularly the more distant exurbs when economic conditions and the real estate market pick up a little more. On one side are the suburbanists, such as Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, who believe that the march of the affluent to distant locations will simply continue, and we will be building more subdivisions 30 and 40 miles out from the cities. Then there are the urbanists, such as Christopher Leinberger, who argue that the Great Recession marks a demographic turning point, and communities far from the urban center are going to be much less attractive to the next generation of affluent homebuyers.