2020

A near-perpetual war in Afghanistan that has uprooted lives and severely impacted the country has rendered it to be called the “nation of widows”. The lives of Afghan widows, a number currently estimated to be near 70,000 in Kabul alone and nearly 1.5 Million in all of Afghanistan, are found to be at an inertial roadblock. The lack of any formal education, work opportunities, and even proper healthcare as decreed by the Taliban owing to archaic laws prevents them from acquiring the necessary means to earn a respectable livelihood or lead dignified lives.

Parking spaces are nothing more than a paradox. It’s a parcel of land that’s so vacant but so crucial that it drives how a city is perceived and functions.

It’s a common reality of how building plans are only approved with adequate or surplus units of these vacant spaces. It’s no surprise our cities look like more parking and less of life at any time soon. This shows how parking spaces have Zero function but have a very inflated value associated with them.

Municipality of Mariupol (UA) invites architects, designers and interdisciplinary teams to submit architectural ideas for a new multifunctional center that will be devoted to the subject of migration, a process that has shaped the city throughout the centuries, becoming an integral part of its identity. The Port of Culture will uncover and explore the less known traits of Mariupol city, and contextualize its local history within larger regional and global processes related to migration.

We live in a networked society where mobile information and digital connection connect us to anyone, from anywhere at any time. Mankind’s desire to develop more and newer technologies has transformed the way we work tremendously. This has changed people’s socio-spatial relationships. Our person to person relationships has become complex, affording a seamless transition between being physically present and digitally present at all times.

Fall in prices, quicker production rates and easier access to fashion (fast fashion) have meant that fashion is now more accessible to the common man than ever before.

Earth’s ecosystem besides resourcing human needs and habituating many culture ethos, is home to a variety of living beings. It is a ground for a complex network of interdependence between plants and animals. The mutually beneficial interactions between them have been paramount in the generation of the Earth’s ecosystem.

The paranoia stemming from war, especially nuclear, pandemics and natural disasters is at an all-time high and rising by the day. According to polls commissioned polls conducted by YouGov, 22-23% of people in the UK and US feel that the world would end in their lifetime, or that they would at least see the occurrence of a doomsday level event. Among those, 60% of the people, especially in the US, feel that it would be through a nuclear war. Only a minuscule percentage among these people hope to survive such an event, and even fewer have the means for it.

The MIT India Initiative is a not-for-profit effort of students and alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to delve into pressing problems in novel, challenging contexts, and tackle these with technology and design. This is a first of its kind workshop where mentors from multiple departments of MIT and Harvard will work with talented participants chosen from all across India to design solutions to some of today's most pressing challenges.

Call for entries now open for the biennial New Practices New York 2020 Awards.

New Practices Committee of the New York AIA Chapter invite you to submit your portfolio to the 8th biennial juried portfolio competition and exhibition known as New Practices New York. The selected winner will have their work showcased in an exhibition at the Center for Architecture, a symposium to discuss their practice, and will hold a lecture series in New York to present their work.

Contemporary Art Room Gallery is proud to announce their 1st “Landscapes” Online Art Competition for the month of January 2020. This is an international competition and artists from around the world are welcome to submit their work. The gallery invites all artists and photographers from around the world to submit their best representational and non-representational art related to the Landscapes theme. The Landscapes theme is considered to be any art with interpretation of natural elements such as mountains, hills, valleys, deserts, forests, farmland, trees, rivers, lakes, polar regions, rainforests, islands and tropical landscapes. All visual art mediums are acceptable (painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, digital, prints, fiber art, collage or installation art) except sound and video art.

EARTH is a doomed planet and if humans do not act fast, humanity faces going down with the ship, Professor Stephen Hawking warned in his last book.

The oil and oil-gas platforms, more than 8000 present all over the planet until a few decades ago, have gradually been dismantled to free the seas from the strong pollution they cause. The so-called decommissioning process of fixed platforms is usually carried out by removing them entirely from the marine environment in which they are located, bringing them to the ground and then demolishing or disassembling them to sell valuable equipment or, in some cases, revamping the best pieces for later reuse in other fields.

For centuries, earthquakes have been an inevitable phenomenon that bring destruction and devastation all around the world and we aren’t any more prepared or equipped to deal with them than we used to be. This is a worldwide issue and although some countries like Japan are better prepared with the proper infrastructure to deal with these disasters, still many countries remain that are powerless in the face of these disasters. Countries like Iran, Indonesia and Turkey which are some of the countries that are most prone to earthquakes but don’t have the necessary infrastructure to minimize the damages.

We are living at a moment of great promise. Humanity’s breakout into space is underway. Yet success is not inevitable. The Internet or Digital Economy that began in the last two decades, has been on an exponential growth ever since. Falling costs, new technologies, and a new generation of entrepreneurs are charting out a bold era of space development and space economy.

Population aging - an increase in the proportion of older people in a population.
As one of the most significant social changes of the 21st century, it is predicted to impact all sectors including labor and financial markets, housing, health care and social protection.

Penelope Haralambidou's project 'City of Ladies' studies 'The Book of the City of Ladies', 1405, by Italian/French medieval author Christine de Pizan (1364 – c.1430). The text is part of a compilation assembled for Queen Isabeau of Bavaria between 1410 – 1414 (Harley MS 4431) the largest surviving collected manuscript of her works and one of the foundation manuscripts at the British Library. In the book, de Pizan describes her visitation by three female Virtues, Reason, Rectitude and Justice, who commission her with the construction of an imaginary city inhabited solely by women. Conflating the act of writing a book and the construction of an imaginary city with building a thesis against misogyny, her work has been seen as a proto–feminist manifesto.

Since the integration of Cheongju City and Cheongwon County, a regeneration project to restore the core functions of the original city center has been promoted. By linking the project with the new City Hall, which will be constructed by 2025, it is aimed to achieve balanced regional development through revitalization

Public Play Space (PPS) is launching a Call for Best Practices for projects and concepts focusing on innovative and creative practices for the co-design of inclusive, cohesive, and sustainable public spaces and cities, through the use of games and digital technologies.