ObjectiveAs one of the most scarce landscape resources in cities, the coastal shoreline endows urban coastal spaces with unique ecological and landscape conditions. Meanwhile, with the development of the social economy, the expansion of urban fringes, and the improvement of living standards, coastal spaces are playing an increasingly important role in urban development. However, due to the influence of location, form, and landscape, problems such as insufficient human presence, seasonal differences, and limited radiation range in the vitality of coastal spaces have gradually emerged during the urbanization process. How to improve the quality of coastal spaces and enhance their vitality has become a widely concerned issue in both academic and industrial circles.MethodsTo address this issue, this research constructs a digital portrait of different crowds in coastal spaces based on the analysis of the evaluation dimensions of the vitality of coastal spaces. The digital portrait is created through four dimensions: basic attributes, socio-economic status, travel purposes, and lifestyle. By analyzing the spatial distribution of stay points and the spatio-temporal patterns of travel trajectories of each typical crowd at different times, the vitality of coastal spaces for each crowd is further analyzed, including the attractiveness of coastal spaces to various crowds, as well as the capacity and transportation accessibility of coastal spaces. Then, through field research, questionnaire interviews, and spatial simulation analysis, the root causes of relevant problems are identified. Finally, based on the behavioral trajectories and spatio-temporal vitality differences of different crowds, optimization strategies for the spatial layout of coastal spaces are proposed. In contrast to traditional approaches, the analysis of coastal space vitality grounded in the digital profiling of crowds enables the screening of key subjects from a vast and intricate crowd. It can also pinpoint the core issues in a targeted manner, thereby effectively enhancing the vitality and quality of coastal spaces. Ultimately, by taking into account the behavioral trajectories of each crowd and their vitality variances across different time intervals, optimization strategies for traffic guidance and spatial layout within coastal spaces are put forward. Additionally, integrating the spatial distribution of crowd stop points and crowd categories, the morphological structure and spatial nodes are optimized and upgraded.ResultsTaking the coastal space of Jiulong Bay in Weihai as an example, this research selects 18 typical crowds with the largest proportion to construct a crowd digital portrait. The research finds that the crux of the vitality issue of coastal spaces lies in three aspects: First, the closed layout and spatial fragmentation prevent people from traveling to coastal spaces; second, the lagging infrastructure construction makes it difficult for people to stay in coastal spaces; third, the long and narrow transportation system makes it difficult to disperse people in coastal spaces. In response to these three problems, this research proposes design strategies such as attracting recreation, inhibiting pass-through, promoting the integration and sharing of diverse crowds, and optimizing the form of green space nodes.ConclusionThe crowd digital portrait proposed in this research as a digital means of analyzing crowd activities, has the characteristic of deeply depicting and classifying the age and gender composition, behavioral purposes, activity methods, and trajectory patterns of the crowds in coastal spaces based on their geographical location, transportation environment, and landscape characteristics. It can help understand the vitality characteristics and spatio-temporal patterns of coastal spaces, and then, in combination with the form of coastal spaces, identify the crux of problems such as insufficient human presence and uneven vitality, and propose corresponding strategies.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Play, which occupies most of young children’s lives, is necessary for their healthy growth. Playing areas, by helping children develop physically, psychologically, and sociologically, foster their creativity, problem-solving skills, and social development. Thus, the design of kindergartens including playing areas is important. This article explores the design aspects of kindergarten interior playing areas. It aims to contribute to the design of the global development of inclusive kindergarten and educational environments. Using a qualitative method to analyze specific cases, the study comprehensively reviews kindergarten playing areas, specifically their interior properties. The findings regarding the strategic location of playing areas, architectural characteristics, playground layouts, access points, relationships with other connected spaces, and features are summarized in tables and discussed. It is found that there are considerable differences in the design of kindergartens and the design of interior playing areas is getting more significant.
ObjectiveThe increasing frequency of environmental changes and natural disasters has intensified pressures and disturbances on urban systems, making the development of “resilient city” a key focus in global spatial governance and risk prevention. Leveraging scientific methods to plan and construct resilient cities, enhance the resilience of human settlement systems, and explore mechanisms for achieving resilient urban and rural development has become a consensus among academia, industry, and governments in response to urban disaster risk prevention and control. In recent years, frequent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the Ahr Valley floods in 2021 have significantly advanced Germany’s theoretical and practical approaches to resilient city construction. “Resilient city” gradually became a core concept in German urban master planning during the latter half of the 2010s. Analyzing the theoretical hotspots and practical experience of resilient city construction in Germany can provide theoretical foundations and practical guidance for the systematic integration and action-oriented refinement of resilient city development and governance in China.MethodsBased on the Web of Science database, this research employs bibliometric analysis and visualization to examine publications on resilient cities in Germany spanning the period from 2010 to 2025. Based on a timeline analysis of 239 publications and a keyword hotspot analysis, the research and practical progress in Germany’s resilient city construction are summarized.ResultsThe results of timeline and keyword frequency analysis reveal that research on resilient cities in Germany is relatively limited in quantity and mainly concentrated in the period from 2010 to 2019. However, since 2019, academic interest has grown steadily, with a peak in publications between 2021 and June 2025, accounting for 73% of the total publications over the 15-year period. Keyword analysis highlights that climate-related terms such as climate change, climate change adaptation, and climate resilience appear most frequently. Urban sustainability also ranks highly, reflecting the mainstream influence of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which place “resilience” and “sustainability” on equal footing. Additionally, terms commonly used to describe resilience characteristics, such as vulnerability and adaptation, are prominent, indicating strong academic focus on the attributes of resilience in the German context. These clues may serve as entry points for analyzing Germany’s theoretical and practical progress in resilient city development.ConclusionAgainst the backdrop that “sustainable development” has long served as the dominant theme in German urban policy, the interpretation of “resilience” in German academia involves a conceptual distinction from “sustainability”. Resilience complements the sustainability notion that future problems can be preventively addressed by treating uncertainties, surprises, or disasters as “permanent companions of humanity” and preparing for them through continuous learning. The core definition of the concept of “resilient city” can be summarized as the robustness, redundancy, diversity, flexibility and other resilience characteristics of various urban elements in supporting system operations during crises or disasters, as well as the recovery and innovative learning capabilities in maintaining basic system functions and urban resident life. Furthermore, German academia incorporates diverse perspectives in defining the basic scope of resilience characteristics and the delineation of resilience planning and governance cycles. To address the complexity, vulnerability, and uncertainties of cities in a risk society, it is essential to enhance decentralized economic and infrastructure systems, natural systems (“hardware environment”), efficient and rapid response mechanisms, cross-sectoral planning and collaborative governance (“soft power”), as well as the crisis response capabilities of individuals and organizations within urban systems — such as social networks and trust relationships — to minimize disruption duration and strengthen the ability to cope with sudden disasters or crises. The Memorandum “Urbane Resilienz — Wege zur robusten, adaptiven und zukunftsfähigen Stadt” (the “Memorandum”), adopted at the 14th Federal Conference on Urban Development Policy in 2021, spurred broad discussions on the resilience concept, prompting some cities to integrate resilience into urban development plans and formulate related policies and action plans. Several cities have launched pilot projects, exploring infrastructure resilience, climate resilience, and social resilience, thereby accumulating valuable experience. However, overall, sudden crises and disasters have been the direct drivers prompting local governments in Germany to shift their mindset and explore “resilience” development pathways. Research projects and funding programs have been a major avenue for introducing resilience themes into German urban and landscape planning. Based on Germany’s experiences and challenges in resilient city construction, several recommendations for China’s resilient city construction are proposed as follows. 1) Develop targeted action guidelines and standard systems for resilient cities at the top strategic design level; 2) strengthen full-cycle resilient city construction by creating refined, precise, and comprehensive city-wide risk maps to help government departments clearly understand uncertain risks across different times and locations, improve the scientificity and effectiveness of prevention and early warning, and explore pathways for full-cycle resilient city development; and 3) enhance interdisciplinary and cross-departmental collaboration to promote goal-coordinated and systematic resilient city construction.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
ObjectiveIn the context of profound demographic change and rapid urban restructuring, the spatial role of university campuses in Japan has undergone a fundamental transformation. Once conceived as inward-looking and self-sufficient “ivory tower” enclaves located on the urban periphery, campuses are increasingly being reconfigured as open and integrated nodes embedded within the metropolitan fabric. This paradigm shift is closely tied to Japan’s declining youth population, intensifying competition among universities, and evolving policy frameworks that regulate land use and higher education. Campus landscapes, in this process, are not merely ornamental green spaces but active agents of transformation that mediate the campus-city relations. The objective of this research is therefore to investigate how campus landscapes, as a spatial and social interface, respond to demographic pressures, policy incentives, and urban redevelopment agendas. By examining the synergistic evolution of universities and their host cities, the research aims to provide insights into the mechanisms that underpin this transformation and to extract lessons relevant to the forthcoming landscape transitions in Chinese higher education institutions.MethodsThe research adopts a multi-scalar approach that combines historical trajectory analysis, case-based comparative study, and theoretical synthesis. First, the historical evolution of Japanese university campuses from 1945 to the present is traced and periodized into three major phases: the expansion phase (1945–1980s), when demographic booms and policy restrictions encouraged suburban relocation and the creation of enclosed, inward-looking campuses; the peak phase (1980s–2000s), marked by intensifying competition, partial return to urban centers, and the emergence of vertical and compact campus typologies; and the contraction phase (2000s to present), characterized by severe demographic decline, urban concentration, and increasing demands for publicness and integration. Second, representative case studies are selected from metropolitan Tokyo, regional cities, and newly developed urban districts. These are analyzed through spatial observation, planning documents, and secondary literature to identify common strategies and contextual variations. Third, the research synthesizes empirical findings into a typological framework of three strategic modes — “catalyst”, “regenerator”, and “stabilizer” — and further generalizes these into a theoretical three-pillar model composed of demographic dynamics, policy instruments, and spatial strategies. This model is used to explain the synergistic evolution mechanism of campus landscapes and urban environments.ResultsThe analysis shows that campus landscape transformation in Japan is not an isolated architectural endeavor but a systemic process shaped by demographic, institutional, and spatial forces. In newly developed urban areas and large-scale redevelopment zones, universities frequently operate as catalysts, strategically positioned to anchor emerging districts. Here, landscape strategies emphasize publicness, multi-functionality, and accessibility. For instance, the Toyosu Campus of Shibaura Institute of Technology integrates open terraces, green staircases, and community-oriented plazas that attract both students and local residents, thereby stimulating district-level vitality. In historic city centers and post-industrial neighborhoods, universities act as regenerators, using landscape interventions to repair urban fabric and reinvigorate cultural identity. Examples include the Kitasenju Campus of Tokyo Denki University, which deploys pedestrian linkages and unified pavement to soften campus — city boundaries, and Kyoto City University of Arts, which integrates riverside ecological restoration with cultural events to generate a “memory landscape”. In smaller regional cities, universities often serve as stabilizers, embedding themselves in local social and demographic structures through service-oriented landscapes and shared facilities. Fukuchiyama Public University, for example, co-locates community dining halls and elderly care facilities within its campus landscape, while university consortia in Kyoto pool resources to create a multi-institutional network of open sports fields, libraries, and cultural spaces accessible to local communities. The proposed three-pillar model explains the underlying mechanism of these transformations. Demographic decline provides the fundamental pressure, reducing the student-age population from over two million in the early 1990s to just above one million in the 2020s, with further decline projected. Policy instruments translate these demographic pressures into spatial outcomes, with such instruments ranging from restrictive measures such as the 1959 Factory Location Law to liberalizing interventions like the 1991 revision of university establishment standards, and most recently, the 2017 enrollment cap in central Tokyo. Spatial strategies, materialized through landscape design, serve as the ultimate vehicles through which demographic and policy drivers are enacted: Open courtyards, pedestrian corridors, cultural event spaces, and service-based green infrastructures become concrete manifestations of institutional adaptation. The interplay of these three pillars — demographics, policies, and spatial strategies — constitutes the synergistic evolution dynamic of campus landscapes and cities.ConclusionJapanese experience shows campus landscapes have moved beyond their traditional role as green buffers to become strategic nodes of governance, cultural renewal, and social inclusion. By adopting roles of catalyst, regenerator, and stabilizer, campuses now shape urban growth, support community services, and sustain regional resilience. The proposed three-pillar model provides a structural lens for interpreting such changes. For China, where higher education faces slowed growth and demographic transition, these findings are highly relevant. Suburban university towns face the risk of under-use, while urban campuses must balance scarcity with public engagement. Japanese precedents suggest strategies of vertical compaction, boundary softening, and service-oriented integration can enhance publicness and urban alignment. Policymakers, meanwhile, should design flexible regulations balancing equity and autonomy. Future research should incorporate quantitative tools such as GIS metrics, user surveys, and cross-national comparison to further validate the three-pillar model and refine its applicability. Ultimately, campus landscapes must be understood not as passive backdrops but as active instruments in reshaping campus – city relations in an era of demographic and urban transformation.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
ObjectiveThe evolution of urban community governance in China has progressed through three distinct historical phases: The danwei (work unit) system under planned economy, the neighborhood committee system during market reform, and the current community-based governance model. These institutional transformations have fundamentally reshaped social relationship patterns, eroding traditional kinship-based connections and resulting in fragmented community networks and a continuous decline in residents’ sense of belonging. In recent years, urban renewal strategies have shifted from singular focus on physical space renovation to integrated approaches that actively cultivate social capital — collective assets embedded in social networks, mutual trust, and shared behavioral norms. Across Chinese cities, green space development initiatives (particularly community gardens and urban agriculture programs) are increasingly positioned as dual-purpose interventions that bridge physical environment improvement with social relationship reconstruction, often serving as neutral grounds for conflict resolution and collective identity formation. While these projects demonstrate potential in enhancing community cohesion and resident well-being, persistent challenges exist regarding sustainable operation funding models , quantifiable social outcomes, and equitable access across socioeconomic groups. Under China’s precision governance paradigm emphasizing data-driven policymaking, this research systematically investigates the operational mechanisms through which community green spaces inspire social capital, incorporating both grassroots practices and institutional innovations, based on which evidence-based optimization strategies for urban renewal practices are proposed.MethodsThis research combines visual mapping analysis based on CitieSpace software with a number of inductive and deductive review methods. The process involves three main stages. The first stage uses CitieSpace to analyze global research patterns by studying countries with largest research output and tracking changes in key research topics over time. The second stage carefully examines existing research to identify common research methods, areas of agreement among scholars, and ongoing debates in the field. The third stage creates a focused collection of studies that specifically explore how green spaces create social benefits, with a focus on the following three aspects: How people connect socially, how trust develops between community members, and how shared community rules form. For the data collection phase, English-language articles published between January 2000 and October 2023 are gathered from the Web of Science database using search terms related to social connections and green spaces. The search strategy is TS = (“social capital*” OR “social network”) AND (“green space*” OR “garden” OR “park”). The research selects 63 articles that clearly link green spaces to community social benefits after removing duplicate entries and unrelated research. After a thorough evaluation, the research selects 32 articles specifically explaining how green spaces foster social connections for final analysis.ResultsGeographical distribution analysis reveals concentrated research output from Western countries: The United States contributes 22 studies (34.9%), followed by Canada (8), Australia (5), and the United Kingdom (4), collectively representing 72% of total publications. Temporal keyword evolution identifies three developmental stages: The early phase (2000–2010) emphasized macro-level urban green infrastructure planning and public health outcomes; the middle phase (2010–2018) shifted focus to micro-level community gardens as mental health interventions and food security solutions; the current phase (post-2018) explores multifunctional green spaces as social capital incubators within precision governance frameworks. Researchers generally agree on four main findings. First, green spaces act as important gathering places that encourage social interaction. Second, the interaction of social networks, trust, and norms is facilitated by social interactions in green spaces. Third, higher quality green spaces tend to support stronger community relationships. Fourth, how people perceive and experience these spaces matters more than their physical characteristics alone. However, debates continue about whether the social benefits created in green spaces spread to other parts of the community and whether they reach all community groups equally.ConclusionThe research identifies three primary ways community green spaces help build social connections. The first involves creating different types of social networks — strengthening bonds among similar groups, building bridges between different groups, and connecting people across social levels. The second focuses on developing trust through safer spaces and neighborly cooperation. The third centers on turning shared experiences in green spaces into formal community guidelines that guide how spaces are planned, used, and maintained. Building on these findings and considering current practices in Chinese community projects, three key recommendations emerge. The first suggests combining local community resources with outside support to create networks of shared interest. The second proposes starting with small-scale green space projects to build trust and maintain community engagement over time. The third emphasizes involving residents directly in managing green spaces to turn collective experiences into established community practices. These strategies aim to help communities better integrate social connection-building into green space development efforts while addressing ongoing challenges in project sustainability and effectiveness. Three prospective research directions are proposed based on the deficiencies and trends in international research: Enhancing the mechanisms through which green spaces cultivate social capital, identifying critical factors that affect social capital to guide the augmentation of the social impact of community green spaces; examining the disparities in green space requirements among various demographics; and investigating community governance strategies informed by green space interventions. Owing to regional disparities, pertinent research must be integrated with the current circumstances of community revitalization and governance in China, tackling genuine challenges and prospective development objectives.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Leopoldo Sdino, Francesca Torrieri, Marta Dell'Ovo
et al.
Considering the growing importance and widespread adoption of temporary approaches to urban transformations, the paper deals with the open research challenge of understanding the economic impacts of tactical urban interventions. Moving from a literature review on the impacts of urban regeneration projects, it proposes an investigation approach from a local economy growth perspective. This approach is applied to the “Piazze Aperte” programme, which was implemented by the municipality of Milan in 2018. Its preliminary results return a possible positive contribution of tactical urban experiences on the reference neighbourhoods’ business dynamics. It seems to unfold about the different neighbourhoods’ specificities and the intervention area’s urban morphology.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
La inteligencia artificial (IA) se ha consolidado como una de las fuerzas tecnológicas más influyentes del siglo XXI, transformando radicalmente disciplinas como la arquitectura. Este artículo plantea una retrospectiva del uso de la retícula de Villard de Honnecourt como herramienta geométrica tradicional que, al integrarse con algoritmos generativos y modelos de aprendizaje automático, adquiere nuevas dimensiones interpretativas y proyectuales. A través de un análisis interdisciplinario que abarca desde la historia del arte hasta las metodologías contemporáneas de diseño asistido por IA, se exploran las implicaciones éticas, técnicas y creativas del uso de esta retícula en entornos académicos y profesionales. La investigación, apoyada en estudios de caso desarrollados en la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, propone una lectura crítica del legado geométrico medieval adaptado a las exigencias del diseño computacional en áreas educativas enfocadas al aprendizaje teórico e histórico de la arquitectura. A la par, se establece un puente entre las transformaciones tecnológicas y los principios clásicos de proporción, orden y belleza, delineando una ruta para el uso responsable e innovador de la IA en arquitectura.
This research delves into the critical role of architectural design in fostering well-being by tackling the widespread issues of chronic fatigue and burnout. In our fast-paced and demanding world, the adverse effects of prolonged stress and exhaustion are becoming more prevalent, leading to decreased productivity, impaired health, and a lower quality of life. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach that includes architecture, psychology, and health sciences, this study explores how thoughtful design interventions can create environments conducive to mental and physical rejuvenation. By enhancing connections between indoor spaces and the natural environment, optimizing environmental quality, and integrating user- centered design strategies, architects can reduce stress, improve relaxation, and promote overall well-being. Drawing from neuroscience, environmental psychology, and occupational health, architects can develop evidence-based design solutions that emphasize human flourishing.
It all started with the plastic chair, it is often found in Beirut’s urban settings without ever really being questioned. Inside the house, it’s an object you sit on. On the street, it prohibits parking. Like an unspoken and untaught language, everyone knows that if there’s a chair, you can’t park. Thinking about this specific urban phenomenon, it was about seeking instances in which the city creates solutions for itself. This collection of informalities formed a popular visual language worth being thought of, challenging the conventional ways we think of our own city. The plastic chair, the wheel, the concrete block, the fruit basket; those are a few ingredients of a creative recipe made of available, low-cost and repurposed materials, patched by a sense of utility. By considering those social occurrences, we attempt to reconsider our own cultural landscape, and by actually looking, we realize they are reflections of our times, struggles and daily obstacles. As urban artifacts, their whole is greater than the sum of their parts. The Beirut Street Museum is a conceptual museum that resists conventional forms of art and dismantles the exclusivity of museology. It operates on the ground, where every city walk becomes a museum walk. Rooted in concepts of the dérive, situationism and deconstructing museology, the BSM speaks the language of the street. It becomes a growing archive of collective evidence: people's marks on the space that surrounds them.
Architectural drawing and design, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Understanding 2D computer-aided design (CAD) drawings plays a crucial role for creating 3D prototypes in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industries. The task of automated panoptic symbol spotting, i.e., to spot and parse both countable object instances (windows, doors, tables, etc.) and uncountable stuff (wall, railing, etc.) from CAD drawings, has recently drawn interests from the computer vision community. Unfortunately, the highly irregular ordering and orientations set major roadblocks for this task. Existing methods, based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and/or graph neural networks (GNNs), regress instance bounding boxes in the pixel domain and then convert the predictions into symbols. In this paper, we present a novel framework named CAD Transformer, that can painlessly modify existing vision transformer (ViT) backbones to tackle the above limitations for the panoptic symbol spotting task. CADTransformer tokenizes directly from the set of graphical primitives in CAD drawings, and correspondingly optimizes line-grained semantic and instance symbol spotting altogether by a pair of prediction heads. The backbone is further enhanced with a few plug-and-play modifications, including a neighborhood aware self-attention, hierarchical feature aggregation, and graphic entity position encoding, to bake in the structure prior while optimizing the efficiency. Besides, a new data augmentation method, termed Random Layer, is proposed by the layer-wise separation and recombination of a CAD drawing. Overall, CADTransformer significantly boosts the previous state-of-the-art from 0.595 to 0.685 in the panoptic quality (PQ) metric, on the recently released FloorPlanCAD dataset. We further demonstrate that our model can spot symbols with irregular shapes and arbitrary orientations. Our codes are available in https://github.com/VITA-Group/CADTransformer.
Writing or sketching on whiteboards is an essential part of collaborative discussions in business meetings, reading groups, design sessions, and interviews. However, prior work in collaborative virtual reality (VR) systems has rarely explored the design space of multi-user layouts and interaction modes with virtual whiteboards. In this paper, we present CollaboVR, a reconfigurable framework for both co-located and geographically dispersed multi-user communication in VR. Our system unleashes users’ creativity by sharing freehand drawings, converting 2D sketches into 3D models, and generating procedural animations in real-time. To minimize the computational expense for VR clients, we leverage a cloud architecture in which the computational expensive application (Chalktalk) is hosted directly on the servers, with results being simultaneously streamed to clients. We have explored three custom layouts – integrated, mirrored, and projective – to reduce visual clutter, increase eye contact, or adapt different use cases. To evaluate CollaboVR, we conducted a within-subject user study with 12 participants. Our findings reveal that users appreciate the custom configurations and real-time interactions provided by CollaboVR. We have open sourced CollaboVR at https://github.com/snowymo/CollaboVR to facilitate future research and development of natural user interfaces and real-time collaborative systems in virtual and augmented reality.
In this paper, we tackle for the first time, the problem of self-supervised representation learning for free-hand sketches. This importantly addresses a common problem faced by the sketch community – that annotated supervisory data are difficult to obtain. This problem is very challenging in which sketches are highly abstract and subject to different drawing styles, making existing solutions tailored for photos unsuitable. Key for the success of our self-supervised learning paradigm lies with our sketch-specific designs: (i) we propose a set of pretext tasks specifically designed for sketches that mimic different drawing styles, and (ii) we further exploit the use of the textual convolution network (TCN) together with the convolutional neural network (CNN) in a dual-branch architecture for sketch feature learning, as means to accommodate the sequential stroke nature of sketches. We demonstrate the superiority of our sketch-specific designs through two sketch-related applications (retrieval and recognition) on a million-scale sketch dataset, and show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised representation learning methods, and significantly narrows the performance gap between with supervised representation learning.11PyTorch code of this work is available at https://github.com/zzz1515151/self-supervised_learning_sketch.
The circular economy applied to the urban context is linked to sustainability objectives focused on environmental performances overlooking socio-political implications, in order to achieve a circular balance within the neoliberal paradigm of business-nature-society in a continuous growth scenario. This paper discusses this criticality, articulating a counter perspective based on the debate of degrowth, circularity and technology through the analysis of three cases of socio-technical assemblages: Transition Towns; Repair Cafes; Community Gardens. The research individuates the effectiveness of urban practices in which the circularity is implemented beyond purely economic interactions or eco-efficiency parameters, defining the potentialities of a degrowing circular city based on inclusiveness, social justice and reciprocity.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
The work of the Fondation des Monastères is to help communities solve legal , property, and other issues. The matter of the closure of some monasteries has become very important in recent times. The Foundation aims to help in all fields: canonical, civil, property, and it also provides support to the people.
Architectural drawing and design, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
AbstractThe notion of the ‘paracosm’ is a useful one for architects to understand. Some of the best writers and designers often work within personal, modelled imaginary worlds, sometimes constructed over decades, enabling them to give birth to their narrative scenarios and spaces. Here, Guest‐Editor Mark Morris looks at various literary and architectural paracosmic precedents.
In the past, digital technology did play an important role in architecture industry through design process and architectural construction with digital content constraint under boundary between digital world & analog world (physical or real world). Today, the actually extension of technologies offer the methods of computation that have disrupted the boundary between digital and physical content. The role of digital computation has become the new convention in generating architectural drawing and modeling in both academia and practice. The process of working from digital computation has created a paradigm shift in architectural pedagogy and methods of teaching architectural presentation.