Dark Roasted Blend has a big round-up of trippy architectural visions of future cities. Here are some highlights:

Luc Schuiten’s Vegetal City

The Walking City by Archigram, an old favorite of mine.

‘Shroom City, by Frederic St. Arnaud

There are many more at Dark Roasted Blend: Hallucinatory Architecture of the Future

(Thanks Trevor!)

Acres of vacant land are eyed for urban agriculture under an ambitious plan that aims to turn the struggling Rust Belt city into a green mecca.

Reporting from Detroit – On the city’s east side, where auto workers once assembled cars by the millions, nature is taking back the land.

Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.

This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland. [...]

It is the size and scope of Hantz Farms that makes the project unique. Although company officials declined to pinpoint how many acres they might use, they have been quoted as saying that they plan to farm up to 5,000 acres within the Motor City’s limits in the coming years, raising organic lettuces, trees for biofuel and a variety of other things.

LA Times: Investors see farms as way to grow Detroit

(via Brainsturbator)

This article on the recent Suburbia exhibition at the London Transport Museum takes a brief look at the history of suburbia:

Rather than some authentic, uncomplicated, unplanned response to ordinary people’s desires, London’s suburbia was the product of both planning and speculation, heavily mediated, and marketed using an impressive degree of subterfuge. The garden suburb was the official face of suburbia. Developed in 1907 by Toynbee Hall’s chair, Henrietta Barnett, and carefully planned by the socialist and architectural traditionalist Raymond Unwin, it attempted to build William Morris’s socialist “nowhere” in a capitalist context. Unwin and his partner Barry Parker developed a style based on whitewash, pitched roofs and large gardens. This became the basis for its many successors. Yet it was also tightly planned and full of public spaces to encourage social interaction. In the same year, the London Underground opened Golders Green station, and promoted its rural joys in an advertisement campaign, as a means of selling season tickets. Golders Green was enveloped by new, unplanned housing, although the Underground’s posters invariably depicted Hampstead Garden Suburb.

The exhibition alludes to the fact that London’s private transport companies were the sponsors and often the creators of suburbia, extending their lines into open country, promoting the glories of the countryside, and then developing it out of existence.

Guardian: Suburbia explored

(via Tomorrow Museum)

On Sunday morning, 40,000 people will run, walk and wheel their way 26.2 miles through New York’s five boroughs in a whirlwind tour of the city at its most festive. My personal marathon, restricted to the long rectangle created by Baltic and Warren Streets and Fourth and Fifth Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn, offered something more subtle: a glimpse at a day in the life of my neighborhood.

The idea came to me on my umpteenth walk with Barnaby, a basset hound with a trace of beagle that we adopted from a shelter in June. Somehow, the thought “This is pathetic — I’m walking miles every day without getting anywhere” morphed into “What if we kept walking — without going anywhere? Wouldn’t that be kind of cool?”

Suddenly, the dutiful, oddly agrarian-feeling urban activity of escorting an animal outdoors for nature’s call took on the urgency of adventure. With the hound as social lubricant, I would immerse myself in the quotidian rhythms and stutter-steps of the block, watching its lives intersect or sometimes — it’s a neighborly block, but this is New York City, after all — float by one another without acknowledgment.

New York Times: Block-a-Thon

(via Eva)

These days the only things that land on Hashima Island are the shits of passing seagulls. An hour or so’s sail from the port of Nagasaki, the abandoned island silently crumbles. A former coal mining facility owned by Mitsubishi Motors, it was once the most densely populated place on earth, packing over 13,000 people into each square kilometre of its residential high-risers. It operated from 1887 until 1974, after which the coal industry fell into decline and the mines were shut for good. With their jobs gone and no other reason to stay in this mini urban nightmare, almost overnight the entire population fled back to the mainland, leaving most of their stuff behind to rot.

Today it is illegal to go anywhere near the place as it’s beyond restoration and totally unsafe. The Japanese Government aren’t keen to draw unwanted attention to this testament to the hardship of the country’s post-war industrial revolution either.

The punishment for being caught visiting Hashima Island is 30 days in prison followed by immediate deportation. But the other week, after getting up before sunrise and cutting a secret deal with a local fisherman, some friends and I landed on Hashima Island.

Vice: Battleship Island – Japan’s rotting metropolis

(via The Agitator)

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

Telegraph: US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive

Previously: Parts of Flint May Go Feral

Property abandonment is getting so bad in Flint that some in government are talking about an extreme measure that was once unthinkable — shutting down portions of the city, officially abandoning them and cutting off police and fire service.

Temporary Mayor Michael Brown made the off-the-cuff suggestion Friday in response to a question at a Rotary Club of Flint luncheon about the thousands of empty houses in Flint.

Brown said that as more people abandon homes, eating away at the city’s tax base and creating more blight, the city might need to examine “shutting down quadrants of the city where we (wouldn’t) provide services.” [...]

City Council President Jim Ananich said the idea has been on his radar for years.

The city is getting smaller and should downsize its services accordingly by asking people to leave sparsely populated areas, he said.

Full Story: Mlive

(via Cryptogon)

See also:

Feral cities – The New Strategic Environment

Update: See US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive