Articles by Kaley Overstreet

The development of cities has historically been a slow-moving process. In the everchanging urban landscape that faces the pushes and pulls of a variety of social, economic, and financial factors, it’s been hard to pinpoint just one main reason over another why each city has evolved over time into the way that we experience it today. And as designers and planners speculate about what the future of our cities should be, sometimes the reason that our cities look and operate in the way that they do has come down to a few famous battles between individuals with competing schools of thought.

Migration across towns, cities, states, countries, and continents is part of everyday life. As we move to seek out new opportunities in our personal and professional lives, our individual choices actually have greater impacts on the large, highly-interconnected socio-economical systems around the globe. Moving from a small farm town into a major metropolis, or from one continent to another comes with more implications than you may think- and architecture, paired with the concept of “Brain Drain”, might be helping to pull the strings behind the scenes, influencing you to go from one place to the next.

Shopping malls and retail centers are dead- or so they say. Although much of how we shop was put on pause by the COVID-19 pandemic, and we experienced the surge in e-commerce focused purchases, some of your favorite stores are faced with reimagining themselves in a new way. As the pressure for high-density housing continues to rise, and big-box centers and shopping malls are left empty, is there a way that the place where you once purchased a new outfit could be transformed into your next apartment?

The average age of a home in Cuba is just over 75 years old, and three of them collapse every day. Cuba’s housing crisis is perhaps one of the most unique examples of urban inequity in the world. While the island nation’s extensive history of waves of foreign influence has largely shaped their government, and in turn their public policies and urban planning strategies, they yet have been able to stabilize their long-standing housing crisis- forcing thousands of Cubans to live in derelict homes or public shelters. Now, many questions are being raised about how they will build new housing, repair the existing structures, and revise laws that allow Cubans to have more autonomy in the homeownership process.

Our lives in urban centers have been completely upended over the last 16 months. As we look into the near future, some of us begin to experience the call back into our workplaces and experience the awakening of a long slumber of cities, it’s without a doubt that life as we knew it will never be the same. While some on the extreme end have been asking “will we even need cities?” (to which the answer is a very definite yes), how will cities change if we continue to move forward in this digital era of work and life that was accelerated by the pandemic?

The discussion around how we plan the cities we want to live in is a never-ending conversation. As our world experiences shifts that impact urban designs in both predictable and unpredictable ways, some principals have held true- that cities that rely less on private transportation, create walkable neighborhoods, boast a multitude of public parks and spaces, and are designed at a more human scale tend to be favored and well-recieved by the people who inhabit them. Enter the concept of New Urbanism. Backed by these ideologies with a modern spin on is how they might apply to our 21st-century lifestyles, New Urbanism a planning strategy that has been both praised and critiqued since its implementation.

What does it take to build a smart city from nothing? Or maybe the better question is, what does it take to build a smart city from nothing and make it successful? For over a decade, architects and urban planners worked hand in hand to create Songdo, a brand new business district that sought to represent South Korean advancements in technology and infrastructure. Songdo was once a model for how we would live in cities of the future- but now, the reality of what this smart city quickly became has us rethinking how the combination of technology and community might have gone wrong.

Architecture and automation are two concepts that in the modern era of design and technological advancements go hand in hand- or do they? On one end, there’s a slight fear that “robots will replace designers”, making the profession more automated, and less creative. On the other, technology has made the practice of architecture more efficient in terms of process and cost. How far will technology take us, and will your job ever be lost to technology? The short answer is, probably not.

Almost 500,000 buildings have arrived at the Port of Los Angeles this year. Well- not exactly. Over 490,000 shipping containers have arrived, though. If there’s a design trend that has caught the world by storm over the past decade, it’s been the rise in transforming shipping containers into buildings as a form of architecture. But are shipping container buildings just a fad that was used to propel ideas about taking every day or is there more substance to creating giant Jenga-inspired structures?

Design can sometimes be mundane- except when it’s novelty architecture. These buildings uniquely and identifiably break away from the abstract, metaphorical, and often monotonous buildings that have classified modern-day design. Instead of favoring the steel and glass skyscrapers that serve as landmarks in cities around the world, they aim to poke fun at architecture in a way that’s jovial, commercial, and perhaps slightly more functional and expressive. Unlike other buildings, they are the literal embodiment of a thing itself, putting its function widely on display instead of hiding it within four austere walls.