Who’s afraid of the Buenos Aires’ new popular habitat act? The answer: everyone. The recently enacted law of the Buenos Aires province proposes a compact, dense, diverse, and accessible city, aiming to reorient the urban land market. This law is shaking the fundamentals of planning in a metropolitan area that to a great extent still [...]
The destruction of this house located on 30th Street between 55th and 56th in the city of La Plata, Argentina is a testimony of the history of the country. The destruction of the Mariani-Teruggi House involved personnel from the armed forces and police, using weapons of various calibers, shows us a clear example of the [...]
In 2010, Siemens and The Economist published the first reliable index ranking for green cities worldwide. Among many other indexes concerning this subject published in the past few years, this is the first one with a specific chapter for Latin America. The result of this index showed a phenomenon that was clear to everyone but [...]
Built Environment professionals, myself included, tend to focus on the latest trends concerning sustainability, smart growth, and recent technologies for construction. Many times we end up relegating historical preservation and everything concerning Built Heritage Conservation as a métier only for experienced professionals, who embark on these projects as a way of closing their careers, as [...]
The glazed facade building stands in contrast with the neighborhood in which it is located, an odd urban landscape built on an authentic wasteland lot of San Juan Street near the Buenos Aires’ Museum of Modern Art. Located in San Telmo, a strategic area in the City of Buenos Aires, this building unifies the two [...]
Buenos Aires has a saturated transportation system and, due to this factor, the population’s quality of life is on the decline. The main cause of this collapsing system is the disproportionate participation of the private car. The total amount of movement in the city via private car reaches almost forty percent of total movement per [...]
Work has been done to create “smart communities,” a concept which includes information technologies as indicators for future urban planning and development, but there is still some blurriness about what these transformations really intend to do. In a October 2007 report presented by Smart Cities in Europe, developed by the University of Ljubljana, Vienna University of Technology and Delft University [...]
Like many global cities, Buenos Aires has more than one airport serving the transportation needs of its citizens. But the main international airport Ezeiza, located almost forty miles from the city center, lacks many of the so-called “ground services” – a term used in Airport Planning for defining all of the economic movement surrounding airport [...]
It has been said many a time that Buenos Aires, Argentina is a port city that forgot it had a coastline. This can be felt in various parts of the city where access to the largest estuary in the world, the Río de la Plata, which completely surrounds Buenos Aires, is almost non-existent. But the [...]
Like many cities in Latin America, Buenos Aires has many barrios so different between them that on some occasions there appear to be small cities inside a city. Acknowledging this historical fact, and in an effort to de-centralize the functions of the City Government in this divergent city, the system of comunas was established. This [...]
CityCamp events are considered by many urban enthusiasts around the world as one of the best opportunities to meet different actors that work for the improvement of urban space. CityCamp evolved from its Buenos Aires edition into a larger, open-sourced community focused on promoting an exchange of experiences and establishing guidelines for coordinated work between [...]
The main slogan for this past August 29, 2012 event was “Towards the Buenos Aires of 2030;” and for now Megaciudades is the most important conference regarding Urban Planning and Sustainability taking place in the city on an annual basis. In its third year, the event was organized by the German-Argentine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, [...]
During the 1990’s, and this past decade, the urban sprawl of Greater Buenos Aires has responded diligently to the (worst) example of North American cities, making the expansion and low density of Los Angeles, just a mere competitor in the race for urban sprawl. Considering the rapid expansion experienced by the city the question is [...]
Museums have recently become a hallmark topic in the teaching of architecture, as many architecture schools tend to include several museum projects in their design studio curricula, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone since we live in an age of the museum as a paradigmatic architectural and cultural enterprise. With the increasing popularity of critical writing, [...]
During the year 2012 an unprecedented effort took place in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. For the first time a resource management and disposal plan, oriented towards sustainability, was created to change this South American city; the equivalent of the “Greening” process that many Latin American cities have been developing in the past two [...]
Urban Planning interventions on a grand scale are the most noticeable way of changing the face of a city and the quality of living for its inhabitants. Not policies, though urban planning depends greatly on politics. Nor the internal economics of the city, however influential. The Urban Design ventures are the ones that change the [...]
Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina is a massive metropolis of 14-million people, whose active population commutes, by the millions, daily, towards the main federal district from distances of 53 kms. (approximately 26-miles), mainly using the massive and 24-hour public transportation system of “Colectivos” with rates from 23-cents to $1.20. Impressive, huh? This may sound like a [...]
