Adam Yamaguchi, reporter on current.com, travels around the globe and features videos and texts about the changing of the world we live in. Empowered by the world’s leading peer-to-peer news and information network, current.com, he produced an excellent film about Chongqing. This new mega-city in China’s mainland is rapidly growing to be one of the largest cities of the world soon. You can watch that movie right here on PerfectCity now by clicking on the play button:

China is building megacities like this at a pace and scale the world has never seen before. Chongqing has 12 million people and counting. It’s part of the central government’s plan to bring some of China’s economic boom to its impoverished interior province where three out of four Chinese live. Vanguard takes you on a whirlwind tour of the city—from inside a cramped boarding house where migrant workers to inside a starter apartment of China’s new class of yuppies; from inside ancient, crumbling teahouses to gleaming new car factories.

Source: current.com

The current PerfectCity Charter poll is on leisure and the cultural life of a city. With the following article we want to support this issue before we will start a new issue within the next days. The work of thinkers and authors such as Charles Laundry (The Creative City – A toolkit for urban innovators) and Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) has raised the profile of creativity and culture as powerful new drivers in building local economies and strengthening quality of life. And of course, this concept also fits cities – creative cities!

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The thesis project “Stack City” by Behrang Behin explores the potential for new forms of urbanism within the framework of a zero-carbon new city in the United Arab Emirates. The project employs the stack effect to moderate the temperature of the city, and to provide for some of its energy needs. Already a successful engineer-entrepreneur when he decided to study architecture, Behin uses his strong understanding of technology to enter the problem of the zero carbon city from a pragmatic point of view, but ends up asking us whether we’re ready to re-engage utopia.

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After our second year, it is time for a review. The basic idea behind this blog is, since the world’s urban population has exceeded the rural population with every second inhabitant living in a city, sustainable urban city planning is one of the biggest challenges of our time. For that reason, Eurohypo AG initiated PerfectCity.net to support international open dialogue, discussion and the exchange of ideas, opinions and visions – PerfectCity.net stands for discussions about the future of our cities.

Since October 2006, people from 5558 cities from 159 countries of the world have been taking interest in these discussions. And in addition to the experts who have given very valuable insights and input, many readers from diverse international locations participated actively and took the chance to publish their own article or interview. We would like to thank you for your active and valuable contribution for the discussion about the future of our cities!

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CCTV, China or Chinese Central Television, has teamed up with OMA architects to build a new headquarter and the building is currently under construction in Peking. Groundbreaking took place on September 22, 2004. The building will be completed in December 2008.

Famous architects Rem Koolhas and Ole Scheeren of Office for Metropolitan Architecture are the architects for the building,

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On Dubai Architecture, a database of Dubai architectural styles, architects and regions, you can find a great compilation of the architectural projects of the last 18 years.

At first, please have a look at the development of the buildings and streets.

It is stunning how a street, which looked like desert land in 1990, completely change within 18 years.

On the website you find a list of projects that have been built within the last five years or are currently in progress:

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The Port Authority of New York, New Jersey, and Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava have released revised renderings of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub.

The old station was destroyed during the September 11, 2001 attacks. After a temporary station was built in November 2003, works for the new hub officially began in September 2005. By mid-2014, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub will be the third-largest transportation centers in New York.

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Nuit Blanche is an annual all-night cultural festival. The festival lasts from sundown until sunrise on the first Saturday and Sunday in October and has, since its premiere in Paris 2002, spread to many other cities internationally, including Brussels, Chicago, Toronto and many more.

During this festival, an interesting project came to light in Toronto this year – an installation called Stereoscope. Stereoscope is an interactive light installation at Toronto City Hall. This installation by the German group Project Blinkenlights transforms the landmark towers into a huge display screen by arranging lamps behind each of the 960 windows of the building. From October 4th – October 12th, 2008 (from dusk till dawn) the façade served as an ever-changing and evolving kaleidoscope of graphic animations automatically generated. Through a variety of interfaces including smartphones, the web and physical controllers located at Nathan Phillips Square, the public could influence the installation. In other words the City Hall’s windows were turned to pixels to create a giant interactive LED display.

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One of our readers advised us of an essay by Dan Hill. Dan Hill is a senior consultant at the renowned and highly innovative engineering firm Arup. Prior to that, he was the director of web and broadcast at Monocle and the head of interactive technology and design at the BBC.

The essay is on recent ideas around urban informatics and urban information design, the impact of real-time data and collaborative planning on urban form, and most of all the changing role and new empowerment of people living in these cities. According to Hill, the essay is on cities as a user interface for governance, in which citizens play an intrinsic role.

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