Urban Planning Blog

Flickr is a smorgasbord of amazing and brilliant photo collections from around the world. The Graduate Degree Blog collects 100 sets for architecture buffs.

Beautiful pictures from the collections in the Earth Observatory. These images were taken from many different satellites and astronaut missions. You can see evidence of climate change and nature of human settlement especially in the images of a Las Vegas suburb and South of Khartoum, Sudan.

The extent of the spillage of an estimated 1 billion gallons of sludge containing years’ of waste from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal-burning power plant over an area of 300 acres cannot be better described than these pictures taken by Dorothy Griffith.

The entire region is a brownfield and I wonder how many years, resources, and money will it take to clean it all up. I wonder if anyone will be held accountable.

Scenic views are underestimated in home designs. Check out images of homes that make full use of the scenic views around them.

Continuing on our theme of abandonment, photographer Craig Ferguson features images of an abandoned hotel/housing development in the small town of San-zhr on the north coast of Taiwan. If you are bemused by the pod-like structures, Craig heightens our interest by narrating the ghost myths that surround these strange-looking structures. I wonder how much does such myths influence abandonment of otherwise perfectly safe and livable structures? Can such settlements be saved in the future?

Abandonment especially abrupt always fascinates us; just like those abandoned cities in 28 Days Later or I am Legend. Apart from the ghost towns of the West, we also have the ghost offices from our changing economy as captured by photographer Philip Toledano.

The above image is the winning entry in the Space Settlement Calendar Art Contest. More here.

Trailer homes always have had a bad rap in architecture. But recent innovations especially with respect to post-disaster emergency housing has led to some beautiful and innovative creations.

Doesn’t this image explain much of the conflict in the world today? [click to enlarge]

Believe it or not, this is a fully functional house. You can see more images and walk through video here.

Admittedly, it is the people that make a city but nevertheless, ghost towns can be hauntingly beautiful too.

This is not a model but in fact, just a new way of capturing images. We used to shoot building models to make them look like the real thing. This is just reversing that trend. If nothing, they look really cool. More such images here.

Shake hands?

The house that Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the former president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu-Dhabi built. He even has a silver (the metal, not color) Audi [click link for pics].

Shades of Grey [via]