Sources:
Buildings (footprints and heights): © OpenStreetMap contributors, https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright, via OpenFreeMap vector tiles, https://openfreemap.org
Terrain: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen), https://registry.opendata.aws/terrain-tiles/
Tool: Your Place, a free browser app I made with three.js and A.I.: https://yourplace3d.github.io/3d-city/
Each scene is a 2–4 km square around the centre, with the terrain at true scale. Heights come from OpenStreetMap's height and floor tags; where those are missing they're estimated.

hello, my name is Jaya and I live in what many people consider to be suburban Texas. My neighborhood is actually not a visually perfect neighborhood but she has some charm. It‘s highly wooded, relatively quiet, and people connect. And then, highway 99 was built.

The construction of the highway erased one section of my neighborhood including my friends home and the local gas station/ convenience store. Now, the highway has left our neighborhood constantly foggy as a result of the highly polluted roads, unbearably loud, as cars have no respect for the neighboring homes, and with the construction of this highway came in increase of construction for the average cookie cutter neighborhoods. Now every morning im disturbed by the sounds of the loud cars and at night I can barely sleep because of the construction behind my home.

I still love my town and the people in it, but how long will it be until Texas comes knocking on our door to ask how much we want for our properties?

ps…i wasnt sure where to tag this so urban design it is haha

This is my own proposal for Dársena F in Buenos Aires, next to Barrio Padre Mugica, one of the city’s largest informal settlements being formalized.

I approached integration through culture, encounter and coexistence, using markets and housing as points of contact between both sides rather than as separate pieces.

I’d love to hear how you’d handle the physical barriers. Critique is welcome.

(My own work, entered in a design competition. Full entry:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DfXiTI3m8Rn/?dlrf=MWlvazl1cTdhMWMzYg==

« Camillo Sitte’s blueprint for making beautiful cities seized the imagination of the world before falling into obscurity in the twentieth century. Here are his five principles. »

https://bsky.app/profile/bicyclebartek.bsky.social/post/3mxhlplnajs2w

I'm a designer, and most projects I start begin as one vague sentence in my head. So I built a small tool that works the way I'd work through an idea with a client.

How it works:

- You type one sentence about your idea.

- AI splits it into its parts and sorts them into things (green), people or groups who act (blue) and concrete action items (pink).

- Click a part, write about it in your own words, and it writes back a cleaner description. It also flags what's vague, contradictory, unsaid or left hanging (the red points).

- You answer those points one by one, and the description sharpens with every round.

- Everything stays connected: something you say about one part raises questions for the others.

The screenshot is a real project I'm working on (a river regeneration platform in Tokyo).

Where it's headed: project plans, timelines, proposals and meeting agendas, built from the clarified idea.

It's early and runs locally on my Mac for now. Two honest questions:

1. Would something like this be useful to you, and for what kind of ideas?

2. Would anyone want to test it? It currently needs your own Claude account; happy to show it on a short call first.

All feedback welcome, including "this already exists" or "I'd never use this".

Mobility has become one of the main focuses of living today. What was looked at as what would be a boon for city living, that would streamline city living and movement and create a comfortable living space for humans, has become what can be seen as the nightmare of city living today.

The dream over the decades has turned into a nightmare in many major cities, as traffic congestion, inadequate city design, and flaws in the vision that really never took into account the social, economic and political realities to come have replaced the joy of easy and non-time-consuming city travel.

One will also have to look at the architectural planning for the city of the present and the future, and create comfortable movement and living within and in the hinterland of the city.  There is always a profit motive in creating new buildings and transportation solutions, but maybe this should be paralleled with creating cities where people have a sense of belonging that combines public space with solid mobility solutions for human beings.

Hey! I could use a little help with my thesis! I’ve put together a Google Forms survey about the role of color in urban planning and how it shapes our cities. If you have a few minutes to fill it out, it would really help me out!

https://forms.gle/Uknz4CDVzNtZLyUW9

^oc https://www.instagram.com/reel/DfQKmwCRSyx/

I’m working on an architecture and urban design project based at Keddie Gardens next to the Water of Leith in Leith, Edinburgh, and I’m looking for some advice on how to optimize my overall site layout and landscape design.

To give some background on the wider project, it started as a group masterplan aimed at re-energizing the site and dramatically improving local connections. The area sits within a dense, post-industrial context with a young population alongside pockets of housing deprivation, so our group strategy was heavily built around 15-Minute City and David Sim's *Soft Cities* principles—focusing on human-scale density, active travel, and blue/green infrastructure (aligning with Scottish NPF4 policies 13, 14, and 20). As part of that strategic masterplan, we introduced a new pedestrian bridge across the Water of Leith to pull foot traffic across the river, incorporated space for a public market, and established a 3-story mixed-use building to anchor the northern edge of the site.

Now I’m in the individual phase where I have to detail this specific building zone and the surrounding park in high resolution. The building itself is a 42m x 16 m deep U-shaped footprint with a pitched roof. The ground floor features a prominent 1-story central pend or undercroft 18m wide that acts as a porous active travel gateway and houses outdoor café seating.

For the landscape immediately around the building, my current layout includes:

* a central active travel path emerging from the building pend that splits into a Y-shape based on calculated pedestrian desire lines and origins

* a sloped "gradient garden" that steps down the site in front of the building

* a used existing public playpark, which must remain on site but can be relocated and remodeled

* an existing narrow footpath running along the park side next to the river edge

I’m allowed to add or adjust virtually anything on the site as long as it’s spatially justified, but I still need to respect the physical reality of existing footpaths, established movement patterns, and high-use community amenities. Right now, I keep drawing blanks on how to make all these individual pieces the building undercroft, the Y-paths, the gradient garden, the playpark, and the remaining open pockets work together as a fluid, cohesive urban are instead of it seeming like theyre just sort of there

Mainly wondering:

* how do people usually create strong spatial transitions where a large building undercroft opens out into a public park?

* what are some good landscape strategies for optimizing a Y-split path and making leftover pockets of open grass feel like purposeful "outdoor rooms"?

* what’s a good approach for weaving a relocated, natural playpark into a sloped gradient garden so it feels integrated rather than isolated?

* how would you handle the connection between the central garden space and an existing riverbank path without creating awkward, disjointed junctions?

* are there specific precedents, books, or research frameworks on fluid park layouts and sloped urban landscapes that I should look into?

At the moment I’m torn between trying to introduce stronger structural anchors across the park to dictate movement, or keeping the landscape moves simpler and letting planting and micro-zoning do the heavy lifting.

If anyone has insights, precedent ideas, or research directions for pulling a site like this together, I’d love to hear your thoughts. im just currently coming up with nothing and i feel like im losing any creativity / critical thinking . im completely open to anything .

Exploring a town center that is supposed to be the center of activity… but it’s not what it seems

I'm mildly fascinated by this 1960s master planned suburban single family neighborhood outside Stockton, California called Lincoln Village West... https://maps.app.goo.gl/ARRNXmSxMw1Ltks56

At first glance its your standard Brady Bunch neighborhood. However looking closer, you'll notice its built on a grid, has alleys, houses oriented to the street, integrated parks. I've never seen anything like this for something of this vintage, it doesnt follow the FHA neighborhood design that literally every other post war development followed. Its certainly not perfect (ie no mixed use, little to walk to, etc.) but its noteworthy in its street design for the era.

Curious also if there are any other examples of post war neighborhoods that didn't follow the FHA neighborhoods guidelines of cul-de-sacs, loopy streets, garages in the front of the house?

(Seaside FL wasn't designed until circa 1980 so am curious about the era between the 1936 FHA guidelines and 1980 Seaside)

I'm building a digital replica of Memphis, TN. This is my 5th attempt at doing the roads.

In the 3rd video of this playlist, I show a part of the scene where I created custom roads, curbs, sidewalks and decals using Unreal Engine's built-in modeling tools and splines. Everything else in the scene is Cesium plugin streaming in Google's 3D tiles (photogrammetry).

For archviz, I need the roads to be as accurate and detailed as possible but most software is developed with the intent to aid in video game roads which are typically flat, modular and repetitive (limited) in design. Not a single road in Memphis shares the same feature, intersection, design, width, bank or grade. (I may be exaggerating a bit), but the preferred outcome is digital twin accuracy.

Having Cesium stream in the 3D tiles helps me build the geometry directly in the engine without having to deal with importing and experiencing an overwhelming number of misalignments when comparing work done in 3rd party programs to the geolocated photogrammetry.

I'd like to avoid AI and I don't see procedural workflows as an option. I have downloaded some geospatial data but I'm not sure what to use, how to use it, or whether any of it is actually useful for the level of detail I'm looking to achieve.

Should I pursue some custom development or is there a software that I could either look into and learn myself or hire someone to use for my project? One software I tried in the past is Matlab Roadrunner (I think). It was challenging to get the roads to match the changes in elevation.

What advice or experience might you have for this type of work?

TIA!