City of Toronto Urban Design Awards

From the forward — The Toronto Urban Design Awards present an opportunity every other year to pause, take stock and recognize the work we are doing, collectively, to create a great city. The city, after all, is expressed and emerges in the places and spaces that we experience and share in common, and the way we design these places has the potential to enhance our connectedness to each other, to both the past and the future, and to the environments that sustain us. When we get urban design right, the massing, placement, and detail of our buildings enhances the public realm and both enables and enlivens our experience of the city as pedestrians. 

Jury Report PDF here.

From landarchs.com —Top 10 Imaginative Squares

So far, LAN has presented the Top 10 squares of the world in a more traditional sense and the Top 10 modern squares in the form of urban plazas. In many ways, these are the most famous of their typology. Here, a few that challenge the notion of what a public square can be. More at Top 10 Imaginative Squares

From CBC Radio Ideas — Cornelia Hahn OberlanderThe Grande Dame of Green Design

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is this country's pre-eminent landscape architect. Her love of nature and respect for the environment has guided and inspired her work from the grounds of the National Gallery in Ottawa to the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. IDEAS producer Yvonne Gall profiles the 91-year-old icon, whose career spans six decades and is still going strong.

More at The Grande Dame of Green Design - Ideas - CBC Player

podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/ideas_20121108_44056.mp3

"Madrid Río" — How Madrid Reclaimed The Banks of the Manzanares River

The city of Madrid dug 43 kilometres of tunnels into which the exit routes and motorways of the six-kilometre section along the River Manzanares disappeared...

More at: http://www.west8.com/projects/all/madrid_rio/

MoMA Symposium — The Child in the City of Play

The Child in the City of Play, Session 1

The Child in the City of Play, Session 2

Symposium details at: MoMA | The Child in the City of Play
MoMA exhibition: MoMA | Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Botanist Patrick Blanc ― Creator of the Vertical Garden

Frank Murphy photo.

Patrick Blanc, botanist, creator of the vertical garden. Pictured, his work at the Caixa Forum, Madrid.

http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/#/en/home