Cities: How our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier
“Really? Richer, most people would accept, at least in terms of GDP generated. People living in cities generally are better educated, with most of the great universities of the world located in cities. Healthier, you can measure, and it is a fact that longevity is highest in the greatest urban agglomeration in the world, Tokyo.
Happier, might seem tougher to substantiate. But one of the most useful concepts in economics is “revealed preference” which, applied simply, means that you look at what people choose to do and start with the presumption that this is what makes them happier and that therefore you need to be cautious about any policy that resists the choices they make. People move to cities, that is, because they think they will have a better life.”
Review of Triumph of the City, by Edward Glaeser (Inde)
Vivian Maier, Untitled, 1954, New York
Roof Piece by Trisha Brown, 1973, placed dancers on Manhattan’s skyline, inviting them to move among the rooftop landscape of water tanks, chimneys and fire escapes above the streets of SoHo. From the exhibition: Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s, at the Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2, 2 March-22 May.
“New York in the 70s was Paris in the 20s,” Anderson has said. “We often worked on each other’s pieces and boundaries between art forms were loose.” The artists lived close to each other, illegally occupying the disused lofts.
“There was a confluence of ideas,” says the exhibition curator, Lydia Yee, “and everybody seemed to go out with everybody else at some point.”
In Mumbai, 19 people are killed each day in transport related accidents.
Photo essay at This Big City.
Rail renaissance in Lagos
‘Urban expansion is one of the biggest challenges facing Africa as people migrate from rural areas in search of a better life. With its cities set to triple in size over the next 40 years, overcrowded slums, choked roads and pollution are already big problems. It is hoped that a rail renaissance can be part of the solution.
Lagos’s EkoRail – Eko means Lagos in the Yoruba language – is the biggest public-private partnership in Lagos state and will eventually comprise seven railway lines, each costing more than $1bn (£630m). Two lines are already well advanced. The red will run north to south from Lagos island to Agbado through 13 stations. The blue will run 17 miles from the island to Okokomaiko in the middle of an expanded motorway. It is hoped the lines will carry 1.4 million passengers per day.
They will be powered by electricity rather than diesel but, with the national grid notoriously unreliable, EkoRail is building its own 30-40 MW power station, with excess power benefiting the motorway and local communities. The trains could begin test runs late next year.
Some veterans of Lagos’s go-slow traffic arteries have welcomed the new scheme. Tolu Ogunlesi, a journalist and author, would leave home at 5.45am to reach his office at 8am. “It’s not unusual to find Lagosians waking at 4am so they can be sure of getting to the office at eight,” he said. “It’s a crazy life.”’
Full article at the Guardian
“Street art has long been a part of Lisbon’s culture. Until the 18th century, there was a tradition of all-white buildings. After the earthquake of 1755, richer areas began to incorporate colour and tiles into walls and pavements. Early graffiti was perhaps the poor man’s equivalent. Following the democratic revolution in 1974, this self-expression increased. Now, tags and scribbles cover the streets.”
The Fragmented Metropolis
In the most provocative sections of his book The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (1967), Robert M. Fogelson argues ‘that the new arrivals who settled in Los Angeles in the decades just before and after 1900, many of them from the Midwestern United States, were deeply skeptical of urbanity and density and even believed that the detached single-family house was “morally superior” to the apartment building. For Fogelson, that skepticism kept the city divided into scores of autonomous low-rise neighborhoods, which in turn only deepened its fragmentation over time.
These new Angelenos arrived in California “with a conception of the good community which was embodied in single-family houses, located on large lots, surrounded by landscaped lawns, and isolated from business activities. Not for them multi-family dwellings, confined to narrow plots, separated by cluttered streets, and interspersed with commerce and industry. Their vision was epitomized by the residential suburb—spacious, affluent, clean, decent, permanent, predictable, and homogeneous—and violated by the great city—congested, impoverished, filthy, immoral, transient, uncertain, and heterogeneous. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metropolis, as the newcomers to Los Angeles perceived it, was the receptacle for all European evils and the source of all American sins. It contradicted their long-cherished notions about the proper environment and compelled them to retreat to outskirts uncontaminated by urban vices and conducive to rural virtues. And though … Americans everywhere shared these sentiments, they formed a larger portion of the populace in Los Angeles than in other great metropolises. Here then was the basis for the extraordinary dispersal of Los Angeles.”’
Full article: LA Times
Tomohiro Ohsumi: Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest peak, emerges through buildings in the Shinjuku district at dusk, in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, Jan. 17, 2011.
Paris, Taylor Miles
“CITY OF RUINS (Miasto Ruin, 2010) is the result of several months of graphic virtuosity and two months of continuous rendering. The Warsaw Rising Museum (Piotr Śliwowski) and Platige Image (Marcin Kobylecki), together with a team of history consultants and 40 specialists, have created an unusual 3D film that documents the shocking sea of rubble that Warsaw was reduced to during World War II, as seen from an imaginary flight with an Allied aeroplane at real speed.”
More at deconcrete
Image: A jugaad chandelier made of recycled bottles.
There is no direct English translation for the Indian word ‘jugaad,’ but the gist of it is to “make do.”
Jugaad urbanism: http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/12625
