Building Number 10, Hu Jia Lou Public Housing Project West

Wang Di was born in Beijing in 1963 and has seldom left the city in the following years. His experience and his photography fundamentally problematises our western understanding of what is traditional in China’s capital. ‘I didn’t manage to catch a glimpse of the ‘old Beijing’ that people have been talking about,’ says the photographer. The first round of urban refurbishment in the 1950s had turned the decorated archways and the old City Wall Gate into history, rarely to be glimpsed even in text books. According to Di, during the Cultural Revolution, when everything old was supposed to make way for the new, it was difficult to find even a photo of those things.

Di says: “The ordinary architecture in my mind, such as the mass-constructed Russian style offices and residential buildings of the ’50s, the simple housing of the ’60s and during the Cultural Revolution (they are shabby both in form and in function because of the extremely tight budget), and the generic residential condos that sprouted up in the ’70s, made stronger marks in my visual memory than the so-called Ten Great Buildings or other famous urban landscape. They were directly relevant to my daily life, and deep down in my heart, they constituted some of the warmest images of this city.”

Interior of Building Number 15 of 4th Road of Jiu Xian Qiao

For a generation of Chinese the demolition of this unassuming architecture creates a rupture of memory and of identity, even if people  would prefer to forget the past. Of course the rapid economic development in the past ten years or so has drastically changed the look of Beijing. Ordinary buildings are often the first to be bulldozed in the mass urban demolition. The situation has direct effect on the basic living environment of Beijing and the way individuals identify with it. Di says he now worries that he won’t be able to identify with his home city some day, without ever having left it. ‘It’s this fear that prompted me to photograph these buildings and this fading Beijing in my memory, a city that belongs to me,’ he says.

Public Kitchen on the West in Building Number 2, Hu Jia Lou Public Housing

Yet it is not simple nostalgia at work here. The Chinese built these buildings to established Soviet principles of square footage would be allotted per capita. Ideologically, these were equivalent to the new Soviet architecture. They were designed for functionary organs of the national government, and built upon Soviet ideals of community. For the large part they weren’t popular, at least in Beijing, because they exceeded the average income of commoners. They were also as much of an imposition in their time as is the current wave of Westernisation. In their time, they were a symbol of power for the new China. They were the new Beijing. Half a century later, and things have changed. In his novel Discussions With our Daughter the writer Wang Shuo describes the city’s Soviet architecture: ‘whoever wants to see the fundamental changes that have happened in China over the past several decades, I take them to west Beijing to see how the former cornerstone of the regime lives nowadays.”

West Side of the North Section of San Li Tuen

Nostalgia is not always an option. Some people want to see these buildings torn down for what they represent.

I share Tyler Cowen’s wariness regarding the morality of meat-eating. In a macro and realist sense, the morality is not so difficult: if the developed world stopped eating meat, then the prices of non-meat would skyrocket, and even if in equilibrium net food costs did not change for the undeveloped world, the dietary adjustment would be costly. Furthermore, since meat is such a cheap source of protein, in equilibrium net food costs probably would go up for the undeveloped world as production shifted to more expensive sources of protein.

On the margin though, I have always seen vegetarians as being more moral than non-vegetarians- I, by the way, am a meat-eater. Ceteris paribus, not killing must be preferred to killing, right?

There are two good counterarguments for this come. First, that the death experienced by animals in the wild is worse than the death experienced when they are hunted, fished, or slaughtered. This is the argument made by slaughterhouse engineer and famous autistic Temple Grandin, and by Tyler Cowen in his Bloggingheads with Peter Singer.

The second argument is that life is a good thing, and because we eat meat, there are billions of farm animals who live that would otherwise not have lived. From a strict utilitarian sense, I don’t think you can make this second argument, since we don’t know the utility of not being born. Nevertheless, intuitively I simply have a hard time believing that life itself is not a good thing.

In order for these counterarguments to defend the morality of carnivorousness, animals must live a life worth living. In that vein, I am glad to see urban hunting taking hold. Of course, in some ways it’s an extension of the silly fad of urban farming; upper class urbanites with time and money to waste looking for increasingly extravagant ways to signal their environmental ethics. On the other hand hunting does seem to require a particular type of person that it would be hard to fake for the sake of signalling- field dressing a deer is not for everyone. Either way, I think it’s a positive development towards more moral carnivorousness.

I was walking around Dhiyafa Street on a recent trip to Dubai when I noticed something very unexpected. In one short stroll I was passed by (and I counted them) 15 people on bicycles! It was a strange feeling. There were bike lanes. The pedestrian crossings were very safe and had traffic lights for cars and pedestrians, with those little buttons you push that tell you to wait.

Upon further investigation, I found a hidden building which apparently houses the labor force that is constructing this new part of town. You can’t really see them clearly in the photo but there are literally hundreds of bicycles there. This one labour camp is seeding a culture of pedestrian and bicycle activity in the whole area! Once the infrastructure is set up, and people see other people on bikes, they won’t hesitate to join. The idea is to give people as much choice in transportation as possible and not simply force one mode onto everyone.

I also got a chance to visit Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the people in charge there were incredibly competent and passionate about what they’re doing. Maybe the lethargic attitude in Kuwait lowered my expectations, but I really have changed my mind about Masdar. I have a good feeling now that they really know what they’re doing and that it’s not just some grand-scale publicity stunt for Abu Dhabi. There’s not much to see there yet, but they are pretty deep into the technical design phase. It was fun and a bit surreal seeing pedestrian urbanism ideas, passive cooling, smart grid technology and pricing incentives all come together in one city. The skeptic in me still thinks it’s all too good to be true, but I hope i’m wrong again.

Introduction:

Let us imagine a city. Enough jobs have been created that the labor market is tight, wages are rising, and increased consumption fuels a thriving economy. Enormous amounts of affordable housing have been built, despite the unending flow of people into the city. Does this city work? Does it fulfill the hopes of the “new urbanists”?

Not necessarily. Because the city I have described is the New York of the Five Points, or Dickins’ London, or Detroit on June 20th 1943 or Los Angeles on August 11, 1965. Making the city work goes far beyond the concrete reality of real estate and employment – there are a vast number of services that have to work for a city to be livable.

And to understand why this is, we have to understand the political and social movement known as “municipal socialism.”

History:

One of many books that every progressive should read is Daniel Rodger’s Atlantic Crossings, a history of the early progressive movement as a trans-atlantic conversation between American and European reformers confronting corporate capitalism and its social consequences. One of the reasons why American reformers were driven to attempt a total reconstruction of economic life was that when they encountered the European city, they felt an unaccustomed feeling of inferiority at how advanced European civic reform had gone. Beginning in Britain in the 1840s, urban social reformers horrified at the unhealthy and dangerous state of water, sanitation, and public health had been forced to confront the reality of private waterworks, garbage collectors, ice companies, and hospitals who saw no profit in meeting the needs of the working classes. In the face of cholera and influenza, the industrial giants of Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Belfast, Liverpool, and London were forced to break the taboos of laissez-faire and provided public services to the masses.

American reformers returning from Europe came back with visions of public water companies and sewers in cities in which one in eight had access to running water, public gas and ice companies to deal with the depths of winter and the unbearable heat of the summer, public subways and streetcars to replace the anarchy of competing private firms who would rather cut off entire sections of the city than allow rivals access to a permanent market, and public housing to replace  the overstuffed and dilapidated tenements.

More importantly, they brought with them an understanding of the city as a “web of mutual dependency,” where daily survival relied upon farms and factories whose goods came to the city through the labor of sailors and longshoremen, railroad workers and teamsters and flowed through a massive network of retailers, shopkeepers, and salesmen to satisfy the needs of the people. Even in a capitalist system, the maintenance of this delicate machine was the charge of the city itself: public markets where consumers could be sure of fair dealing thanks to public inspectors and licenses; public roads, docks, train stations, and warehouses where goods could be moved and stored; and public fire, police, and public heath services to keep the public safe.

Through a series of grueling political battles that lasted from the 1880s through the 1930s and 40s, generations of progressive activists established the principle that we cannot allow the necessities of urban life to be left to the mercies of the market. It is hardly a coincidence that  we began de-regulating utilities and privatizing government in the 1970s at the same time that the cities began to decline – cities need public and regulated services to prosper.

Rebuilding Public Services:

If “new urbanism” is to actually make the city once more a functioning organism, one of the elements of constructing the “new urbanism” must be the re-publicization of services.

Electricity, Water, Climate Control, and Garbage Services:

These services have two things in common: first, they are very much necessities, and second, at the same time they are also public goods. Garbage services, for example, benefit both the individual (who gets a home that is clean and healthful) and the community (who are protected from the “great stench” that once characterized urban life, and the epidemic diseases that made it so precarious). Water is a human necessity for life, but it also benefits the community in that it allows people to cook and clean in their own homes, which aids in sanitation and public health. By the way, if the emphasis on cleanliness and disease strikes you as a bit odd, consider the ease by which epidemic diseases swept the great cities of the 19th century and then imagine the scale by which similar diseases would speed through cities that are ten times larger and where people can travel from country to county in a few hours.

Climate control is normally somewhat marginal in terms of human survival – except at the extremes. In the middle of winter, people do get sick and a smaller number die from extreme cold, especially the young and the infirm. Likewise, in major heatwaves, we also see that the elderly and infirm often succumb to heat stroke and similar conditions. Beyond the extremes, however, there is the issue of “livability.” Given how densely-developed cities function as “heat islands,” and similarly how canyonization can amplify the effects of high winds, having some kind of climate control is important for keeping urban residents happy in close quarters. There is a reason why major urban riots in the 20th century were most frequent in the summer – extreme temperatures can have a catalyzing effect on existing tensions.

In terms of making a city livable, the immediate purpose is to make these services both abundant and affordable – without sacrificing the long-term goal of making cities more sustainable when it comes to power, water, and waste disposal. Given the extremely mixed results of privatization of utilities, especially in regards to equitable distribution of goods and the impact this has on class inequalities in quality of life, one strategy that the “new urbanism” movement should support is the re-publicization of basic services, especially models that combine decentralized production (rooftop solar panels) with public “yardstick” utilities to create both competition with private corporations and outlets for new strategies in the sustainable production of services.

Mass Transit:

Mass transit is something of a given when it comes to municipal socialism – spatially, a city is essentially a network that allow people to move between different buildings and open spaces. Beyond just saying “mass transit is good,” there is a larger point that needs to be made: contrary to the conventional wisdom that “there’s no Republican or Democratic way to fill a pot hole,” there are different ways to make mass transportation work. Choosing between highways and subways, or between more car lanes or more bike lanes, or between systems that privilege ex-urban commuters over intra-urban commuters have both practical and ideological consequences.

In most American cities, there is a disparity between how we treat roads and how we treat public transit – roads are generally free to the user (with the obvious exception of tolls, but these are rather rare) but funded by the public via taxes or bonds, whereas public transit is viewed as a service that the user pays for at the point of use. If we are to make mass transit the hallmark of new urbanism, one mental change that has to happen is a rethinking of public transit as something that should be made cheap, if not free – because the city has a vested interest in making it more attractive than low-density methods of transportation. To that end, establishing free passes for the elderly and working poor families, as well as subsidized passes for regular commuters should be a standard part of the new urbanist toolbox, especially because such programs also act as a mechanism of wealth redistribution that can nurture a “bell-curve” city.

Free Higher Education, The Arts, and Wireless Broadband:

Here, we move from the realm of practical necessity to what once was called “the civilizing arts.” Free higher education is not a necessity – but it a public good that both ensures the social mobility necessary for preserving the “bell-curve” of a healthy democratic society and the robust economic development and the intellectual and cultural innovation that are the hallmarks of a great city, and its true justification as a social organization. Likewise, creating a vibrant artistic nexus where talented people can gather and collaborate both provides additional routes for upward mobility, and allows the city to develop its own voice and its own conscious identity. Wireless broadband is a newer entry onto this list, but the potential benefits of freeing up communication, business startups, and facilitating political mobilization are too strong not to include it.

Together, these items help to incubate the base elements for a true, Deweyian democracy, a city that can think, and debate, and act collectively. They’re not sufficient – you need political and social organization before you can really have a self-directing city – but they do create the raw material of experts, ideas, means of communication, and so on that the organizing process relies upon.

Conclusion:

The role of “municipal socialism” in creating the new, livable city ultimately comes down to the very origins of urban life. Civilization began in the cities, with the creation of an agricultural surplus that allowed for the seperation of a population from the all-consuming task of acquiring food. Civilization in this sense begins by transcending necessity.

To this end, the livable city must be one in which people spend as little time and resources on the basic necessities of life as possible, and thus can devote themselves to the progress of society.

Take a look here at what the City of San Francisco is trying to do. The Transit Center District project is an excellent concept for large scale transit-oriented development. The article from SFGate is here and the project website is here.

The Global Power Index might sound like something the Bilderberg Group or Club of Rome dreamt up during a mountain retreat but it’s actually a project of the Institute for Urban Strategies at the Mori Memorial Foundation in Japan. The index, compiled by an international group of academics led by Professor Heizo Takemaka and including Sir Peter Hall, ranked cities across the world on the basis of six criteria: economy, research and development, livability, accessibility and cultural interaction as well as ecology and natural environment. Perhaps unsurprisingly New York City, London, Paris and Tokyo were deemed to be the most powerful cities in the world. New York scored top marks for its economy as well as research and development, while London was judged to be the world’s cultural capital and Paris is number one for livability and accessibility.

Amid an ever-multiplying array of similar rankings however, the aim of the study is perhaps best understood as part of Tokyo’s desire to play a more significant role among its rivals, with Singapore (fifth) and Hong Kong (10th) snapping at its heels in Asia:

Under severe global competition among cities, GPCI explores the comprehensive power of cities to attract creative people and excellent companies from around the world, and produces rankings for the world’s major cities such as Tokyo, New York, and London.

This ranking is truly unique in applying new visions compared to the conventional rankings announced internationally, and it is the first ranking of world cities to be created in Japan.

The objective of the GPCI rankings is to show people the features of cities and encourage them to reconsider the attractiveness of cities. GPCI is intended to be a useful tool for establishing urban strategies for Tokyo and other cities covered by this research.

The study can be read in full at the Mori Memorial Foundation site here or in summary over at CityMayors.com here.

With urbanism itself ranked as the second biggest likely trend for not only 2010 but the next decade, watch this space.

The rise of the small town Zlín in the east of the Czech Republic to the centre of the biggest European shoe manufacturer Bat’a is a unique economic and social, but also an architectural phenomenon.

Zlín is a “model town of Modernism”, since many architectural and social ideals that politicians, entrepreneurs and architects propagated as visionary after World War I, had been realized there. Thus the town, that Le Corbusier described as a “shining phenomenon”, became a kind of pilgrimage site for all kinds of proponents of progress in the 1930s. At the turn of the century, the small place in which Tomáš Bat’a had founded a shoe factory together with his brother and sister in 1894, had 3,000 inhabitants, steadily developing to 43,000 by 1938. Thrilled by the ideas and production methods of the most successful car manufacturer of the time, Henry Ford, and the founder of the science of management, Frederick W. Taylor, the entrepreneurs Tomáš and Jan Antonin Bat’a had the small place systematically developed into a kind of huge laboratory for communal life and work, establishing a system in which the entire town and all its inhabitants were only serving one single purpose – the increase of shoe production. Not only the division of labour, timekeeping and conveyor belts, but also captive social facilities such as nurseries, schools and a hospital as well as a department store, a sports club and a large cinema, aimed at this target. Architecture should also contribute to forming new and better-working people.

Tomás Bat’a Memorial, Zlín, 1938 [© KGVUZ, REGIONAL GALLERY OF FINE ARTS IN ZLíN]

School of Arts Zlín, outdoor drawing class, 1940s [© MZA - SOKA ZLíN, MORAVIAN PROVINCIAL ARCHIVE IN BRNO - STATE DISTRICT ARCHIVE ZLíN]

The town is divided into zones assigned to the areas of working, living, spare time and traffic – a separation of functions corresponding to the key concepts of modern town building that were later propagated in the „Charta of Athens“. Decisively influenced by the architects František L. Gahura and Vladimír Karfík, almost all public buildings were developed on a planning grid of 6.15 by 6.15 metres, a uniform measurement which literally served as a standardization of work and life. Starting out from Zlín, Bat’a had factories and towns erected in other countries and continents as a smaller version of Zlín using modern architecture to convey a company-related identity and modernity.

View of the Bat’a premises with administration building No. 21 [© KGVUZ, REGIONAL GALLERY OF FINE ARTS IN ZLíN]

View of the labour Square with cinema, Bat’a community centre and the entrance to the Bat’a premises, Zlín, mid of 1930 [© KGVUZ, REGIONAL GALLERY OF FINE ARTS IN ZLíN]

Members of the jury of the international housing competition, Edo Schön, Vladimír Karfík and Le Corbusier (from left to right) on the terrace of the Community building, Zlín, April 1935 [© KGVUZ, REGIONAL GALLERY OF FINE ARTS IN ZLíN]

Now, there is an exhibition that has adapted parts of the Prague show “The Bat’a Phenomenon“ (National Gallery, spring 2009) but has been restructured for Munich. By means of models, plans, objects, photographs and films the architectural development, the linkage of cultural and social life in Zlín as well as the worldwide circulation of Bat’a’s ideas are presented and critically reflected. A separate area, specifically compiled for the Munich show, will be dealing extensively with Le Corbusier’s planning concepts for Bat’a – which have so far been hardly known, even in expert circles (expansion of Zlín, a standard plan for the French shoe shops, the French satellite town Hellocourt and the Bat’a pavilion for the World Fair in Paris in 1937). Some of the original drawings of the Fondation Le Corbusier will be shown for the first time. A big model of the World Fair pavilion – only known as a plan so far – can be experienced in its spatial form for the first time.

Frantisek L. Gahura, site map “ZLÍNA”, 1934 [© KGVUZ, REGIONAL GALLERY OF FINE ARTS IN ZLíN]

Le Corbusier, draft for the Bat’a pavilion for the Paris World Fair, 1937 [© FLC 17.814 A / VG BILDKUNST, BONN 2009]

Le Corbusier, map of the french Bat’a satellite town “Urbanisation d’Hellocourt”, 18 July 1936 [© FLC 17.806 / VG BILDKUNST, BONN 2009]

Aerial view: workers’ colonies of Bat’a factory in the district Díly, Zlín, start of construction 1930 [© KGVUZ, REGIONAL GALLERY OF FINE ARTS IN ZLíN]

Zlín – Model Town of Modernism
Place: Pinakothek der Moderne – Munich, Germany.
Opening: 18.11.2009, 19.00
Duration of exhibition: 19.11.-21.02.2010

Elektropriveda Building by Ivan Straus in 1978

The building of the The Electrical Management [Elektroprivreda] Building in Sarajevo, Bosnia was designed by architect Ivan Straus in 1978 but was destroyed when the city of Sarajevo was under blockade and military siege from 1992 to 1995. The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, conducted by the Serb forces of self-proclaimed Republika Srpska and Yugoslav People’s Army (later transformed to the Army of Serbia and Montenegro), lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996.

A map of the JNA attack on May 2, 1992.

We can read at the wiki that reports indicated an average of approximately 329 shell impacts per day during the course of the siege, with a maximum of 3,777 on July 22, 1993. This urbicide by shellfire extensively damaged the city’s structures, including civilian and cultural property. By September 1993, reports concluded that virtually all the buildings in Sarajevo had suffered some degree of damage, and 35,000 were completely destroyed. Among buildings targeted and destroyed were hospitals and medical complexes, media and communication centers, industrial targets, government buildings, and military and UN facilities.

Elektroprivreda Building.

Elektroprivreda Building under siege in 1992

Damaged Elektroprivreda Building under siege in 1993

Lebbeus Woods travelled to Sarajevo in November of 1993, when he went invited —as a ‘journalist’—at the invitation of Haris Pasovic, head of the Sarajevo International Film and Theater Festival, who was aware of Woods work from a lecture he has given in Sarajevo two years earlier.

As he writes at his blog:

The Electrical Management Building, along with the Post Office, Parliament, National Library, mosques and churches were symbolic of the civic life of the city, and therefore were especially targeted by the besieging Bosnian Serb army. I met the architect of the building, Ivan Straus, one of the most respected architects in Yugoslavia, who was also very supportive of my presence and ideas. It was he, during a later visit, who asked me to design a reconstruction of the Electrical Management Building [...] The design for the reconstruction of the Electrical Management Building is a case study in the application of this theory. Most of the building would be restored to accommodate corporate offices of the known kind. However, in the space that had been literally blasted off by artillery fire, would be constructed a freespace, to be inhabited by those who, in the reinvention of ways to inhabit space, would open the way to the future.

Lebbeus asked himself how could architecture play any positive role in all of this? When buildings vital to the social and economic functioning of the city were damaged and unusable without extensive reconstruction and whit the people of the city suffering years of deprivation, terror, and uncertainty. His answer was that architecture, as a social and primarily constructive act, could heal the wounds, by creating entirely new types of space in the city.

These new spaces would be what Woods had called ‘freespaces’ spaces without predetermined programs of use, but whose strong forms demanded the invention of new programs corresponding to the new, post-war conditions. His hipothesis is that “90% of the damaged buildings would be restored to their normal pre-war forms and uses, as most people want to return to their old ways of living…. but 10% should be freespaces for those who did not want to go back, but forward.

As Deleuze and Guatarri quoted: “Only the extreme forms return – those which, large or small, are deployed within the limit and extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing one into another.”

Here is Lebbeus Woods proposal for the Electroprivreda building reconstruction:

Reconstruction Design by Lebbeus Woods in 1994

Reconstruction Design by Lebbeus Woods in 1994. Computer rendering by Carlos Fueyo 2004.

The complete post by Lebbeus Woods at his BLOG.
More images about the Electroprivreda building here.

Jessica Reaves in The New York Times Chicago News Cooperative explains why cab drivers try to avoid taking credit card payments. It’s a nice little read. Reaves reports that the reasons all center around time consumption involved or broken card machines.  I can’t help but wonder though if cab drivers are missing out.

I’d actually imagine they are. Take college students like me. Generally, we don’t carry a lot of cash but often (usually more often than is healthy) we spend with credit cards. In a city like Chicago, where there are a number of universities, I’d imagine if it was common practice to use credit cards more people wanting to get around Chicago but, for whatever reason, against taking the El, would happily wave a cab than is currently the case.

Photo by Cote used under a Creative Commons license.

Since the beginning of 2009, the New York Times has been collecting stories about the citizens of New York. Every week, a new individual’s story is added: the subway busker, the sneaker connoisseur, the religious runaway, the mayoral maid… Taken together, “One in 8 Million” is an incredibly moving portrait of the City: the “305-square-mile parade of people with something to say.” If you care about urbanism, if you care about “the city,” if you care about New York, it is well worth your time.

JAM session, molteplicità congestionata, ma anche marmellata. È la sintesi di quello che sentiamo di voler dire e fare attraverso questo network. Sessioni di discussione che attraversano la molteplicità dei linguaggi, delle competenze, degli interessi. Ma con la curiosità di un bambino nell’intingere le dita in un vasetto di marmellata.

ARCHITECTURE, perché un’altra architettura è possibile e auspicabile. Architettura in quanto progetto di luoghi destinati alla vita dell’uomo. La qualità degli uni pervade obbligatoriamente ed essenzialmente anche l’altra. La pluralità diviene un principio guida, capacità di misurare ed armonizzare strutture, spazi, insediamenti.

NEIGHBORHOOD, non siamo entità cieche di spirito, ma solo una catena di esseri umani in un mondo in trasformazione (B. Lancaster, Il Gattopardo). Gli occhi degli altri sono indispensabili a comprendere un luogo; le differenze si esaltano, il reciproco scambio valorizza le conoscenze e arricchisce di competenze indispensabili per interpretare i processi di trasformazione. Il vicinato rappresenta il reale dinamismo umano.

URBANISM, insistiamo sui meccanismi attraverso i quali si crea la metropoli contemporanea; spazi e infra-spazi, che fanno comunicare realtà formali ed informali. Trasporti, alloggi, spazio pubblico e pianificazione sono al centro dell’indagine per gettare le basi di nuove spazialità vitali.

BIOMIMICRY, l’innovazione è guidata dalla natura. Comprendere veramente la terra richiede molto più che costruire oggetti. È necessario indagare modelli, sistemi, processi e scomporli in elementi per implementare ogni idea. Ma la natura è al tempo stesso termine di confronto e misura della sostenibilità la cui interfaccia con la nostra persona è ciò che può essere chiamato ecotono urbano¹

Tutto questo è JANUB (in arabo, SUD).

Cosa significa? Prima di tutto geografia – il mondo mediterraneo che guarda interessato all’america latina, all’africa, al medio oriente, all’India – cultura, tradizioni, paesaggi, persone. Ma anche S.U.D. che vuol dire Sviluppo Urbano Duraturo.

Cosa vuol essere? Un network, piattaforma internazionale aperta e interdisciplinare incentrata su casistiche italo – mediterranee.

Di cosa tratta? Di molteplicità e dei territori della contemporaneità. Arte, architettura, urbanistica, sociologia, ecologia, e paesaggi futuri in tutte le loro specifiche accezioni sono inevitabilmente il territorio primo di confronto da cui parte l’esperienza del network.

JANUB condensa i vari linguaggi al fine di non ricondurre l’interpretazione dei significati ad un sistema di controllo univoco.

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1 – Definiamo l’Ecotono Urbano come un’esperienza non identificabile con indici astratti ma comprensibile solo in termini di percezione. Si tratta del luogo o della situazione dove si accumula la maggiore diversità di immagini; così come la maggiore diversità di vite si accumula nell’habitat ecologico. L’Ecotono Urbano rappresenta il territorio d’azione così come il supporto concettuale all’azione stessa. L’azione non è frammentaria. È complessa. Si costituisce di azioni molteplici piuttosto che da una molteplicità di oggetti. (da: Sensorial City Caracas – Jesus Fuenmayor e Rafael Pereira)

David Loukidelis, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia, speaking today at The Surveillance Games workshop, has made it quite clear that his office does not want the Winter Games to leave a legacy of securitization in the city or indeed, fear (as the Assistant Federal Privacy Commissioner, Chantal Bernier, put it), in the consciousness of its residents. In particular he argued that the 600 (yes, 600) cameras that are being installed at the Olympic venues and beyond should not be allowed to remain after the games. I hope that his office is able to deliver on this view, but I doubt that it will. As Kevin Haggerty and Phil Boyle have noted, security architecture is now an actual deliverable of the Olympics, and as many other researchers have shown, such architecture, including in particular CCTV but also adjusted local or national laws on the thematic and spatial limits of protest and freedom of expression (which, as Michael Vonn of the BCCLA and Chris Shaw, a leading anti-games activist, are describing at this very moment in the conference, are themselves often illegal and unconstitutional) tends not only to persist but to act as a kind of Trojan Horse for an expanded surveillance. And as Vonn’s group has also shown – the city is building a permanent CCTV control centre as part of the security architecture for the Games, and you don’t do that for cameras that are going to be removed.

This week is Build Boston week in, well, Boston. Sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects (Boston’s local AIA chapter), it’s a week where architects from New England and beyond converge upon the city for a crash course in everything of interest in the profession and pick up their much coveted learning units along the way.

On Wednesday I had the pleasure (or was it self-inflicted torture) of sitting in on McGraw Hill’s 2010 Construction Outlook presented by VP of Economic Affairs, Robert Murray. I say torture only because of the often depressing data that was presented. The good news is things are getting better, the bad news – many of the things that are getting better are merely presenting in lower negative numbers. For example, in 2010 commercial building starts are expected to be at negative 4 percent, in 2009 that number was negative 43 percent.

Here are some  highlights I took away:

• There’s lots of talk about new urbanism, smart growth and transit oriented development. As I enjoy the benefits of urban living every day I think these are all great things. However, the data is showing that it’s still the big box stores and single family residences that are getting built. I think it’s going to take a stronger economy before developers and banks are flush enough to return to funding more creative urbanistic projects.

• Residential construction will start rebounding first, composed primarily of single family and small scale multi-family housing. This could be a nice boost for single architects that have decided to set up shop on their own after a layoff. Sole practitioners and/or small firms are more nimble by nature and can reap more from small fee jobs than the big firms can, putting the smaller guys at an advantage for long term success.

• Having the knowledge and experience working with sites in need of environmental clean-up will be a strong competitive advantage as we see growth in spending resulting from stimulus funds distributed to the EPA, Corps of Engineers and DOE ($17.8 billion). In most cases previous matching requirements for cities and towns to take advantage of these funds will be waved. Money for the 2^nd round of stimulus dollars needs to be allocated by March 2010.

• Now is the time to be looking at transit oriented development as these projects will likely start breaking ground in 2011. However, as I stated in my first point, we need to look at ways to make these successful without relying on big box stores. To make TOD truly livable we need to be thinking lifestyle retail and take the gamble that this market too will come back. In Massachusetts we have Westwood Station as one of our TOD projects that has been put on hold. Robert noted that while this project started out incorporating a mix of lifestyle retail with a couple anchors, the developers are now looking to bring in more big box stores to help lift the project off the ground.

These are just some of the takeaways from 30 data laden pages of slides that were presented. If you’d like a copy of the presentation send me an email and I’ll be happy to share the document with you. Vconyngham [at] gmail [dot] com.

Last week the non-profit group Transportation For America released a study documenting pedestrian deaths in American cities. Dubbed Dangerous by Design: Solving the Epidemic of Preventable Deaths (and Making Great Neighborhoods), the study posits that our roads are deadly not by accident, but intentionally, insofar as our modern streets are more often than not designed for speeding cars, not walking or bicycling.

The good news offered by the work is that these pedestrian deaths are preventable by rethinking the design of our roadways. Traffic calming (or measures that reduce the speed of traffic in intersections), complete streets (or streets that are designed for walking, bicycling, mass transit and cars), and walkable neighborhoods (or places to live that aren’t predicated solely on auto transport) are a few of the solutions they advance.

There is obviously a long way to go, however, and for one state, a larger distance to travel than others.

Florida’s four main metropolitan regions rank as the top four most deadly cities for walking or bicycling. As Chicago’s Daily Herald puts it: “Florida’s Orlando is no magic kingdom for walkers.” Beyond Florida, the top ten cities are in the South. Fast growing Southern regions (both east and west), in fact, dominate the list, implicating our most “modern” patters of development as the most unsafe. That is ironic considering the modern obsession with safety, but it follows from the modern dependence on the car.

Not content to wait while the Nation’s Southern cities make the transition to calmer traffic, more complete streets, and walkable neighborhoods?

This week, that pulpy ranker of things, the US News & World Report, ranked the top 15 cities for “people who hate driving and long commutes”. Don’t worry, none of the top 15 are on the “deadly by design” list.

In fact:

“The list is heavy on college towns, for a few good reasons: Such places are good fits for nondrivers because they are often compact and dense, and they often have liberal populations that demand more investment in public transportation.”

The top cities include: Cambridge, MA; Pittsburgh, PA; Boulder, CO; Davis, CA; Ann Arbor, MI; New Haven, CT; Chapel Hill, NC; Minneapolis, MN (lowest ranked on the Deadly by Design list); Portland, OR; Ames, IA; Madison, WI; Honolulu, HI; Provo, UT; Eugene, OR; and Syracuse, NY.

A compelling new entry on the Smart Growth Around America blog suggests that smarter land development (i.e. livable, walkable communities) may help curb violence within a neighborhood. Charles Branas of the University of Pennsylvania is currently researching if there is a significant link between vacant properties and crime levels. His latest findings indicate that high vacancy rates are often linked with a higher rate of aggravated assaults. Mara D’Angelo, of the blog, reports: “In fact, total assaults in a given set of blocks increased by 18.5% for every additional vacancy in a given area.”

Branas plans to now examine the ways in which stabilizing vacant property can have an impact on health issues and crime. His research reminds me of a criminology theory put forth by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling called ‘Broken Windows’:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

Wilson and Kelling argued that curbing vandalism and crime will involve, in part, fixing the initial (often overlooked) issue. It may be the case that by addressing vacant property (indeed, much of the work behind brownfield redeveelopment projects), crime rates can decrease in some neighborhoods. What are your thoughts on this?

Very soon after September 11, 2001,  the dual roles of the Ground Zero site became clear. The site was to act as a memorial for the victims and was at the same time a piece of prime real estate. These two were very hard to combine. For years nothing seemed to happen. Competitions were held, and various rather horrific combinations of memorial and profitable office space were selected and questioned over and over again.

Now, it appears that construction is finally on the way, and things are starting to come up out of the ground after 8 years. I’m not sure what it will be, whether it is Snøhetta’s, Foster’s, Rogers’, Calatrava’s or Libeskind’s building that will be there, possibly it has all been hijacked by SOM and generic office towers will fill in the gap. Whatever it is, it feels rather good that something is happening and that the scar will be healed eventually.

In one very definite sense was the hole the most effective memorial there could be. It is not about whether that would allow the enemy to win or not, but it puts the entire catastrophe into the present in a way a memorial could never do. As soon as a memorial is constructed, the event memorialized is effectively put into history. A scar drags the events of 9.11 into the present while a memorial, any memorial, no matter how it’s designed, will effectively put the events into the history books.

One could therefore argue that the scar in the urban fabric is the ultimate memorial, It keeps the events in the present forever, much more effectively than any memorial. It is this that every day reminds Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular about the “War on Terror”. The physical void corresponds to the psychological void in people’s minds in a very minimalistic but effective way. I find it interesting that the last parcel of land was handed over to the developers just when the US politics shifted focus from having the War on Terror as the top priority. The void could then hypothetically have been used as an instrument of politics, as a way of stretching, or bridging the past into the present.

The void itself is not empty, and the symbolism of the void can be quite powerful. A void is a something not a nothing, there is no Tabula Rasa. No matter how much symbolism you try to load into the office towers that will be built, they will just be buildings, and they will put this quite awkward period of America and the world into the history books rather than eternally revolving on the prime-time news. Construction on Ground Zero is making peace with the rest of the world, it is putting an end to the state of emergency that has served as an excuse for humans doing rather horrific things to each other for far too long.

It is interesting to look at why we construct monuments, sometimes we construct them not to remember, but to forget. We build memorials to allow ourselves to move on and detach ourselves from the past by loading a physical structure with the guilt, sorrow and other emotions. The memorial gives us a distance to the event its created to commemorate. It also provides us with a physical structure where we can remember, but the structure or space takes on many of the immediate emotions and memories. The structure remembers, history remembers, so we don’t have to. Our minds are liberated by it, free to go on with our lives and to live in the present instead of the past. In that way, the monument is a great structure, a very human structure that sets us free to live our own lives, in our own day and age.

In October of 2009 I was thinking about cities. What makes a city a city? Is it the density? The commerce? The cultural institutions? We all know a city when we come to one – what is that?

Perhaps it has something to do with desire. So one Sunday morning a few friends and I set out walking. We decided we would walk someplace new and take turns leading. The only guide was our desire. We ended up in private gardens and a flea market, a hippie commune, an antiques mall, a couple of art galleries, and a hilltop homeless enclave, among other places. Afterwards I wrote this essay – Cities of Desire (with apologies to Italo Calvino) – about what makes a city a city.

What you see here are the images from our walk along with field recordings of the sounds from the city. Overlaid on all this is the essay. The walkers were: Alejandra Orozco, Robert Hudon, Cynthia Rothschild, and me (Abraham Burickson). Enjoy.

The AP reported today that new data suggests that more people are looking at medium-sized cities as desirable places to live after college, which indicates a change in popular opinion over the past decade. In 2000, small cities (which includes townships and suburban communities) were ranked as the most popular places to live by those individuals who held a college diploma – but this view has changed, as medium-sized cities were voted more desirable by 31% of the polled individuals (compared to small cities, which 30% of polled considered as better places to live).

Does this news fare well for the cities of Allentown and Bethlehem? Post you thoughts below.

You have to love the pure madness and wildness of it all. La Prosperitat, the edge city barrio (neighbourhood) in Barcelona is where, starting from midnight on friday, you will hear lots of roaring in the streets: ECO ECO ECO – VIVA SAN XIBECO. This is the opening night of the local festival this weekend, but for this night you will find the presence of a saint, San Xibeco, but he is no ordinary saint.

Take the yellow line metro up to Via Julia this friday and find out why…

ECO ECO ECO …. VIVA SAN XIBECO

An integral part of the culture in Barcelona is to meet up with friends and share drinks outside in the streets, they even have a proper word for it, which we dont have in English; botellon. Barcelonas local Beer group DAMM produce many excellent beers; estrella, voll, AK, bok… BUT their most loved creation has to be their litre bottle called XIBECA. Most of the time while having a botellon people sit on the ground in a square, or on the steps of a building passing around this bottle. It even has written on its label; Cerveza para compartir, which translates as Beer to Share (in fact i learned the verb compartir, while having a botellon in the Rambla Raval)

Here is the source of the madness:

And here is what it leads to:

Festival posters from recent years…

san xibeco VII (#7 – 2008)

San Xibeco VI (#6 – 2007)

San Xibeco V (#5 – 2006)

San Xibeco IV (#4 – 2005)

See yez this friday in the streets, where we will all be drinking, dancing, celebrating, participating, having the craic and most importantly roaring allegiance to our Saint:

ECO ECO ECO …. VIVA SAN XIBECO

SAN XIBECO 2009

8es Festes d’Hivern de Prosperitat

Del 20 al 22 de novembre

DIVENDRES 20
23:30h Pregó de Festes
(Lloc: Casal de Joves de Prosperitat)
24h Baixada del Sant
24:05h Passabars
1.30h Arribada al Casal de Barri + DJ.

DISSABTE 21
13h Vermut amb concert Es molt Band
(espai per concretar)
22:30h Concert al Casal de Barri.
Rumborrachera, Stoy ke Trino i Herederos del Taxi
Entrada: 2€

DIUMENGE 22
12:30h Actes infantils
a la Plaça Àngel Pestanya
14h Dinar popular Casal de Barri
16h Café + sorteig del mocador
18h Fi de festa amb traca final

“The Metropolis [Manhattan] strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.”
Rem Koolhass, Delirious New York

Black Dog Publishing had released previously Mapping London and now, following on the same editorial topic, is presenting Mapping New York, a richly illustrated survey of the urban and social history of New York City, the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world.

The city consists of five boroughs: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island and, as Seth Robbins and Robert Neuwirth says in the introduction: “New York City was invented by a map.”

Is interesting to note that the first maps published in the book are dating back to the 16th Century, when the European settlement began with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement, later called “Nieuw Amsterdam” or New Amsterdam, on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1614. As Rem Koolhaas did with his Delirious New York, suggesting that the city was a site for an infinite variety of human activities and events [both real and imagined] and represents the essence of the metropolitan lifestyle; this books confirms Koolhaas vision about the development of New York as a leading global city.

Located on a large natural harbor on the Atlantic coast of the Northeastern USA, all the maps have some kind of magical achievements when they try to communicate the poetic behind the city, that was designed according the federal Congress decision of mapping Manhattan’s wilderness territory as a precise 36 square-mile parcels, ready for subdivision and sale, around 1811. This was a visionary development proposal, called the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, that expanded the city street grid to encompass all of Manhattan, and the 1819 opening of the Erie Canal connected the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the North American interior.

As we can read in the introduction: “The maps of the world and the American republic were changing as transportation improvements and the rising market economy announced a new capitalist age, and New York wanted a piece of the action. As America began to fill in the map of the western frontier, New York State planned a new canal cutting from the Hudson River to the great Lakes. The Erie Canal opened in 1825, anchoring New York’s place at the center of a new mapof transcontinental trade.”

In the 19th century, the city was transformed by immigration and development. These big changes are reflected in the maps presented here, from John Randel Jr.’s map in 1821 that presents the City of New York as laid out by the commissioners with the surrounding country to George Waring Jr.’s map from 1886, where Waring focused on the representation and documentation of new York parks, passing through Robert Mose’s Panorama of the City of New York map, where he presents an expansive diorama as a dense reconstruction of New York City featuring every single building constructed prior to 1962, totalling 895,000 individual structures.

But the book is not only about maps. It’s also about New York city representation in many graphic ways: aerial views, touristic maps, typographic ways of mapping, as “Manhattan” by Howard Horowitz in 1997 or Aaron koblin’s “Flight Patterns” designed in 2005 and representing the United states mapped by the flight paths of national airlines and many others, as we can see here:

There are also many interesting researches that are part of the book. The “Routes of Least Surveillance: Manhattan, USA circa 2001” by the Institute for Applied Autonomy with Site-R is part of the book An Atlas of Radical Cartography, and is and intriguing commentary on the concept on public observation in a major city. Also the “Spatial Information Design Lab: Million Dollars Blocks” by Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams is a research done at Columbia University and offers an unique cartographic documentation of New York City, with 13 separate projects that attempt to map urban locations across the USA using carefully selected social data that together form a unique interpretation of the urban landscape.

The complete contents are:
1. Introduction
2. The history of the city
3. Servicing the city
4. Living in the city
5. Imagining the city
6. Biographies
7. acknowledgements

We highly recommend this book, for reading, for learning about New York City history, but also just to enjoy surfing and get lost in each of the maps presented here!!

Editor: Duncan McCorquodale

Published by Black Dog Publishing

Hardback, 272 pages with 216 b/w and colour ills

29.0 x 24.0 cm

On Saturday (last month) I spent a lot of time in Midtown Manhattan, seeing the big sites, and some smaller ones as well.  More photos from the trip.

Plaster Detail, Manhattan

Graffiti, Manhattan

Hot Dog Vendor

Palm Room, Some Bar

Madison Avenue and 42nd Street

Grand Central Station

Grand Central Station

Grand Central Station

Buildings in Midtown

Times Square

Times Square

Vogue Covers

Chrysler Building, Lobby

Chrysler Building