City Theory

Reverse Special Economic Zone

2011-05-22T16:24:00.000-07:00

A simple thought on a sunny day: it'd be interesting to see what would happen if a neo-liberal state (of which there are many) set up a zone where state-owned-enterprises were experimented with. Brazil was able to weather the recent (and still present) economic recession because it hadn't sold off every function of the government, and it might be useful to set up a laboratory to explore similar policies.

Also, what's up with public transit not being privatized in the US? Seems like the country would really benefit from that. Anyway, back to the sun.

Essential Reading

2011-05-15T17:39:00.000-07:00

My library isn't really a library, more a shelf of books, but if I had to make it even smaller these are what it would boil down to. Classics, in my eyes - I recommend each highly.

The Transit Metropolis, Robert Cervero

Very educational about transit systems and the built environment. I'll have to read it again, don't remember specifics but if you're into transit you just might learn something.

The Ungovernable City, Douglas Yates

This one's old school (late 70s) but is a great primer on bureaucracy and why a city like New York, which is the primary example, is ungovernable. Addresses issues like why a pothole takes so long to fix, even though it should be a pretty simple process (and why it's actually horribly complex).

Shadow Cities, Robert Neuwirth

There are several competing entries in the slum/shantytown genre, but this is the one I read (Mike Davis' Planet of Slums is another). I found it very illuminating, and I think that everyone should read up on the reality of these settlements. They are a huge factor in contemporary cities, and being ignorant of their workings is just that, ignorance.

The Early Works of Jane Jacobs

This one's a no brainer. I've only read the first three of her books (the ones most related to urban issues) but I find them to be incredible in so many ways. Jane is not a professional planner or even an academic, really: she calls them like she sees them, and just has a great eye. Read these, and read them more than once.

The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro

Clocking in at over a thousand pages, you would figure that this history of an infamous urban planner would be a chore to read - nope. The Power Broker is shocking, and reads almost like a horror story. Just when you think things can't be worse, well, they are. Robert Moses was a dick, and an evil guy; if you think otherwise read this book and get back to me.

Honorable Mention:

City Life, Witold Rybczynski - It's down here because I can't remember exactly what I liked about it, but I was pretty stoked on Witold after reading.

Anyway, these books inspired and informed me, and I'm inclined to spread the love. Check 'em out.

Book Review: The Concrete Dragon

2011-05-15T15:32:00.000-07:00

This book, about the explosive urban growth and related issues in China, is informative on a wide variety of subjects. I came out the other end having learned a lot, for sure. So you should read it, if you want to know more about the greatest urbanization in history and its ins and outs. Bottom line.

My criticisms are about what the author focuses on. He spends a few chapters on specific areas, and while these are the usual suspects - Guangdong Province, Shanghai and Beijing, otherwise known as the most famous metropolitan areas in China - his insights and the results of his research shed light on sides of these cities that one might not otherwise see. The rest of the chapters focus on many worthwhile subjects, and there are not many wasted words. However, in his focus on car ownership and private 'villa estates,' the author is choosing the upper over the lower class, which is my problem with the book.

Many Chinese cannot afford private vehicles, or to live in gated communities, and Campanella sort of glosses over this population. He shows a spotlight on the rich and middle classes but barely mentions the poor in his descriptions of the suburbs. Given that the victims of highway construction are relocated outside of the central city, I was very interested in hearing about their living experiences, but this was not a focus of the book. So there's that.

Overall the book is very illuminating, but another issue is that there is SO MUCH to address in China's urbanization that a book twice as long might have been more appropriate (with more case examples: Nanjing, Xi'an, etc.). But we have what we have in the 300 pages, and it makes sense of the puzzle that is China in a great many ways. So buy it if you're interested in the topic, which you should be. It's good.

The Nonexistant "New" City

2011-05-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

I hear often about the 'new city' exercise as assigned in the ivory tower. It goes something along the lines of "build an entirely new settlement of x size," with various emphasis on a certain urban issue or issues: waste systems, transit, etc. This practice is a little like playing SimCity - blank slate, the ability to control every aspect of urban development, etc. You are essentially a dictator, benevolent hopefully, who tries to make a city function from scratch.

This seems pretty straightforward, and innocent enough. But I think it is far from a simple assignment, and in fact not innocent at all; I would argue that thinking about the 'new' city is dangerous, and such an assignment is actually detrimental to an education in actual urban planning.

For one thing, thinking about the 'new' city is purely an academic pursuit. It is akin to a four-dimensional shape; useful in some ways as a concept, but not existing in reality (I'll go into that next). But unlike the concept of a four-dimensional shape, one can draw out a new city, plan its every process, and think that it DOES exist. This is where the danger comes in.

There are no new cities. And thinking about them, even for a fleeting second, is wasting time that could be spent thinking about reality: existing cities, and the problems they contain.

Let us imagine a city on another planet; for this exercise it cannot be any city, but the FIRST settlement on this new world. Let's say the planet is Mars, and the city is Mars City. (I know, I am wasting time thinking about a somewhat 'new' city at this moment, but bear with me, there's a point.) Mars City is to be built on a blank patch of land, and an entirely new urban framework is to be built to accommodate an influx of population that is to occur at an unspecified point in time. Basically we are building a city from scratch that will be populated later.

We can lay out electrical grids, sewers and pipes, waste disposal systems; we can plan for housing, we can plan for commerce areas and administrative complexes. Simple enough. Blank slate. Right?

This is where things get complicated. First, a city has to be built SOMEWHERE. If it's Mars, it's Mars. But to build this city you have to factor in the local weather and terrain; is the site windy? Are there some kind of potential otherworldly challenges to the stability or safety of the city? And also, what about climate control? Is a city truly new if it is built in an existing environment? There is no question of chicken and egg; the environment came first.

Where do the building materials come from? If they come from Earth, what part of Earth? And how are they coming? In waves, in a constant flow? These questions seriously affect how the city grows and its form. What needs to be built at first to enable the rest of the city to be constructed?

Also, how is it a new city if it conforms to planning disciplines that were honed in other cities? Is it not a product of Earth? And where were these disciplines created?

The previous three paragraphs are largely semantic. But most cities are not built on a brand new planet. In fact, only one city per planet is.

Fast forward a hundred years. Mars City is a teeming metropolis, with suburbs and a thriving economy. But it is still the only city on Mars. Plans are scraped together to built another city, Red Bluffs, nearby. Another chance to make a new city, it would appear. Everyone get out your theory books.

But Red Bluffs is not a new city. It is far from it. In the same way that raising a first child establishes groundrules for raising a second, Mars City has a huge effect on this second settlement, for many reasons. (Unless, of course, Red Bluffs was created by a rival superpower that was trying to make it's OWN brand new city. But let's not veer into science fiction here)

1: Red Bluffs will depend on a transit web that connects it to Mars City. How else will it get resources? If it uses the same spaceport as Mars City to ship its building materials etc. in, it will need to ship them FROM Mars City to use them. It is barely feasible to build a brand new spaceport for Red Bluffs when one already exists. Thus Red Bluffs depends on Mars City.

2: While Mars City surely involved much trial and error to get functional in the new environment, by the time Red Bluffs is created we know what works. In this way we depend on Mars City conceptually.

3: We depend on Mars City to know what works in its PHYSICAL form. How do we plan for new arrivals? What is built first? Etc.

In short, Red Bluffs is not a new city, no matter how new it is. It looks to and utilizes Mars City, and therefore is part of a larger inter-urban system.

Okay, so why use stupid examples of cities on Mars? I am trying to show that, even in a case where a brand new city is built, cities depend on the cities that have come before them, and the networks they have created.

But we don't live on Mars. And the real reason I shared a ill-thought-out hypothetical world with you is because if we tried to comprehend the inter-urban webs that exist on our planet, Earth, our heads would explode. If Red Bluffs is not a new city, imagine building a 'new' city in a world that has major urban centers scattered all over its globe, inter-urban infrastructure wrapping around continents, and a vast wealth of knowledge about how settlements in all possible environments function well. In truth, nothing about ANY city on our planet is new.

Consider a 'new' city built in Africa. Is it close to Johannesburg? Dakar? Its nearest port or major urban center is of the utmost importance. How long does it take for resources to arrive? Where are they coming from, and is it feasible to depend on a constant flow?

Now consider a new city built in the United States. There is a ridiculous amount of inter-urban connection in such a built-up country. Where is the nearest major urban center? What about the nearest air freight hub? Passenger hub? Is the city on the interstate system? Is the city on a train line?

Can this new city depend on other cities in similar environments for guidance in planning for weather and water consumption? Does it have to fight other areas for water rights? Etc, etc, etc. On Earth the web of cities is so dense that any 'new' city is basically an extension of other cities. Therefore it is impossible for it to be truly new.

Now, what is dangerous about this exercise is this: we spend a lot of time focusing on what SHOULD be built, where it belongs, how people should live in it, and other fruitless questions that we fail to see something so basic it practically slaps us in the face: there are things that have been built, that belong where they are because they cannot be moved, and that people live in in whatever manner they can. These are existing cities.

Why plan a brand-new city when we have so many REAL cities around us? Right now you are sitting in a room in one. We can look at a map and see them, laid out before us. Why, then, do we focus on the new, the nonexistant, instead of what already exists?

It's simple. There are three ways to care for things, and I will rank them here from easiest to most difficult.

The easiest is destruction - it takes nothing to swing a baseball bat and break a porcelain plate. The second easiest is creation; we replace the old, broken plate with one that is brand new, one that we have full control over in choosing (or designing). But the third method, and by far the most difficult, is repair.

Repair is not simple. It is not easy. It takes a lot of work to put a plate back together after it has been shattered. But to truly cure the ills of a city, it is what we must do. After all deciding to destroy a problematic block takes a simple mark of a pen; designing a new block on the same property, thus fixing the problem, takes many, many marks, but it is not as complicated as the third option: figuring out what the problem is on the block, and using as much tact and care as possible, turning it into a solution.

This is what we as urban scientists must focus on in our studies and, if possible, in our work. For it is not often we get to design a new city; in fact, it will never happen at all for the extreme majority. But we have an opportunity to fix cities around every corner. A new city is interesting, but like a four-dimensional shape, it exists only in our minds. We must overcome the temptation to think on it, and instead focus on what is real.

On Megacities and Conurbations

2011-05-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

I got to thinking about the conurbation and corridor concepts as related to megacities, which are at this point merely theoretical but appear to be an unavoidable result of urbanization. A megacity is just a huge, huge city; that's all the term means. A conurbation is an urban area with multiple major cities that forms an urban fabric that essentially creates a city with multiple centers of activity, and a corridor is such a group of cities that exists on a path or multiple paths.

A good example of a corridor would be the Boston-Washington region, which could be argued is the largest megacity in the world. (I'll express the reasons toward that claim in a second, in a paragraph for those interested) A good example of a conurbation would be the San Francisco Bay Area, which while significantly smaller than a megacity has three poles that each are surrounded by suburbs that merge and blend into each other, creating an urban fabric with three major cities: Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco.

(To defend my point that the Boston-Washington corridor is the largest urban area in the world, I bring up the fact that it had a population of 44.5 million in the 2010 census, only including its major metropolitan areas - Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore/Washington DC - not even counting the points in between; this already makes it at least one of the largest such regions in the world. To provide another example, the Tokyo corridor region, when measured including rural areas as part of the metropolitan area, clocks in at 43 million in wikipedia's estimate. The Pearl River Delta, China's largest such region, has a loose estimate of 50 million people, although adding up the population of it's major cities brings a figure of 32 million. If the Boston-Washington corridor isn't the largest, it has commanding status at the top of such rankings. If anyone cares.)

The point I am trying to make, and am too tired to write up completely, is that if megacities develop around one pole they may struggle as the center would be far away for many, thus opportunity would be far away as well. I am wondering if it would be wise to develop economically viable 'second cities' that in a sense would relieve the pressure of everyone having to make it to the central city. I have no idea if or how this would work, but I thought it was an interesting enough idea to bring up here. So that's that.

Back

2011-05-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

Well I fell out of love with urban planning for a long time, but when it came down to thinking of what I REALISTICALLY wanted to do with my life, an urban planning job doesn't sound so bad. So I'm back. And this website is a pressure valve, a way for me to get my ideas about urban planning out there, which I'm having all the time now.

I post on cyburbia.org as RPfresh; if you're not on there and are interested in urban planning you should check it out. You can message me there if you want to talk about anything. And please do! I would like to build a community of creative urban thinkers (a group I humbly include myself in). If you vibe with the ideas I have I would definitely love to hear what you think or what you disagree with.

Anyway that's me and while I know no one follows this blog, well, I'm back.

Cityscape: Lima

2010-09-26T19:52:00.000-07:00

Haven't done a Latin American city since the first Cityscape, so here she is: Lima, Peru. Lima is a great city, with its only disclaimer being that its position of relative unimportance in the world depresses some of the populace, and that it can get pretty sketchy. We lived in what is known as the sketchiest part of Lima proper - Callao, which also had terrible air (the joke was that when the organ thieves which our host constantly reminded us existed got you, they'd leave your lungs). But really, it's a cool place and if you're in Peru, check it out.

This is Larcomar, basically a mall that is the safest part of one of the safer districts of Lima, Miraflores. You could find it in America, except there wouldn't be all kinds of gun-toting guards there.

Inside Larcomar.

This is the presidential palace, in the Plaza de Armas, the Spanish square that is still used long after independence. If you can't see it there's a tank.

Another view of the palace from the neighboring church.

Downtown.

More downtown.

Approaching Chinatown.

Yes, there is a Chinatown in Peru, the largest in Latin America. It's just one street, but it's still a pretty unique place. Interestingly enough the Chinese that settled there were from the same province as those that came to California, so the cuisine is very similar.

Miraflores security. They don't joke around.

Cool little architectural flourish.

The view from a thousands-years old pyramid in the San Isidro district. This was July's cover.

Graffiti?

A stadium.

A park where a music video was being filmed.

A hedge.

This guy's tags were everywhere.

A roundabout statue.

Miraflores architecture.

Another view of the Plaza de Armas.

The taxi and bus dominated streets.

Peru's sick, like most of Latin America. Got to go down there again...

Cyburbia Notes: Jacobs vs. New Urbanism

2010-09-26T19:24:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I use the Cyburbia forums. And I link to this blog in my signature, so odds are if you're here you got to the blog from that forum. In any case, I'm only saying this disclaimer and calling this section 'Cyburbia Notes' because they're going to be thoughts on threads from Cyburbia.

This one is from a thread about Jane Jacobs that I started. Somehow New Urbanism was brought up, or I thought it was brought up, and I thought to myself, having just read Jane Jacobs' book, that she would hate the idea.

It sounds like it would be compatible with her views. To spread out a brief and probably ill-informed explanation of the movement, I believe it advocates creating walkable, urban neighborhoods. Well, here's why Jane wouldn't like it - it creates new urban neighborhood. It reminds me of San Jose's Santana Row, discussed in the post 'A City Neighborhood In Sprawl?'. The problem there was that the buildings were all the same age, etc. so that only one class of people could buy housing and only businesses able to support the cost of new construction would be able to afford the storefront space. So there's that.

In addition Jane would hate it because what really needs to be worked on are preexisting neighborhoods in cities. Suburbs are all well and good but are terrible for everything except the satisfaction of the consumer; making new ones, no matter how 'urban,' would be an exercise in siphoning people away from the city and thus counterproductive to Jane's goal of revitalizing cities.

The money spent building New Urbanist towns could be spent making older neighborhoods in existing cities more livable. In the sense that suburbs are doomed to die off as we run out of oil and cars become more costly to use, this is a waste both of money and time. There's my rant. If you haven't seen Cyburbia check it out, it's great.

Book Review: Jacobs' "Death and Life," part 4

2010-09-26T01:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, one more word about the book: after finishing the final section of chapters, it's easy to see why this book hasn't had the all-encompassing ramifications that Jane probably wanted to see: her solutions would require basically a complete restructure of city government (and federal and state urban policy) and a totally cleaning of the slate as far as planning theory. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen.

Not only that, but I believe that she sidestepped her own logic in arguing for this cataclysmic change - earlier in the book, she was a major proponent of gradual change as far as some urban ideas. I think that this is the best we can hope for in terms of any change in policy or government structure. Of course bureaucracy is terrible, and of course, like everyone else, powerful people make mistakes. But we can't expect everything to change overnight.

Anyway. Great book. READ.

Slugging

2010-09-25T18:31:00.000-07:00

So I have a list of blog topics that I compiled in case I couldn't think of anything to write. Well, I'm sick and totally bored, so I'll go into one of them now.

Washington DC is a unique city (in the USA at least): it's the US capital, it exists in two states and a federal district, it's one of the great black cities of the nation, it spends more money on education than any other city and still has terrible test results, and it has a ridiculous number of police agencies, to name a few reasons. Another is the way some people commute.

I think Jane Jacobs would like this one, as it is wholly organic and results in less cars on the road - the practice of 'slugging' occurs because of high-speed carpool lanes and two facts about them: simply that they are much faster ways to get into the city, and also require that drivers have more than one person in the car to use them.

What are single commuters to do? If they want to take advantage of the lanes they need to be in a car with other people, but if for some reason they don't know anyone they can carpool with they would have to resort to commuting with strangers in order to use them. Well, given the situation, that's exactly what happened.

There are rules - no talking about certain topics, for example - but the heart of slugging is that a driver picks up complete strangers that share nothing necessarily except for the need to go into the city. Riders line up on sidewalks and drivers just drive by and pick them up. Here's a website that details the practice - http://www.slug-lines.com/. As it says on the website, it is a practice that wasn't started by the government but instead resulted from the ingenuity of the masses. As such, I think it's pretty cool.

Let's be honest, though - it's basically an evolved form of hitchhiking. There's nothing new about it, except that the class of people involved in the process are workers instead of hippies, and it is rigidly organized - see the website.

What can we learn from this? Well, it's pretty basic. If there is a downtown that people commute to from outlying areas, we might as well introduce slug lines. Of course this would have to be accompanied by carpool lanes, or even roads that have nothing BUT carpool lanes (thus really pushing slug lines to form).

Let's use the Bay Area as an example, because I know what's basically going on there. A major commuting artery is the Bay Bridge; there are carpool lanes, but let's say they were extended to two instead of one, making commuting without a partner or partners very difficult in comparison to slugging. Pretty soon, if slug lines were artificially introduced on certain streets, the practice might catch on.

Why do this? Less cars on the road, more bang for the gas buck, etc. It's a win-win for those who do it, and, if normal traffic were to be leaned on and made less desirable than giving rides to strangers, it would be a loss for those who didn't slug.

As we run out of fuel it may be that slugging is one arrow in the quiver of solutions. Instead of getting rid of traffic, infuse it with riders so that it is not as wasteful environmentally. Sounds like a good idea to me. Later

Book Review: Jacobs' "Death and Life," part 3

2010-09-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

Skipped a few days in getting to this; oh well. I don't really feel like reviewing the whole rest of the book, so let me just say this - it is excellent. If you ever want to understand anything about cities, you could do worse than to pick this up. You will be overwhelmed with theory, but that's the point; Jane doesn't mince words.

The bottom line is that while I hesitate to say this is the most important book ever written about cities, it probably is, and for good reason. The points inside root for the little guy, and that's who we should never forget. May it influence urban issues for generations to come.

Cityscape: Shanghai

2010-09-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

To break up the US-centric week I seem to be having, here are some pictures from across the larger pond in China.

China was my third trip out of the country and was very different than anything before it. I ended up traveling alone and barely getting by with a combination of my Chinese and the kindness of strangers, which was prevelant. I saw a lot in Shanghai, but didn't have the camera I do now. Oh well. Here are some flicks.

A whole new world.

A semi-phallic lineup of Shanghai's leading architectural feature, TV Tower, and some other building. I'm that mature.

A hotel by the river with the tower in the background

This sculpture is trippy. Trip out

People's Square is the massive park in the middle of the city.

More People's.

I didn't understand the pictorial signage until I was back in the US. And I felt dumb.

This is the bullet train that takes you from eastern Shanghai to PDX airport. It banks on its turns and goes so fast that every time you pass a pillar it's like you almost died.

This guy was someone important, probably...

These four shots were taken on the Pudong side of the river, looking towards downtown.

Shanghai subway, the all-around best one I have ever ridden.

An amphitheater park in People's Square. No doubt many a pro-Mao rally has gone down here.

A view of a Jiangwan Town sunset over the Fudan foreign dorms. They all looked like this, and I can only assume it was because the air was terrible. This was June's cover.

Shanghai was crazy and I'll take a minute here to go into why. Everything was so cheap; we went clubbing all the time and had a hell of a time - with each other. Eventually I felt like I was missing something, and I can say that after I dropped out of the school and began traveling around Shanghai I felt like the world had opened its hands to me. It's one thing to skateboard to class; it's another to be pulled along on said skateboard by a dentally challenged man in a rickshaw who doesn't speak your language but understands the basic principles of fun. I met a lot of people and blew my world away in Shanghai. So thanks.

That said Shanghai kind of sucks. I could stand to be there for a while but I couldn't sign up for an extended period of time, it's hard to explain why. If you've got the choice, just go to Hong Kong.

Car Dungeons II

2010-09-19T12:39:00.000-07:00

I had previously (in the first post of this blog) advocated the building of 'bridge' buildings above cars, creating a 'second-story' city. The idea is that, as cars drove into the downtowns, the roads they were driving on would stay at the same level, and cities would be built above them; cars would exist in a world of darkness and parking garages, and the streets (if there were streets; a city landscape without cars would be free for experimental design) would be above them.

Well, I'm still advocating the car dungeon idea, but thinking realistically it would make more sense to tunnel under existing streets than it would to build on top of them. Boston's Big Dig is an example of this type of construction. For one thing, as in the bridge idea, the city owns the land as roads are public property (I assume). In this scenario, though, the construction would rip up and tunnel under the streets, not merely build above.

The benefits of this idea, besides the elimination of cars on the urban surface, would be that modern architectural techniques would still be able to be used, instead of new pillar-based architecture being built for the 'second-story' city to sit on top of cars. Also it wouldn't require a major shift in urban layout necessarily. Things could continue as normal above, with streets being converted to parks or street vending areas, and buildings with first-story retail wouldn't have to be converted to second-story retail. Really, tunneling under just makes a lot more sense.

So this is more probable food for thought - dig under downtowns, put parking garages down there with escalators to the street etc, and live without cars putting such a damper on urban space. I don't know, I think it would be a good idea. More Jane tomorrow in any case, peace

Book Review: Jacobs' "Death and Life," part 2

2010-09-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

As alluded to in yesterday's post, this will be a multi-part deconstruction of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by the awesome Jane Jacobs. I'm going to skip the introduction and talk about the first three chapters of the first part; namely, the three about sidewalks.

Immediately post-introduction Jacobs makes an excellent, should-be-obvious point: if we speak of a neighborhood being dangerous, we're usually not talking about the inside of buildings; we may be speaking of a public park, but unless a neighborhood is unsafe even to drive through we are largely speaking of how dangerous its sidewalks are. As such a vision of public space is brought into focus - besides the occasional wander into parks or plazas, public space is sidewalks.

From this basic observation Mrs. Jacobs writes, yes, three chapters purely about sidewalks and their 'uses.' These are in some ways my favorite chapters in the book, not only because they are full of common sense but also because they are more accessible and less complex than later, thicker portions of the text (and it does get thick).

The points of each chapter are interrelated and overlap, but they don't waste words. Jane argues that, contrary to the 'tragedy of the commons' or whatever the title is of that bullshit theory is, strangers and their interactions or at least close proximity to each other create safety, both for young and old, and make a community stronger. She argues that 'shallow relationships,' the bane of many people who struggle to find true friends in large cities, are the glue of the cities themselves.

She does this by breaking it down step by logical step, and leaves very few stones unturned in that regard. I could see these three chapters standing alone, compressed, as a New Yorker article, or being expanded into a book called 'Sidewalks' with a subtitle and real-life examples of neighborhoods and streets where these practices work (not that Jane doesn't use examples). The fact that this section comprises 59 pages and no more is testament to the fact that she is not wasting space, and has bigger plans. And really, compared to the stuff later in the book, this stuff is arithmetic.

However it's sad, in a way, that the only way these chapters would be read would be after someone had committed to reading the entire book. If these existed by themselves, and were, say, online or something, it would be much easier for these concepts to be absorbed by the world of planning. So, once again, you should read this book, even just the first few chapters. It's really something special. More tomorrow.

Book Review: Jacobs' "Death and Life," part 1

2010-09-17T19:34:00.000-07:00

This book, whose full title is 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities,' written by Jane Jacobs (and according to her, Ben Franklin somehow?), is so much an integral text in urban planning that if you're reading this blog right now and you haven't read it you should get someone to slap you. Even if you don't care about US cities you should read it - the issues she discusses should apply anywhere.

Anyway, Jacobs is a genius, mostly in the field of observation; this book lays it on really thick about things you knew, but never could put your finger on - well, Jane's finger is very 'on' all of them. She draws a lot of lines between disparate concepts and basically...I don't know how to describe it. The way her mind works is fucking amazing.

I think this was the third book I read about cities - the first, by happenstance, were City, by Douglas Rae, about the history of New Haven (excellent long-term study) and Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta, about Bombay (shortlisted for the Pulitzer and now being adapted into a movie?) - these are good books and survived the last time I decided I hated urban planning and sold half of my books (oh god, the regret...). But if I had to sell every book I owned and could only keep one, it would be this, Jane Jacobs' first opus.

This is my second time reading through "Death and Life," and my first time taking notes. The first time I was blown away, but after a while I kind of forgot what it had been about, and my vision of her was marred. A criticism leveled at Jacobs is that she overestimates the role of city planners and assumes that they have full control of their cities, when the truth is that the ability of anyone (save Robert Moses) to affect a city is usually marginal. After I heard that I was kind of turned off to her, and let the book gather dust.

After I cut my ties to urban issues earlier this year, and decided to get back into it, I thought I would read some of my favorite books over again (others include The Transit Metropolis by Robert Cervero and The Ungovernable City by Douglas Yates) to see if I could glean more info out of them. So I cracked Jane's book again, and was blown away all over again.

Bottom line: this book kicks so much ass that it accomplishes in a few chapters what whole books can beat around the bush about in 300 pages; theory is smeared into the pages; a pleasant walk through NYC this is not. READ THIS BOOK!! Especially if you want to get involved with planning or other urban concerns.

If you haven't noticed, I got this far without saying what the book is ABOUT. Well, I will do so, but not in a spot paragraph where I talk about the basics and let it go. No, not for Jane. I'll be reviewing it in chunks, small enough so that some of her most important points can be revealed but of course I'll be holding back much of it because really YOU SHOULD READ IT!!! I've got a concert to go to, but I'll start tomorrow. Hasta manana

The Sports Team Theory

2010-09-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

To make an extension of the "airport theory" previously postulated on this blog (misleadingly posted under 'The Airport Theory'), we might say that the larger a city is, the more major airports it will have. This theory, like the sports team theory, has its problems.

In regards to the above statement, it makes little sense to say that Mexico City is less of a city than the Bay Area because it has two major airports and the Bay has three. It's just plain wrong; due to history and economics, that's just how the cookie has crumbled, nothing more. New York is much, much larger than the Bay Area and also has only three airports. Los Angeles, however, is served by 5 (LAX, Burbank, Ontario, Long Beach and Orange County). Would this make LA more important than NYC? No. This theory, at least as a way of judging cities, sucks.

However it is useful to note how many airports a metropolitan area has. If it has one and it doesn't handle an extreme amount of traffic (or is a 'hub' which sees lots of through traffic), we can say the city isn't incredibly large and/or important on the world stage. If it has more than one, though, we can pretty much deduce that it's a big deal. A quick Google Earth glance at the US reveals few cities with more than one airport. We have a few with two - Chicago, which as the third largest city in the States I am surprised doesn't have three, a trifecta of Florida cities - Miami, Tampa and Orlando, and Washington DC, which might have three but one is way out in Baltimore. If you count Providence, RI as part of Boston, which the US census does, then so does Boston. Interestingly enough, the only ones with three are cities which show up often in the top five lists of metropolitan areas in size = NYC(#1) and the Bay Area (#4 by my count, but I'm biased). Los Angeles(#2), being the huge soul-eating monster it is, clocks in two heads above all others.

What does this say? LA is spread out, NYC's three heavily trafficked airports mark it as a heavyweight, and the Bay Area...well I don't really know why the Bay needed three airports. Anyway. That's the Airport Theory 2.

The Sports Team Theory is similar both in its issues and its simplicity. Basically its hypothesis is that cities with more sports teams are more important/larger than other cities with less teams.

Let's look at a few cities as examples, starting with the Bay which is what I'm most familiar with. We have, in baseball, the Giants and the As; in football, the Raiders and the 49ers; in basketball, the Golden State Warriors; and in hockey, the San Jose Sharks. Hot damn, that's six teams. A lot, right?

The answer is yes, that is a lot: the only metro area to have more is the NYC area, which has the Yankees and Mets in baseball; Jets and Giants in football; Islanders, Rangers and New Jersey Devils in the NHL; and the Knicks and Nets in the NBA. That's a solid nine teams, befitting to the economic and cultural powerhouse that it is. And as far as the Los Angeles area, we have the Dodgers and the Angels for baseball; the Lakers and the Clippers for basketball; and the Ducks and the Kings in the NHL. LA has six, like the Bay Area, but by an anomaly - it is a massive area, but has no NFL football team to speak of, two having left to regroup in other cities (one being the Raiders, which Oakland seized by eminent domain, another story).

Without listing them, Chicago clocks in at 5 teams, while Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Miami, the Twin Cities, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Washington DC each have four. Many cities have three, including Toronto, one of three Canadian cities to be included in US leagues. I could go on listing stuff for a while, but I won't.

Again, interestingly enough, we have Chicago, New York, LA and the Bay Area ahead of the curve. These cities are, strangely enough, what I would measure as the four largest in the States. I'm kind of surprised by the results, but there you go.

Cities with one or two teams are probably not the most vital cities in the nation; with three you're getting there, and the ones with four are without fail major centers of their respective regions. And the big ones are, well, the big cities. Anyway, food for thought. I'm tired, good night.

The Great SF Reshuffle of 89

2010-09-14T09:37:00.000-07:00

What do I mean by 'reshuffle?' Well, 1989 was the year of a major natural disaster in the Bay Area, the Loma Prieta earthquake. I'm not all too familiar with the extent of the damage in the rest of the greater Bay, but I do know that it put huge holes in the downtown of my city of Santa Cruz, and that it contributed to one of the greatest changes in San Francisco's waterfront to ever occur.

The story dates back to the 1950s, when an extensive freeway system was proposed that would both serve and cut up San Francisco, destroying many neighborhoods and even going through Golden Gate Park! Needless to say, residents were not happy with this and put up a fight; this time, the NIMBYs won (thank god), and the freeways were never built.

Except for one. Construction had already begun on 480, and by the time the 'freeway revolt' had been successful enough road for a few stops had already been built. It started at the entrance to the Bay Bridge and, when construction was stopped, terminated in Chinatown. Well that's all good, right? One freeway through the city can't be that bad, one might say.

And San Franciscans who remember 480 would probably disagree. This specific stretch of freeway had the side effect of creating what Jane Jacobs calls a 'border vacuum,' or an obstacle to neighborhood growth and vitality. As you can see in the picture below, the Ferry building was basically walled in by the freeway, invisible from downtown. 480 was an eyesore and, because of the border vacuum, created unsavory neighborhoods on the waterfront. But shit, it was a freeway; what are you going to do, rip it down? That would cost a lot of dough.

Enter mother nature. The 1989 earthquake managed to do half of the work for the demolition crew - it rocked 480 to the ground. Costs were going to be roughly the same (supposedly) to rebuild the freeway OR to cart the debris away and finish the job. The city opted to remove the unpopular road completely, and that stretch of the SF waterfront turned into the Embarcadero, a pleasant drive and walk that connected the rest of SF to the open bay. A happy ending, ignoring all the property and other damage done by the earthquake. The story was I believe discussed in a book by Jaime Lerner entitled Urban Acupuncture (translated title) that I have; it's in Portuguese and I don't know the language yet, so I can't say what his comments are exactly, but the fact that Lerner thinks highly of this says something in and of itself.

Anyway. There's a little Bay history for you. In the third picture you can see the Ferry plaza, which is exactly in front of the Ferry Building and thus right where 480 used to be. You can draw your own conclusions from this story, because I'm tired and don't feel like writing anymore. I'll see you later.

Cityscape: The Bay Area

2010-09-13T10:20:00.001-07:00

This Northern California metropolis is my home and I have traveled it extensively. Here are some pictures I've taken over the years.

Santa Cruz is my place of birth and my life's residence at this point. It's a more or less freethinking little hippie city with a fair amount going on. There's a college and that is reflected in the music and book stores, although the nightlife sucks. Yuppies have staged a hostile takeover but now that the economy's bad things are easing off on that front.

On the other end of the cool spectrum is Palo Alto, which despite also being a college town has little to speak of in the way of culture. This park got a major makeover so this is a throwback shot.

Berkeley is awesome; another college town, this place is a culture hotspot. Known as the US entry point of LSD and for its liberal politics during the Vietnam war, this city is one of the more famous in the Bay.

Oakland is really cool, but parts of it are really sketchy. A drive down International Boulevard, which cuts through several neighborhoods, can be an interesting experience. But as a majority African American city it has culture that is unique in many ways.

Monterey isn't statistically considered part of the Bay Area, but it's close enough. Cannery Row is the area John Steinbeck wrote about and has some stuff going on even though it's touristed out.

San Jose is spread like butter over the Santa Clara valley, but downtown is alright. I believe it's more sprawly than LA. This is a view of the Tech Museum, which I visited a few times as a kid and is cool for what it is.

Houses on the beach in Pacifica, a little south of SF.

Mountain View's downtown is alright. Nuff said.

There's a town north of the city where they tear down the highway signs telling you where to turn - it's a cool place, really cool, but I don't want to blow it out.

This is CalTrain, the public transit artery between San Jose and San Francisco. Just a train, true, but it's a great place to spot graffiti from as you roll.

And now, San Francisco. This is a view from Coit Tower, which Bill O'Reilly threatened to bomb and most San Franciscans apparently aren't familiar with.

Chinatown. One fifth of SF's 800,000 people are Chinese; damn.

Haight Ashbury is known as the hippie capital of the world; well it's not anymore, really, but it is cool and houses Amoeba Music, once the largest CD store in the world and still fucking huge.

This is Union Square, which suffers from high rents and thus monotonous businesses. Still a really cool neighborhood.

This is the Ribbon of Light, which runs down a stretch of the Embarcadero, a waterfront boulevard with an interesting urban history. Maybe I'll post that soon.

This is a sign that kind of 'symbolizes' the Castro, SF's gay hood. I had one for North Beach, the historically Italian neighborhood, but it got lost.

Downtown SF on Market. Very alive and pretty sketchy at night; this was on New Year's, though, so it was crowded and not too bad.

Here's a MUNI station downtown. SF is served by two rail systems (three if you count CalTrain), impressive for a city that is by itself relatively small.

A lit-up building on NYE. I love SF, I really do and hope to go to college there soon.

The Bay Area is supposedly the fourth or fifth largest city in the United States, and it's fucking awesome. I seriously consider it in my favorite urban areas, and am so blessed to be from such a vibrant, multicultural place. And that's that.

A City Neighborhood In Sprawl?

2010-09-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

It's been a few months, but I'm back, at least for one post. This one's about Santana Row, an attempt at recreated an urban milieu in the sprawl of San Jose, California. It's all new construction and is next to and somehow related to a giant mall; so, does this attempt at recreating what I'm guessing is a Paris-type urban model succeed?

Flat answer: no. But it really is a valiant effort. Why does it not succeed? For that we can go back to old Jane Jacobs.

Jane theorized that in order to be a real live neighborhood, a piece of city must have old and new buildings, so that different classes of business can exist. Santana Row does not, and because of this is populated with chains and almost nothing else (restaurants excluded).

What could be done differently? I'm not really sure. But when Santana Row becomes older and run-down, maybe it will be something cool. For now it's just too much too soon. Here are some photos, peace

Urban Planning Blues

2010-07-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Why I stopped posting and really caring about urban issues is just that it seems as though urban planners don't have that much of an ability to change the urban fabric. Zoning and ordinances are one thing - actually being able to change things is another, whether it's the wellbeing of a neighborhood or anything else. Of course I'm not sure if I'm right in that. But then I came to the realization that I care enough about these things that I should still do the blog, and keep involved in the community. After all, we have to try, right? Anyway, I'm back.

Cityscape: Montreal

2010-07-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

Well it's been two straight weeks with no posts; maybe you thought the blog was dead. I did too, for reasons I'll outline in the next post. First, though, let me give you a window into another one of my favorite cities in the whole world, Montreal.

I spent a week or so in Montreal and was so bummed when I had to leave. Far from being an interesting city I could probably never live in, Montreal is amazing and I could easily see settling down for a few months here (not in the winter though). Between here, Paris and Tunisia I see good reason for me to try to learn French. It's got that kind of draw. Anyway here are some flicks.

This is my favorite photo I took on the trip. Something about the painting, I don't know.

More art.

...and more art. There was a lot of it, everywhere, which I thought was amazing.

This is the Olympic stadium Montreal had built for its winter games. Sort of a ghost town now, but there's a great artificial environment exhibit here.

This is what the front of many Montreal houses looks like. It's supposed to be quaint or something.

This is some college or something.

The menu of a random restaurant where we enjoyed some poutine - fries covered with cheese and gravy. Mmmmm...

Yet more art.

Huge art.

Chinatown - much larger than I expected.

Even larger art - the whole side of a building. I love it.

Some weird, wet architecture.

Old Montreal fountain.

A church in OG Montreal.

City hall.

A magic show in the main Old Montreal square.

They like beer here.

This bandaid was someone's tag and was really cool.

These penguins were in the gay neighborhood, the village. Like most gay neighborhoods it was pretty vibrant. We happened to stay close and it was pretty cool.

An AIDS mural in the village.

The village metro stop.

A creepy statue to top things off.

Montreal is totally legit - to think the only reason we really came here was that I lost my passport and Canada was one of the only places I could go without it. Things worked out, I guess. I love you Montreal, I'll be back.

Book Review: Rubble

2010-07-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a disclaimer: if you are Jeff Byles, stop reading this and go write another book. You've got a good voice and we need more books on urban issues.

If you're not Jeff Byles, well, this book...it's not that it's written poorly or anything, it's more that the subject matter seems trivial and I felt like I was wasting my time reading it. I thought from the Mike Davis quote on the back that it would be somewhat theoretical, but it's more just a history of the trade. Which is cool, but I find myself overwhelmed by the fact that I don't really care about the personalities and landmarks of demolition. Of course if that sounds interesting to you, by all means go for it.

I don't feel like doing a long post so I'll leave it at that. Bottom line: a little boring.

If you haven't noticed(well, I don't think anyone reads this so it's more of a tree falling in an empty forest thing), I've been slacking on posting as of late. Truth is I'm kind of burned out on urban theory right now. But I'll come around and get full into it again, and I'll try to keep updating it during the interim anyway. Oh and I'm changing the cover from Shanghai to Lima to celebrate the passing of the first month during the blog; it hasn't been around for a month, it's just the first time a month has changed while it's been up. Anyway take it easy,

Fresh

DIY

2010-06-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

While there really is no comparison when it comes to the seriousness of the rural poverty and inadequate housing that result in slums and the minor annoyance that skatepark helmet laws pose, there are similarities in the way shantytowns and DIY (Do It Yourself) skateparks pop up. Both are simple land grabs, and both have a logic that cuts through bureaucracy and indeed is a result of bureaucratic inefficiency: if you won't give it to us, fuck that, we're taking it. I just want to show that the policy of taking land for a use that it isn't legally meant for occurs in first world countries as well as third, even if there aren't many slums in the US these days.

Skateboarding is a sport that utilizes the underside of the city - the urban form itself. And it feeds off of the mistakes of urban planning, specifically areas that are underutilized by pedestrians, the waste-of-space plaza and blight itself. But a skatepark, being a place where skateboarding is meant to be done, undercuts this and creates a place where skateboarders can do their thing without being bothered by cops or security guards. It's a perfect marriage of a countercultural sport and a culture that needs everything to be put into little boxes...right?

Wrong. The strange fact of the matter is that skateparks are the most likely place that a skateboarder will get a ticket at. Far from being a solution, the concept of a skatepark, at least in California and many other states in the USA, causes a problem for skaters. Stay on the streets, or risk getting a ticket?

There is, however, a solution. Washington Street in San Diego, pictured above, is an example of a skatepark that wasn't meant to be: skaters found an abandoned spot under a freeway, got some bags of concrete, and started building. By the time the city found out what was happening the concrete was set, and the park was going to be expensive to take out. Eventually the city decided to let it stay, and didn't even enact helmet laws, which in Southern California is something.

The same tactic is used to much different ends in the third world. Land grabs here are about survival, not recreation. While these two are completely different, I thought the whole concept of DIY parks worthy of a post. So there you go.

UN Habitat Best Practices

2010-06-30T12:22:00.000-07:00

Just found this website, home of the official UN Habitat awards for the best programs regarding living conditions. Most of these are urban ideas and cover various topics like poverty eradication and economic development, but the concepts stretch to rural infrastructure and also address things like gender rights. The practices come from all over the world, from developed and developing nations(mostly the latter), and there's some pretty cool stuff in the database. I'm going to have to sit down and spend some time hunting through these, because this is exactly the kind of stuff that gets me going.

Cityscape: Monaco

2010-06-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

I was in Paris for a few days and decided that I would be missing out if I didn't give at least one of those days up to travel; instead of lurking in the City of Lights the whole time I took a train down to Marseille. When I got there I poked around and then realized that I really wanted to go to Monaco, which would require blowing most of my France budget on yet another ticket. It was kind of worth it; oh well. Here's a bunch of shots from the legendary wealthy city-state, most without comments cuz there's not much to say.

This is the train station. It is super modern while the stops leading up to it are very small and dinky. Huge contrast.

The yacht harbor. Packed.

This is Nice, a French city just outside of the 'Co that I liked the best out of anywhere I went on this trip. And considering how much I liked Paris and Marseille, that's saying something.

Bottom line, it wasn't worth going to Monaco. Besides the cars, the boats and the upkeep of construction, if you're not going to the casino and are just there to scope, there's not much to scope.

Bringing Urban Theory to Shantytowns

2010-06-25T16:52:00.000-07:00

Some ridiculous percentage of people worldwide live in shantytowns, or slums. As much as it is a problem, it is also a natural evolution of urbanism. Irregular parcels – pieces of land on hills, around rivers and or in other spots that a structure is hard to build on – are more or less ignored by the construction industry (although the Tokyo subway used them ingeniously when building a line). Shanty dwellers, who are too poor to live anywhere in the city proper, can’t be picky when it comes to real estate, and pick up the scraps of a city’s land. While the logic of this makes it unlikely that the location pattern of slums will change much, architects and urban planners can offer assistance in building the structures and communities, and try to make these better places to live if people are going to live in them.

Instead of leaving the poor to scrounge up whatever material they can find to make shelter, what if cities (or charities) actively handed out building material that the prospective slumdweller could make a house out of? We could take this further and suggest that architectural support be given to people building, whether in the form of an architect on site or just easy to follow directions for common house shapes. Surely some charity could supply easy-assembly structures that could be set up as houses. And having on-site architects, while it seems far-fetched, could also happen - what if architecture students went to the slums and helped people build? It could be a sort of volunteer job that would pad resumes, and at the same time give the students valuable field experience building a different structure every week or so.

Additionally, supplying the people in the slums with the materials and expertise to build their own basic infrastructure would result in much better functioning settlements. A similar program was in place in post-WWII Japan; the municipal government was unable to provide sewage and water systems to some areas heavy hit by combat, and so farmed the job out to the residents of the areas themselves. The program was a success and much of these systems were able to function adequately if temporarily.

As far as planning, if slums appear to be chaotic in their property lines and patterns, it is possible that, working closely with the new inhabitants, a big-picture plan could be formed and adopted that will help the urban fabric to be more functional. I see a similar university program for urban planning students, providing entry-level planners with hands-on experience, and at the same time hopefully helping those living in slums.

These are ideas that probably have been thought up before, but if they haven’t then I’m glad to put them forward. A slum doesn’t have to be cheaply built, or built without a plan (although credit is due to the architects that are building now, who build mostly on irregular parcels and are able to make something solid out of basic materials). If it’s helpful to have help from a government or NGO when building in a shantytown, this help should be extended to the people that need it.

TED Talk - Jaime Lerner Sings of the City

2010-06-25T05:14:00.001-07:00

I was looking up info on this man and found this - it's worth checking out. He discusses sustainability and has a great angle - nothing we do outside of taking cars off the road is really helping the world. He gets the audience to clap along while he chants more than sings, and it's a good primer for what Curitiba is and how it works. But you should read the article I posted two days ago as well. Click below

Jaime Lerner Sings of the City

The Airport Theory

2010-06-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

In a metropolitan area like the San Francisco – Oakland – San Jose conurbation, arguments about where the city ends and begins are rampant. In the seven or eight core counties you can find a ring of cities around the bay, and many of the outlying areas, like my home town of Santa Cruz, depend heavily on these cities for commuter work, and their citizens for tourism on the weekends. So, is Santa Cruz part of the bay area? It would appear to be, as it leeches off of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties specifically. The government has recognized this, and includes us in the official statistical area for the Bay Area. But the fact that arguments like this still happen shows us that there isn’t much agreement about how far inclusion in a metropolitan area goes.

The constant joke of Los Angelenos saying ‘Oh I’m from Torrance, not LA’ does little to dissuade most people from considering Torrance to be LA. If you live in, say, Burlingame, you are probably more likely to tell a stranger you live near San Francisco than try to explain exactly where Burlingame is. Where are these lines? Where does one stop saying ‘I’m from the Bay Area’ and begin to say ‘I’m from a town NEAR the Bay Area?’

Personally I have always thought that you can gauge the limits of a metropolitan area by its airports. In the US the Federal Aviation Administration has a classification system that is useful for this – airports are designated as L (Large Hubs), M (Medium Hubs), S (Small Hubs) or N (Non-Hubs) depending on the percentage of US travel done at the airport. For example LAX is tagged as L because it carries upwards of 30 million people a year, over 1% of all US flights; Arcata Airport, serving the Humboldt County micropolitan area, is classified N because it carries about a 3000th of that. However the Arcata Airport serves an important purpose – while it is a tiny airport, it is the fastest way to get from the Humboldt area to the locations served: LA, San Francisco and Sacramento (additionally there are flights to two nearby cities). Arcata is unquestionably not part of the Bay Area; a map could tell you that. But so does the role of its airport.

Let’s look at the Bay Area, the easiest example for me since I’m from there (as I will prove). It has two Medium and one Large Hub airports (Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco). The only other airports that operate passenger service in the vicinity are Santa Rosa and Monterey; these are Non-Hubs, and are able to operate because of tourism to the Wine Country and Monterey Peninsula. However there is an important difference between these two – Santa Rosa has flights only to destinations outside of the Bay Area, while Monterey has a flight connecting it to San Francisco. Because there is a flight to the Bay Area from Monterey, we can deduce that we are not IN the Bay Area.

In most major American cities, we can find at least one Large Hub. My hypothesis is that towns that have airports with flights that go to these Ls are not part of the metropolitan area. Even a non-hub like Santa Rosa doesn’t run flights to an airport you could just as easily drive to.

I’m sure there are all kinds of holes in this idea, but it might help to settle some of these squabbles. In Santa Cruz, we have to use one of the three Bay Area airports to get around; we have no airport of our own. Therefore, we are on equal footing with the rest of the Bay population. Take that naysayers.

Curitiba's Closet Skeleton

2010-06-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

If you're not familiar with the city of Curitiba, Brazil, you should be. It's the one with the bus system that runs (or ran, not sure) with the efficiency of the NYC subway and has recycling programs etc. that serve as models for urban planners everywhere. Or you could just read this NY Times article here: Recycle City

If you read the whole thing you will have a view of the city that at least I didn’t for a long time. Jaime Lerner, an urban planner that I put up in the same leagues of genius as Jane Jacobs, is truly a remarkable man in his ability to think urban thoughts, and the fact that he has implemented them is admirable. I hold him in very high esteem, and this has not been dampened by the content of this piece.

But Curitiba’s history is not all sustainability and efficiency, apparently; basically, to skip to the conclusion of the article, Lerner was put into power by Brazil’s military coup. His first two terms as Curitiba’s mayor were not democratically decided. He was, at first, essentially an arm of the dictatorship.

Now a dictator is a dictator, but a benevolent dictator is certainly preferable if you have to have one. And that is what Mr. Lerner was, to the extent that it is even fair to compare him to a dictator at all. He certainly wanted a livable city. Early in his career he converted his downtown into a pedestrian mall, and later built the world-famous bus system and instituted programs that would clean up the city as well as give people jobs. It is hard to imagine his motivations being anything other than altruistic.

But the odds of anyone being able to implement policies like his in a democracy are slim. A proposal to take most of a road away from cars to put in a physically separated public transit system probably wouldn’t get past the drawing board in most US cities. Drivers would be outraged, and drivers vote. In retrospect it makes perfect sense that his early policies were implemented not through public approval, but by big brother’s hand; otherwise, his ideas might have remained just that – ideas, and nothing more.

However, it is arguable that the world is a better place because of the implementation of these thoughts. Curitiba has stood as a model for green cities everywhere, and has certainly inspired many urban planners and mayors around the world to get off their asses and make similar things happen. What, then, does that say about big brother and urban planning?

What if the dictatorship’s idea of appointing an urban thinker as mayor was a good move? What if the only way to get something done is to do it without having to listen to the public? In the case of Robert Moses, who while operating in a democracy essentially had complete power over highways and parks in New York City, this went horribly wrong. But in Lerner’s it went amazingly right. Curitiba is known as a ‘first world city in a third world country.’ And none of it would have been possible without big brother. The collective we gains something through the democratic process. But maybe, when it comes to the big picture, we lose something too. This extremely thin line is one that is normally considered too thin to fool around with. But if we look at the case of Curitiba, we can see that occasionally big brother does something good.

All this is spinning my moral compass in circles. Would it be better to have urban planning and city administration run as a less democratic system, with urban planners in control of it all as Lerner was in Curitiba? Regardless of the answer, this question is one that will not be received positively in any democracy. Dictatorship has ruined untold lives, but here in Brazil one happened to make a city and the world a better place.

Cityscape: Boston

2010-06-22T18:09:00.000-07:00

I have an apology to make: sorry for all the times I told people you suck, Boston. Looking at these pictures made me recall that the trip really wasn't that bad. I think the city's just got too many bricks for me, and the brick overload got to me (I'm located in California, where bricks are more or less illegal). Anyway, here are some flicks from said trip.

Many cities have a huge building where you get a panoramic view that slides over the horizon; well, Boston has one. Here are a few large-scale shots of the city.

This is what a fair amount of sidewalks look like in the city, with variances due to age and other factors. Or at least a few were like this.

Cool little fountain.

Cool big fountain.

I think these are metro stops.

The fabled North End, a favorite subject of Jane Jacobs' in Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was cool to see what she was talking about; the man below obviously found it overwhelming in its relevance.

This is a mural in Cambridge, which it seemed had even more bricks than Boston. It was cool, but as far as university towns go kind of tame.

The gateway to Boston's small Chinatown.

The kind of thing Jane would hate - a barely-inhabited park in the middle of what I think is a civic center. I think I was a little sketched out because I took the picture with my phone.

The T, Boston's not-so-rapid transit system. Let's just say it's in need of a major overhaul.

I didn't get a pic of the big dig, either, but I think we walked over it on the way to the port park area. Boston's interesting - it's no New York in its sheen and hustle, but it's got its own vibe and is certainly a healthy city. I could never live there, but it holds its own as an East Coast metropolis.

The City As a Web of Needs

2010-06-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

Too often the urban milieu is compared to chaos. Indeed, it may be hard to see the order in something so incomprehensively huge and constantly shifting as a metropolis. Although it would almost be more convenient if it were actually chaotic, and did not warrant efforts to have it make sense, the fact remains that it is not chaos. There is order even to the largest city, and it can be mapped in just as many fashions. One method of comprehension I have been toying with lately is that of the city as a vast web of human need.

As far as I can tell, humans have five basic needs: a need to consume air, a need to consume solids and liquids, a need to make waste, a need to sleep, and a need for climate control. Of course there is the half-need of reproduction, and many auxiliary needs that today’s society forces on a population, but I believe these five control our lives and make the auxiliary needs relevant.

Breathing is a basic need and is satisfied by our merely being on this planet, as air is available in some form to all of Earth’s residents. Therefore it is a need that is easily satisfied, and because of this does not concern us here. But the other four needs each require, in cities, vast systems to satisfy mass amounts of people.

To begin with consumption of food and liquid, to address the needs of a metropolitan region we get plumbing systems, and intricate systems of food importing and growing. The need to make waste results in sewer systems and more plumbing. But the need to sleep and the need for climate control are two needs that combine to form a mass amount of the urban fabric in a city.

Obviously if the world were a perfect, habitable temperature no climate control would be needed for life. But it’s not. Surviving in some places, like Siberia, or the desert, requires something to regulate the temperature in order to support normal life. In many ways clothes address this need. In some ways they do not. When sleep is thrown into the mix we get a need for climate control that lasts an entire night, and if one is going to sleep in the same place every night than it is necessary for the climate control to essentially be permanent. These are the reasons we have residential housing (although an auxiliary need, the need to protect private property, is also addressed by this). All this is pretty basic, of course.

Complicating things is the fact that money is needed these days to support these needs (a lack of money results in a lack of these needs being adequately supported in most societies, although some in the first world are willing to prop up those who otherwise would not have access). Because of this we have a need to generate money, which explains business in general; businesses have needs for employees, a need for their own shelter, etc.

I’m not really going to go into this very far but you get the idea. By looking at the city in terms of needs, it is easy to explain many aspects of city life. Even park use and private purchases are easily explained by the needs to spend extra amounts of time and money. All this is just an idea, and maybe someone else has addressed it. But it certainly makes the city look a lot less like chaos, and more like the logical outcome of human life.

On The Nature of City-States

2010-06-20T20:36:00.001-07:00

As a conclusion to my excursion into the conceptual and literal forms of Hong Kong and related cities, I’m going to say a few words about the defining point of HK, the fact that it was, for most of its life, a city-state. It still is, to an extent: it and Macau operate surprisingly autonomously even while being under control of China. Anyway.

Many countries have primate cities, cities that contribute greatly to the country economically and hold much of its population. Some of these cities, such as Dublin or Seoul, loom incredibly large over their respective nations. A city-state, as far as I am concerned, is a country that has cut the fat of the countryside out, leaving the meat of the country’s population and economic activity and little else.

A city-state doesn’t have to squabble with the country over tariffs; as we have seen, this freedom ensures a solid currency. It doesn’t have to worry about internal migration; theoretically it can control immigration and grow how it wants to. It has many other benefits that put it apart from other kinds of nations. As far as I can see, being a city-state is a good thing. Why, then, are there so few in the world?

One answer is that city-states may find it difficult to form military might. Two of the three that are left, Monaco and Vatican City, are under the wings of France and Italy respectively. However Singapore, the third, has been able to assembly an army that is comparable to that of countries like New Zealand and Israel(!). Hong Kong, while somewhat defended by foreign powers until the turnover to China, did not develop any kind of army with which to defend itself from the 1997 takeover.

Another reason may be that some cities are just too good of a prize for any country to let go of. There was a theory that if Los Angeles were a city-state its economy would rank in the world’s top 20; it is hard to imagine the US giving it up, or alternatively not absorbing it if it were not already part of the union (although these days taking over a country just because wouldn’t play well on the international stage).

This brings up another reason – cities that remain states need to be economically vibrant. It’s true that the countryside can contribute much to the economy of a country, and often does; a city-state needs to be able to do without this in order to exist as its own entity. Rich Hong Kong, Monaco and Singapore are examples of this ability.

Also, it can be difficult for small cities to import all that they need. This includes food, water (if necessary), goods, and capital. It is no wonder that most city-states are also ports (Singapore ranks in the top 5 busiest in the world).

So here are some logical rules. A city-state must:
A – Be able to defend itself or have a larger country which is willing to defend it
B – Be capable of economic survival on its own
C – Have the ability to supply itself

These are pretty big obstacles to overcome. There are many countries, in fact, that cannot achieve these conditions. And land is scarce, or completely claimed in the world – I might predict that no true city-states will come into existence anytime soon. Most of them, and most micro-states, are relics from a bygone world where politics were not global but regional, and in small regions as well.

But although true city-states are on the slide, semi-city-states could see a resurgence. Military bases, like those of the US abroad, are examples of this. If a stable country were to purchase land and start a city-state, like Britain did with Hong Kong, it would be able to prop up this city with its own supply networks, economy and defenses. Small, remote pieces of national territory are fairly common – many former colonial powers have them, and the US has a collection, chief among them Hawaii out in the middle of the Pacific. If a country were to purchase a swath of barely habitable land on the African coast, say, and attempt to create a city, it might work.

Such a city would have to offer something unique to the region, if not the world. For example, an economically stable American or Chinese city in Africa, a shipping point for African resources out to the home country, might well prove a success. Let in immigrants, encourage relocation of people from the home country, encourage business with lazes-faire policies, etc. and you might have a new Hong Kong on your hands.

Again, this blog is about food for thought, so as ridiculous as this sounds it’s not really meant to be taken seriously. If it’s an interesting concept then I’ve done my job.

I’ve been trying to post a lot this first week and a half to give the site some content; from now one expect less frequent posts, to the tune of 2 or 3 a week. If you find yourself on this page and like it, drop me an email at allcity831@gmail.com. Later

Pushing Private Cars Out of Downtown

2010-06-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

Had a busy Saturday so no HK post today. Big one tomorrow. Thanks, nonexistant readership, for understanding. Here's a ramble about transit, enjoy.

Pushing Private Cars Out of Downtown

Environmental effects caused by car exhaust are well documented; sprawl is at the center of these issues. And yet sprawl is so entrenched in at least American urbanism that it would seem that there is nothing anyone can do about it – well, there has to be. Here’s one idea.

People with cars often drive them downtown, clogging up streets and generally taking up space. If we pull the rug out from under these people, and make private vehicle use downtown illegal, we can cause commuting to be a pain in the ass. People would have to drive somewhere, then take the train or a cab into the city.

If this were partnered with investments in transit infrastructure, making transit more widely available, it could influence people’s decisions about living close to stations, which has been a dream of urban planners’ forever. Buses, trains and cabs would become the only way to get in and out of town. I envision either massive parking lots at the edges of cities or people actually giving up driving. Something like this is going on in London I think, but I think that’s more of a ‘pay a fee to drive’ sort of thing. And in Curitiba the legendary Jaime Lerner forbid driving in the downtown, but that was any kind of transit, not just private I believe. I’m talking about straight up outlawing the practice of non-public transportation in a city.

There would be massive opposition to this kind of proposal, and the odds of such a measure being passed, for that reason, are low. Still, I’d like to think that someday we’ll all take trains from town to town and skip around in taxis in the city. Also, it would be even cooler if the taxis in the city were free, but I’m not sure that’s possible economically. And I’d like to see data on whether taxis are better as far as environmental impact. But it’s fun to dream…

Funnel Cities

2010-06-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong was lucky to get a position, from the 50s to the 80s, as the only entity able to trade with China. This ensured that huge amounts of international money and business would be drawn there, as China and the rest of the world would have to meet in this very small place and nowhere else. Of course, this type of situation occurs once in a blue moon (Venice I believe was once such a place for Italy), and would be hard to recreate to any success. Still, it might be worth trying.

Let’s say a government was trying to create a sort of buffer between it and the outside world, and use one urban area as that buffer. The idea is to make one city the funnel through which the world trades with that country. As in, the US doesn’t trade with the world. The world trades with Detroit, and Detroit trades with the US.

This would make Detroit somewhat of a Super Special Economic Zone; odds of this happening – practically nonexistent. But creating a sort of buffer city between a country and the outside world probably has other benefits as well, and might be worth looking into somewhere down the line during times of war etc. And look how well it treated Hong Kong; the place was popping for a long time. It would seriously improve the stakes of the entire city. Unrealistic, but it would be interesting to try.

Book Review: Hong Kong Edition

2010-06-17T14:52:00.001-07:00

China Syndrome
Continuing the series of blog posts with glancing relevance to Hong Kong, here are three short book reviews from memory. This one’s the story of SARS, a disease that broke out in Shenzhen I believe (haven’t read it in a while) and spread into China, lighting in Hong Kong and from there crashing hospitals all over the world. It’s highly engaging and an important reminder that every city needs to be prepared for the unprepared, especially in the form of disease outbreaks. It’s good, don’t have much more to say.

The Transition of China’s Urban Development
Last I saw on Amazon this book was worth $150, and I was trying to sell it for maybe a twentieth of that and no one would buy it (this was when I had given up urban planning two years ago). Well, good thing it didn’t sell because I would have regretted it. It’s a valuable collection of data on the ins and outs of State Owned Enterprises and Special Economic Zones. It’s actually about Shenzhen, but hey. If you want to learn something about China’s development patterns and want a heady read, check this one out. Well-written and informative.

World Cities Beyond the West
This is a collection of essays, each one focusing on a world city. The editors define a world city as one that functions within the global economy and would leave a vacuum if it were to fall off the earth (basically). There’s a chapter on Hong Kong as well as pieces on Cairo, Johannesburg, Bangkok and more. It’s a good read if a little dry, but provides insight into disparate cultures that otherwise is hard to find. The one on Cairo is nuts – hundreds of thousands of people living in cemeteries? What?

Something substantial tomorrow.

Currency and the City-State

2010-06-16T11:24:00.001-07:00

The United States’ civil war happened partially due to the dollar. The current Greece bailout situation was caused in no small part by the euro. The problem with these currencies, according to Jane Jacobs at least, is that they were applied to areas with very different economies. Greece slagged behind Germany, France, and the other European powers just as the South slagged behind the North. But it was not the fact that these areas were a little down on their luck that caused problems with the currency – it was the currency that caused the areas to be down on their luck.

Or so goes the Jacobsian logic put forth in either The Economy of Cities or Cities and the Wealth of Nations, I forget which. Currencies tend to serve the economies that use them that are doing the best, while slower regions fumble and are hurt by having to use the same denomination. Personally I believe that there should be, within reason, all kinds of currencies, and that huge regions like Europe and the States shouldn’t only have one. If you want to know why read those books, they’re good and you should probably read them anyway.

In whichever book she discusses such issues in, Jane waxes about city-states and how they can use their own currency as a check on their own economic failures; the theory is that a currency will automatically set tariffs and that sort of thing as the economy of a city ebbs and flows, thus getting rid of the need to set those tariffs artificially. Well, that sounds cool, but the examples she uses are old city-states in Europe and that kind of thing. Where, one might think reading it, has this actually worked?

Enter Hong Kong, and Singapore. Is it coincidence that two of the most prosperous Asian megacities are also states? I think not. I suspect that Hong Kong’s currency helped it float when times were bad (like the Asian financial crisis of the late 90s) and kept it booming during the good times. I’m not exactly sure on the science of it – ask Jane. But I remember enough of it to be influenced by her logic. Under this influence, my opinion is that a small, city-wide currency is not only preferable, but would be a very good thing, especially for an ailing city.

So here’s the idea – take a city, a small city maybe, and create a Special Currency Zone or something for it. Don’t drag another city into it, just one. Give it its own currency, and see what happens.

I’m not going to pretend to have any idea what might occur, but here are some basic predictions – the import/export tariffs will reset themselves. It will be easier to trade with, because instead of dealing with economic policy that is spread between all manner of booming or busting areas, you will only deal with one entity.

In case you haven’t noticed by now, this blog is more about food for thought than anything else. So think on that, if you care to. Would this help a city down in the dumps? Would any country go for the idea? Maybe, and probably not. But if anyone was really trying to help the citizens of a city, shit, it might be worth a try.

Cityscape: Hong Kong

2010-06-15T12:12:00.001-07:00

Well, after Monday's post I got all worked up and stoked, so I'll be spending this whole week talking about Hong Kong and its fascinating urban history. Be prepared for all kinds of factual inaccuracies, like I'm sure littered yesterday's entry, and more abstract urban theory than you can handle. I'll be talking about the advantages of city-states, the 'funnel' thing and much more. Today I'm putting up a Cityscape, so my non-existant readership can see the city I'm talking about. Enjoy.

I didn't have a camera that would fit in my pocket on this trip, so I ended up doing a lot of walking around without taking too many pictures. But I still ended up with some, and here are the better ones of Hong Kong and other Pearl River Delta locations.

This is Shenzhen, as mentioned in yesterday's post. Its architecture is all super new, and its sidewalks are polished stone. The whole place looks like Star Trek, seriously.

And this is a casino in Macau, across the delta from HK. Macau is a trippy place; maybe it's just seeing signs in Cantonese and Portuguese, I don't know. Cool architecture, too. The whole thing is gambling - it is the Las Vegas of the East, and the Chinese love to gamble, so it's doing pretty well.

Here's the main event - Hong Kong. This is a skyscraper in Central, one of the downtown areas.

This is the HK subway, supposedly one of the most used in the world. I can tell you that it's clean, up to date, and does get crowded during the day.

I forget the name of this neighborhood, but it was one of my favorites. Hong Kong is full of hills, like San Francisco, which makes for great landscapes and also interesting things like the 'mid-level escalators,' a bunch of moving staircases that take you from one street up to the next uphill. Cool.

Found this hallway somewhere on HK Island (one of the two main 'boroughs,' the other being the Kowloon peninsula). I think it's well-designed.

This is the view from the hostel I stayed in, which was on the sixteenth story. Buildings of this size are totally normal, and everywhere.

The view from Victoria Peak, the equivalent of Coit Tower in SF in that everyone goes up and takes the same pictures from the view. It's a good one, though.

Other picture-worthy things - there are 7-elevens all over the place. I'm not kidding - there was one point where I stood on a corner and I could see three down different streets. I guess the buildings are so big that each one or so can support its own Sev. Trippy. The whole place is pretty photogenic. Look for other pictures online and you'll see what I'm talking about. Causeway bay was pretty cool. More HK content tomorrow...

A Tale of Two Cities

2010-06-14T18:57:00.000-07:00

Having been to Hong Kong and seen its urban wonder, I know that it’s not my favorite city JUST because of its unique position in the world’s urban history. But what drew me to study it, and eventually go there (thanks Mom and Dad), was just that – over the past century it has played a role in the world that is entirely unique.

The fact that it was one of the world’s last city-states (literally – the only one that remains now is Singapore, although microstates like Monaco have a good argument) is only a facet of its story. This history begins when the Chinese conceded a rocky island to the British in 1898 and gave them a short 99 year lease, setting into motion events that would create a true world city.

The Pearl River Delta, the industrial heart of Southeast China, has had a foreign presence since before the first Opium War; however it was after this war that the port of Canton (Guangzhou), deep in the Delta, was officially designated as a port open to European and American ships. After much politics and more war, the foreigners spread throughout China and eventually left, leaving two territories under European rule – Hong Kong, at the mouth of the Delta, given to the British, and Macau, also in the mouth, given to the Portuguese to deal with the Delta’s pirate problems.

Hong Kong started out barren, with little to no inhabitants, but the British knew they had something good going on and started building, creating an important port. Promises of work drew thousands of Chinese over the border, and soon it was a healthy city. But it would be fifty years after the signing of the lease that Hong Kong would play the first of its series of vital roles in the history of China.

When signs that the communists might take control of the mainland began to spook the Chinese rich elite, they picked up their things and moved, many to Hong Kong. Thus the city became a receptacle for almost an entire country’s wealth, and much of China’s businessmen and companies. This situation would set it up for its second role, which took place after the communists were entrenched in power.

China was in an interesting predicament – I assume this was after the Sino-Soviet split, because it wasn’t getting support from any side. On the one hand it needed foreign cash and supplies, but on the other hand its policy was not to trade with any foreigners. Given this problem, it decided to trade with one entity and one entity only, one that had been populated by exiled Chinese – Hong Kong.

Thus the small port on the Delta became an economic funnel; all trade between China and the outside world had to be done through it. Because of this its already considerable wealth became gargantuan, and skyscrapers popped up like weeds in the urban landscape. This party would not end until the 1980s.

The second city in this drama is Shenzhen, just across the border in mainland China. These days you can literally take a commuter train from this city to Hong Kong, and they are so close that some people consider the two one metropolitan area. But Shenzhen is not a normal example of urbanity in any sense; it has, like Hong Kong, a unique role in the history of cities. I am 24 years old, born in 1986, and Shenzhen is younger than me.

Upon Mao Zedong’s death in the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping, the new Chinese leader, started instituting economic reforms in the country. One of these policies, eventually, was to create Special Economic Zones, or SEZs, essentially geographical areas where communism would give capitalism a try. The first such area was Shenzhen.

Needless to say, the location of the SEZ, right across the border from Hong Kong, was no accident. As China began to open up economically it quickly forgot what good friends it was with the then still British territory; Shenzhen’s economic policy seems to have been designed for one purpose: to steal industry from Hong Kong.

It worked. Shenzhen quickly grew from a rice-growing village of 8,000 to an economic powerhouse with unprecedented growth patterns, swelling to a population that today numbers between 7 and 8 million. And Hong Kong, once much more than the home of the world’s third largest stock exchange, had much of its manufacturing base and economic diversity siphoned off across the border.

These days Shenzhen is still growing, and is one of the largest regional economic powers in China. Hong Kong is still a hustling, vibrant capitalist metropolis, although it is somewhat a shell of its former glory. Other Asian stockmarkets are competing with its exchange, and predatory investing caused it to take an unprecedented step in buying a huge stake in its own market (!!), but it is still a powerful player on today’s world’s economic stage.

What can we learn from these cities? A whole lot. I’ll use them both to illustrate many points over the course of this blog. I just figured I’d let y’all get acquainted.

Running On Empty

2010-06-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

As many governments are focused on warring over oil to supply their countries, the coming of an important era seems to be forgotten – we will run out of the stuff. While it is possible that a replacement form of energy will allow life to continue relatively as it is, my hypothesis is that only societies that truly prepare for this drought, becoming functional without oil early on, will save themselves from all kind of doomsday scenarios.

What will happen to cities, and what should cities do to prepare for this day of reckoning? This is not a question that only concerns urban areas and their citizens. I predict, and others more knowledgeable than myself would hopefully agree, that once suburban and small-town living become uneconomical, as utilities become more expensive and personal transport becomes impossibly so, suburbanites and those in far-away urban areas will trickle into major cities, if not flood. Thus, the question of what will happen in cities is more so another question. What will happen to the population of this future world as this process occurs?

Clearly a city equipped to handle this flooding would have several things – excess housing and infrastructure capable of supporting a huge population, ahead of need, come to mind. Sort of preparing a party in advance of knowing how many guests will arrive. But how would this be possible economically? Capitalism is unlikely to wait for such long-term gains, and cities have so many problems that forcing such massive projects on them would be just another straw breaking the camel’s back. What, then, is to be done?

One thing I would propose would be that instead of waiting for the party to happen, cities send out invitations in advance. Whether by the carrot or by the stick, suburbanites and far-off little-city dwellers should be given a reason to start coming to the metropolis. One way to do this would be to artificially make oil scarce. Pushing the gas tax up to ridiculous heights would make suburbanites think twice about commuting everywhere all the time. But this is not really practical – the incredibly powerful oil companies are unlikely to give up their market without a fight, and suburbanites are their bread and butter.

Another idea would be to prepare and plan for the mass influx of slum dwellings that would result from a lack of such surplus housing and infrastructure power. While I’m not sure what these preparations would be, it’s worth checking out the literature on the subject of slums (Shadow Cities, Planet of Slums) to see what works in such settlements, and get a feel for what does not.

I’ve got to admit, this problem may require greater minds than my own to solve, and I don’t have much more to say right now. But acknowledging that this time is coming, and preparing for it in whatever form possible, is vitally important. Eventually foresight will be rewarding, and hindsight just will not do.

Cityscape: Tunis

2010-06-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

Tunisia is known as the most liberal country in the Arab/Muslim world - woman are not necessarily ostracized if they are not virgins upon marriage, and don't have to wear hajib if they don't want to. As such it's not so dangerous to be white there, although my friend still wouldn't let me walk down the street alone. I had a great time in Tunis, the capital city, and came back a second time a few years later.

Tunisia is basically a benign dictatorship at this point; it is yet to be seen what will happen when politics take a turn for the worse. Tunis is decidedly low on the global city chain; it is the commercial and cultural center of the country, counting over a million heads, but it has little impact on the world. It is, however, an interesting case in urban studies due to its accessibility and Arab/Islamic urban form.

A stylish skyscraper downtown. There wasn't much modern architecture, but this building's pretty cool

The downtown was designed along the guidelines of a famous Paris boulevard, and it felt like an oasis of green and shadow. So congratulations, colonial urban planners, people seem to enjoy your streets. But they are nothing compared to...

The Souk. This is really cool, and I have never been anywhere like it. Imagine a thin alley, but instead of being a way to get somewhere it is somewhere. Around each bend there is a store dug into the wall, full of clothes or plates or shoes. There was even a hookah bar carved out. It is essentially a footpath, the size in places permitting two people to pass but no more, and a full bazaar. I didn't get good photos (I didn't feel safe bringing my camera out), but it was an amazing experience. Claustrophobes would hate it, but I completely prefer it to our monotonous, cavernous malls.

In a book about Middle Eastern cities, a culture that extends to North Africa, it is said that ancient Arabic cities were designed not with a map, but with the eye. If you are in a souk or in an old part of the city, you can see how it plays out. Truly breathtaking urban form.

Tunisia has a lot of beach, and the train stops on the gold line, one of which I stayed close to, are all within walking distance of the Mediterranean coastline. The beachs are rocky but well-used.

This is Le Kram, my friend's neighborhood. All the buildings are white - no kidding, all of them. It was a far cry from the 'every house a different color' scheme of my semi-suburban home.

This is the view from the ruins of Carthage. The site is huge, but some of it may have been built over as the city engulfed the town. As it is, quiet neighborhoods surround this historical land.

Le Goulette, a busy neighborhood, at night. The place was vibrant and felt like a party town, even though no one in Tunisia drinks. People were drinking at coffee shops late into the night, and generally having a good time.

This is Sidi Bou Said, the crown jewel of Tunis apparently. Here they require blue trim on the white buildings (I'm not sure if there's a code or not) and the results are eye-pleasing. This and the Souk I could imagine existing in the very old days of the city. Very organic looking and cool.

This is the Lebanese schwarma spot where I found out said schwarma tastes something like burritos, one of my native foods as a Californian. I thought I'd put it in here for good measure.

Tunis gives the visitor a look into the past. Although the city and Tunisia in general are fairly caught up to this century, the architecture remains from the old days, and it is very interesting. Makes me want to plan a little footpath mall or something. Tunis is pleasant and I would recommend visiting if you are in the Mediterranean area; Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the other Arabic cities I would like to visit, probably don't have much time for the history present and on display here.

Giving Work to Local Artists

2010-06-12T12:26:00.001-07:00

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the unfortunate process of artists revitalizing neighborhoods, then being pushed out of them (along with the neighborhoods’ original inhabitants) by rising rents. This is a serious problem as it can push artists out of whole cities, which has occurred to some degree in the borough of Manhattan and the city of San Francisco. One way to stop the cycle is to employ mass amounts of artists and give them money to hang on.

Graffiti artists keep an eye out for a blank wall, and muralists should too – I propose that these walls be covered in paint, and that we pay our own artists to paint them. I envision a program that will provide, free of charge, a mural on any wall whose owner sees fit to paint one on. And I see the contracts going to local artists.

One could hopefully wrangle the money for such a project out of redevelopment dollars, or out of some mayoral urge to ‘leave a mark on the city.’ Personally I think everything on the city street should be art; a zoo of color and design. I have been to neighborhoods like this in Milan, although these were generally uninhabited, and the effect of walls covered in paint is very cool.

The odds of this being implemented are slim, but if a sympathetic city were to take it on the possibilities would be endless. Water fountain and trash can sculptures or color-themed streets would have a great physical effect on the urban experience, and in my opinion it would be a positive one. It would be a way to upgrade the city and support its culture at the same time.

Surface Transit and Safety

2010-06-11T14:18:00.001-07:00

I’m currently re-reading Jane Jacobs’ ‘Death and Life of Great American Cities.’ It was one of the first urban theory books I read, and I found it mindblowing at the time, but as I read on I began to regard Mrs. Jacobs as a sort of unknowing amateur that had some cool things to say, but not very many. Well, I’m only 50 pages in, but I’m sold all over again. I’ll write up a full review when I finish, but reading it I had a revelation about surface transit, and here it is.

In the first chapter of the book, ‘The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety,’ she pushes the point that the more eyes a street has watching it, the safer it is. Surface transit, buses and taxi fleets, creates eyes, and, by Jacobs’ logic, should create safer streets. While mass transit, served by underground heavy rail or busways, is naturally better at getting people around, surface transit plays a role in creating safety by forcing people to congregate on the street to wait before they are picked up. These people are able to see and report crime. In addition, surface transit riders and drivers provide additional eyes for crime prevention even while moving, although one is less likely to get off a bus to confront a thief than if they were on the sidewalk. In these ways surface transit plays an important role in neighborhood safety, a role that heavy underground transit cannot.

Jacobs has tons of things to say about urban theory and most are incredibly accurate, and others just common sense. I’m glad to have rediscovered her book, and if you’re interested in planning for real, livable cities and you haven’t read this one you’re blowing it.

Cityscape: Mexico City

2010-06-10T04:26:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures and observations I took away from Mexico City (DF). I had no idea what to expect before I went there, but man was I pleasantly surprised. What a great city; what a LIVE city. Street stalls everywhere, serving delicious food - good plumbing, an extreme rarity in Latin America - everything colorful, everything art. I put it up on my list, for what it is, with Paris, New York, Montreal and Hong Kong. Everyone should come here at least once.

The Zocalo, the second largest square in the world after Tianenmen or however you spell it. As you can see it gets lots of use and is bordered by multiple uses.

Downtown, centered around the Zocalo, is vibrant and safe, at least where I was.

The slums outside the city proper go on forever, literally mountains covered in haphazard urbanism.

Wandered a little off the beaten path in downtown and felt unsafe. But nothing happened.

The Zona Rosa, or Pink Zone, home of the homosexual population, was the most alive part of the city I visited. Cool.

The Mexico City metro system is world-class, aesthetically pleasing and has murals and other points of interest all over the place. If the soundtrack to the NYC metro belongs to the musicians who wander on and off the cars, the soundtrack to DF's metro is that of the men who come on blaring cheap cds out on stereos. I bought two.

'The Pants,' a building in the glistening new Santa Fe business district. The place is built on a landfill but looks like a mini midtown NYC, with a large handful of skyscrapers.

Political unrest in Coyoacan.

These two pics are of the Parque Espan(~)a, I think. It's in a neighborhood full of vitality (Condesa/Roma) and is very pleasant and safe-seeming.

Creative sidewalk in Roma

This thing proves that buildings can do more than just house workers, students or people: the whole thing can be amazing art too.

A word on Mexico City - if you are incredibly wealthy or like flashing your money, you might not be safe here. And the odds of something happening probably go up the longer you stay, and night, logically, is more dangerous. But that said Mexico City is one of my favorite cities in the world, and I've been to a few of them. It might be dirty and a little sketchy, but it has culture, and that's something you can hardly say about American cities, for example. I love it, and I'm going back.

Roads to Buildings

2010-06-09T18:16:00.000-07:00

A while ago I read about a Portland firm that specialized in buying the air rights over parking lots and building structures on top of them. For some reason I was thinking about the problem of roads bisecting the urban milieu and I had an idea. Cities like money, and developers like land. But land with road on it is dead property, never able to be used for another purpose. And a city will never be able to profit off land it has reserved for cars. Right?

What if a city were to sell the air rights over its streets to developers? This could create new property in in-demand neighborhoods, and also get some money into city coffers. In addition the city, as owners of the air rights, could dictate what type of development take place over its streets, and add strings to the deal including mandatory pedestrian paths, above-street plazas, etc.

There is a long list of things that could go wrong with this idea. For one, too much ‘bridge property’ building would block out the sun; while one or two short buildings built on top of streets might not dent the urban fabric too much, a long stretch of street cover would kill the street below. Similarly, moving a pedestrian path up to the second story could kill the businesses on the ground floor and make those storefronts worthless.

At the same time, taken to an extreme this practice could serve to create a new urban landscape in which cars and parking lots occupy a first floor, and actual city living takes place above. I like it as an idea, but it’s more one to experiment with than something I think would necessarily work in any given setting. But the possibilities are endless – buildings over freeways, over ditches, blighted rivers, on and on. After all, can’t land have more than one use?