Hitchens, on the meaning of bohemia and the West Village
Christopher Hitchens recalls bohemia’s eclipses in London, Paris, and San Francisco, and worries that New York’s West Village may soon become another victim of the skyscraper’s shadow. The loss would be immeasurable.
[T]ry picturing American culture without the contribution of this unique square mile. Inter alia, you would have to subtract Bob Dylan and the Cafe Wha?, Norman Mailer and The Village Voice, Isadora Duncan, John Reed and Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Beats, the gay movement and Christopher Street and the Stonewall Inn, Lauren Bacall as “Miss Greenwich Village of 1942,” Eugene O’Neill, Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern, Dawn Powell and Djuna Barnes. In his book which has the wonderful title Republic of Dreams, Ross Wetzsteon managed to evoke what he admitted was sometimes “a cult of carefree irresponsibility, but in the service of transcendental ideas.” That could be Bohemia defined.
The loss of a cultural beacon like the West Village will make the future a bit dimmer
because on the day when everywhere looks like everywhere else we shall all be very much impoverished, and not only that but—more impoverishingly still—we will be unable to express or even understand or depict what we have lost.
photo credit: scratch n sniff
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Michigan’s MEGA tax credits to include creative industries
On the recommendation of Detroit Renaissance, Michigan hopes to attract more creative sector employers with recent legislation making these firms eligible for the state’s high-tech or high-wage MEGA tax credits. [via]
The two Cairos
In a pattern that is repeated in megacities–and not so megacities–everywhere, Cairo’s rich are opting “for the private gated enclaves, while the poor live in illegally built suburbs reclaimed from the surrounding countryside.”
What are the growth patterns within the city?
“It is only a slight exaggeration to say that informality is the defining characteristic of the modern Egyptian built landscape,” says David Sims, an American housing expert who worked extensively in Egypt. He cites studies which found that the population of the informal areas of Cairo has been growing at more than three times the rate of the formal districts of the city. The city is now ringed by vast areas of informal housing. These are overcrowded forests of unrendered blocks crammed so close together that their balconies almost touch above streets that are too narrow for cars to pass.
Experts estimate that well over half of Cairo’s 16m people live in unplanned districts that have sprouted in breach of laws banning construction on farm land.
gen·tri·fi·ca·tion (n.): “a benign ethnic cleansing”
“What’s kind of going on now is a benign ethnic cleansing of the borough of Manhattan. . .”
The Anglophilic American suburb
For over a century, American developers and suburban-boosters have branded their communities with an easily-pronounced, “safe”, Anglophilic vocabulary:
Anglophilia runs deep in American culture, but it’s been particularly useful in helping Americans lay out a fantasy for how they want to live, a measure of wealth and success that’s guided urban planners for a century…
We anoint our suburbs with the names of invented British estates out of insecurity, nostalgia and a love of fantasy. America’s Buckingham at Queensbridges and Canterberry Crossings are, in the words of “Geography of Nowhere” author Jim Kunstler, “only part of the growing abstraction that is necessary to sell the suburbs. It’s a place without a past and without a future that leads to anxiety and depression. It’s through those cracks in the damage, that the marketers fill a void.”
But marketers fill this void haphazardly.
You know you’re in suburban Atlanta when the street names shift from memorializing an important local leaders–in the Civil Rights movement or otherwise–to being the imagined names of British people and their estates: Sir Charles Drive, Abbottswell Drive, Glenforest Drive, and most of the streets in Peachtree City.
Tensions between mass transit and mixed-use
…there is a contradiction in the planning approaches of many jurisdictions that are developing mass transit, in that promotion of mixed-use urban areas actually weakens the strong nodes that are the lifeblood of mass transit.
To be fair, the concept of mixed-use areas is intended to support short walking trips rather than public transport; but the application of mixed uses, increased densities, parking requirements and public transport are not always thought through in a coherent way at the metropolitan scale.
This presents a serious risk to the attainment of green transport. The greater risk, though, may be the inability of metropolitan authorities to exercise adequate control over all the factors that need to be brought together for a green transport strategy. Even in the context of strong policy, planning is often fragmented and stymied by political interference, uncooperative developers and unreliable funding.
This tension is not clearly evident in Atlanta but, then again, the city’s largest mixed-use development doesn’t seem to encourage any form of transportation that isn’t via automobile.
China’s Chicago, etc.
What do Chongqing, Wuhan, Ningbo, and Dalian have in common? They’re China’s second-tier cities. And they’re booming:
They are attracting more and more tourists as well as investors from home and abroad. These cities are endeavoring to form their own unique character, attempting to evolve into Chinese versions of Chicago, Hawaii or Bangalore.
In an article from the Economist issued on July 28, 2007, titled China’s Chicago, the author writes, “Deep in the heart of China, the hilly riverside city of Chongqing is burning with ambition and wreathed in a shroud of smog. Visitors are astonished by the scale and pace of its growth: shopping malls, expressways and a throng of skyscrapers, including one that looks like the Chrysler building. Work on a US$200m opera house is under way.”
Why now?
All these cities have the same advantages: cheaper labor costs, higher-speed development; more favorable local policies, fresher air and less traffic jams.
Photographs of Dalian by SnoShuu.
A mysterious murder in Polop de la Marina
Alejandro Ponsoda, mayor of the Spanish village of Polop de la Marina, may have been murdered for his plans to grow the city’s population fifteen-fold [English translation, map].
WTF is platform building?
What is platform building? It’s when you put buildings over railroads and highways. On platforms:
Earlier this century, urban planner Robert Moses did what he thought necessary for New York City’s growth, including building highways that displaced homes and ripped apart neighborhoods.
Now, as a space-starved city looks for places to put more housing, a construction concept called “platform building” may be gluing the city back together.
A major part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to make room for some 1 million new city residents in the next two decades, for example, is to develop air space by building on gigantic platforms constructed over the city’s highways and rail yards.
A Monocle video report from Murmansk
Monocle’s Shaun Walker reports on the revival of Murmansk [wiki, map]. In the wake of the Cold War, the far-north Russian naval port went south; it seems to be doing much better now.
The Denver Museum of Contemporary Art reopens this Sunday in a new location
The Museum of Contemporary Art | Denver reopens this Sunday in a new location [map]. Architect David Adjaye designed the shiny, new building [pictures]. Architectural Record has the details. I like the design, especially what I’ve seen of the interior walls:
Adjaye, known in Europe for his creative use of industrial building materials, employed tinted glass for the museum’s exterior walls but added an interior skin of MonoPan, a translucent material made of woven recycled plastic and used in the fabrication of trailers and storage sheds, among other products. “It was something I encountered at a trade fair of motor cars,” Adjaye says. “I was blown away by this material.”
If that’s not enough, I recommend the New York Magazine interview with Adjaye:
Your museum in Denver also seems like an attempt to make something more public than the traditional museum.
It is like a mini-version of a city.How is that done architecturally?
You never go from one exhibition space to another: You always come out into a kind of street and then you meander into another exhibition space. The way in which you are seeing art is almost like being in a little village or little town.What is the plus of that?
You have the ability to perceive art, digest it, then go on to the next thing. You get away from the exhaustion when you are relentlessly pounded with stuff.
Aerial photographs of Dubai
Dubai for Life has posted an interesting series of aerial photographs of (mostly) new construction in Dubai.
Photograph of Palm Jumeirah Island by twocentsworth.
Putnam on America’s “big triangles”
Robert Putnam reduces sprawl to simple geometry. Brilliant:
It’s less clear where home is; I mean, basically as Americans we live our lives in big triangles. One point of the triangle is where we sleep, one point is where we shop, and one point is where we work. And our American triangle has gotten much larger.
[via: Sprawled Out]
Sprawl in Melbourne
Melbourne is sprawling faster than its Melbourne 2030 comprehensive plan allows.
The Department of Planning and Community Development yesterday released the first part of its review of Melbourne 2030.
The review, completed using the figures from the 2006 census and other sources, argued that 48.3 per cent of new housing built in Melbourne was on “greenfield” sites — new subdivisions typically on the city fringes. Its target had been 42.5 per cent by 2005 and 31 per cent by 2030.
Länsisatama redevelopment project to transform Helsinki harbor
In an earlier entry, I mentioned a Chinese blog post I found yesterday morning. I posted the English translation and asked for more information. Within minutes, Esa helped me find everything I’d need. The Chinese post mentioned a development project in Helsinki that involved input from local schoolchildren. It turns out the project has actually enlisted the help of many other groups of Finnish citizens in the redevelopment of Länsisatama [map, site, flickr].
The Länsisatama redevelopment project will transform one of Helsinki’s container harbors into “into a waterfront city quarter with an estimated population of 22,000.” The place has potential, according to this “possible future view.”