Medellín is the new Bogota
It seems that common sense solutions are usually completely ignored by governments in Latin American cities, and it is refreshing to see that this isn´t the case with Medellín. The government is rebuilding its city for the inhabitants: they have discovered that when people have public spaces they can enjoy and where they can relax, breathe in clean air, and stretch their legs, they work harder, better, and are generally happier. The poorer inhabitants of the city don’t have time or money to take vacations to the rural areas; they don’t have the means to visit beaches and certainly don’t have membership to country clubs…so the city decided to give them spaces where they could take their families, where they could lay on the grass, sit on a bench and kick back on a Sunday.
Today’s Where blog post on Medellín reminds me of similar successes enjoyed by Bogota a few years back (and still enjoyed, as far as I know):
“Every Sunday, we close 120 kilometers of main arteries to motor vehicles for seven hours,” [former Bogota mayor] Penalosa explained. “A million and a half people of all ages and conditions come out to ride bicycles, jog, see others, to appropriate their city. During Christmas, we close those streets one night and more than 3 million people come out just to see the Christmas lights, to be with the others as a community.”
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Paris is greener than you think.
What’s in the middle of those oddly-shaped Parisian blocks? Peter Levine uses Google Earth to find Paris is much greener than a stroll down its boulevards might reveal.
Why is Portland so hot?
The media is obsessed with Portland. Why? The city’s own Willamette Week is on it:
Yeah, we know Portland’s hot shit. But we wanted to prove it to the world. So we did a search of all things Portland on LexisNexis, a really powerful search engine that looks for content from newspapers, magazines, and anything news-related. Our intuition was correct—Portland is in the news a hell of a lot. In fact, when we tried to search for how many times “Portland, Oregon” appeared in the news over the past year, we broke LexisNexis (well we didn’t exactly break it, it just stopped working due to information overload). But we were able to think up a few things Portland may be known for and find out how many times those words have shown up in the news in conjunction with Portland since September 2006…(hint: beer, sustainable, and gays top the list).
Add bicycles to that list: today the New York Times’ obsession with the city manifested itself as a story about Portland’s bicycle culture.
Photograph by samgrover.
The Times-Online guide to nightlife in six so-called “party cities.” No mention of Chattanooga.
Spending the night in Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Belgrade, or New York? The Times-Online offers you a guide to the nightlife in six so-called “party cities.” Belgrade’s inclusion intrigues me.
Forbes: America’s most sedentary cities.
Forbes: America’s most sedentary cities.
Forbes added together three scores for each city. These scores measured body mass index, physical inactivity, and television viewing. They derived the first two scores from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the television viewing score came from Nielsen data.
Memphis came in first and five of the top ten are cities in the southeastern United States (I’m not counting Miami).
Grist: 15 Green Cities
Grist highlights 15 green cities. This list seems to come out once a week, each time from a different source. I was happy to see Curitiba, Brazil, make this one.
Busting superblocks.
The Built Environment Blog busts superblocks. The post does a good job of placing into historical context one controversy among many surrounding the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn.
The world’s most expensive cities
A report by UBS ranks 71 world cities according to cost of living. Europe has the most on the list, thanks in part to a weak dollar; the continent had 15 of the top 25 most expensive cities, including London, the most expensive. The United States had four cities on the list, all within the top 25: New York (2), Chicago (9), LA (10), and Miami (22).
Rent comprises the largest portion of living expenses for each city; many of the readers of this blog probably have heard horror stories about rent per square foot in either of the top two cities.
Transparent soundproof walls to line a highway in Cleveland
Cleveland has installed transparent soundproof walls along the southside of Interstate 71. The walls will quiet traffic as well as the demands of a nearby church:
The clear panels, made of heavy-duty acrylic, cost about $32 per square foot, compared with $20 per square foot for the traditional concrete walls. Still, the see-through panels can reduce the imposing, tunnel-effect that a walled highway might create.
The see-through panels will soften that effect, said city Council President Martin Sweeney. He got an earful from members of the St. Paul congregation when they realized they were about to be walled off from the high-profile freeway view that they valued when they purchased the land for a new church building.
BBC: a Mexico City retirement home for the city’s retired prostitutes
The BBC recently profiled a Mexico City retirement home for the city’s prostitutes:
Until now…the sex industry had a forgotten demographic: elderly, former practitioners, discarded by the cruel forces of a market that penalises the imperfections of old age.
But after a life of violence, discrimination and exploitation, these women have at last found people who are showing them compassion.
10 principles for sustainable city governance
Danish think tank Mandag Morgen solicited ideas from 50 urban experts, resulting in their 10 Principles for Sustainable City Governance pamphlet. Most of the content focuses on expanding civic participation. Download the PDF from their website; it’s the hyperlinked text “Se figuren her” under the bold “Reteisse” heading.
The hidden costs of parking
Salon neatly summarizes the inefficiencies of most urban parking systems:
“Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else,” explains Shoup. “Because we buy and use cars without thinking about the cost of parking, we congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air more than we would if we each paid for our own parking. Everyone parks free at everyone else’s expense, and we all enjoy our free parking, but our cars are choking our cities.”
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. As parking lots proliferate, they decrease density and increase sprawl. In 1961, when the city of Oakland, Calif., started requiring apartments to have one parking space per apartment, housing costs per apartment increased by 18 percent, and urban density declined by 30 percent. It’s a pattern that’s spread across the country.
Any plan to decrease traffic congestion in city centers, at least in the United States (à la Bloomberg’s recent proposal for NYC), will also need to address parking congestion.
Italy’s slow city movement
Small cities across Italy aspire to be granted cittáslow status:
To a certain extent, a “slow city” tries to preserve the civic structures from medieval or Renaissance times, while at the same time incorporating the most recent scientific findings of ecology and sustainability. Even modern technology is allowed if it helps to meet the city’s goals. For example, Cimicchi is hoping to install electronically controlled access gates in Orvieto, which would grant entrance exclusively to city residents. Pisa already has a similar system: If the camera catches you letting the parking meter run out — whether it’s for a single minute or an entire day — you can expect to receive a parking ticket.
Last year USA Today profiled Virginia’s own cittáslow, the town of Floyd (population 434).