From Casey Walker, Boston Review
For half a century, rich men have talked about building a stadium at the tangled intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn. Walter O’Malley hoped to construct a stadium for his Brooklyn Dodgers there, but Robert Moses—New York’s “master builder,” the bureaucrat through whom nearly all of the city’s major projects ran—refused to play nice. O’Malley took his ball and went home; the Dodgers decamped for Los Angeles in 1958.
But last March a new stadium project broke ground at Flatbush and Atlantic, where I live, and it promises to bring Brooklyn its first major sports franchise since the Dodgers’ departure—the NBA’s New Jersey Nets. In the 50 years since O’Malley’s stadium was thwarted, much has changed in the head-butting politics of American city building—and much has not.
Walk down Atlantic Avenue from Flatbush as I often do—carefully, because panel vans and car services menace pedestrians from all sides—and you will be in the footprint of the projected arena, the Barclays Center, anchor of the 22-acre Atlantic Yards project. Atlantic Yards is a familiar urban story: surrounding neighborhoods are braced for upheaval; architects have come and gone; redesigns have been announced, lambasted, tweaked, disowned; lawsuits multiply like kudzu; millions of dollars are all but blowing through the air; and the likely date of actual completion is anyone’s guess (Forest City Ratner, the developer, contends the Barclays Center will be finished by 2011, but the Web site does not give a timetable for the rest of the project).
To Read More…
From Justin McGuirk, Guardian UK
London’s long-awaited cycle-hire scheme is launched this week. While there’s no doubt it’s a valuable addition to the capital’s public transport options, it strikes yet another blow to the idea of London as a dignified city. First of all, there’s the name. Paris has the Velib, Montreal has the Bixi; what does London get? Barclays Cycle Hire. Clearly the good people at Barclays marketing thought long and hard about that one.
Maybe it’s not worth getting too wound up about the name – selling the rights to popular institutions is unlikely to make anyone who watches, say, the Barclays Premier League or the Npower Championship even blink. What is new, however, is the prospect of more than a hundred kilometres of the capital’s road surface being branded with corporate livery. The city’s new dedicated cycle lanes – two of which recently opened, with another ten to come before the Olympics – are called “Barclays Cycle Superhighways” and painted Barclays blue.
To Read More…
From Stephen Budiansky, The New York Times
IT’S 42 steps from my back door to the garden that keeps my family supplied nine months of the year with a modest cornucopia of lettuce, beets, spinach, beans, tomatoes, basil, corn, squash, brussels sprouts, the occasional celeriac and, once when I was feeling particularly energetic, a couple of small but undeniable artichokes. You’ll get no argument from me about the pleasures and advantages to the palate and the spirit of eating what’s local, fresh and in season.
But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.
To Read More…
From Roberta Brandes Gratz, The Huffington Post
First came urban renewal, destroying more residential units than replaced by towers in the park.
Then came the highways through the cities, piggybacking on the massive clearance of urban renewal, this time demolishing whole neighborhoods. Thousands of industrial and small businesses and the jobs that came with them were lost, along with countless housing units.
Then came “planned shrinkage,” the idea that cities should close down failing neighborhoods, shut off the infrastructure built to accommodate density and concentrate investment in neighborhoods still worthy of middle income investment. Places like the South Bronx were left to burn.
Then came the endless number of parking lots to accommodate all the cars driven by the commuters who fled the urban wreckage for the suburbs and were now driving on the highways that drew them out of the city. Countless recyclable buildings of all periods and architectural styles - not to mention historic structures - were lost.
From de zeen
American landscape architect Heather Ring of the Wayward Plant Registry has transformed a disused site in Bankside, London, into a public garden with the introduction of apple trees, allotments, a timber pavilion, and a table-tennis table in a skip.
To Read More…
As part of the process of publishing Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies all submissions are sent for peer review, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.
In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.
If you would like to referee papers submitted to The Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies, please email journals@spacesandflows.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.
From Daniel Albert, n + 1
Here we are half a decade into the 21st century and still no flying cars. We know there are powerful interests to overcome—gravity, for one thing, and all those people making money on our baroque transport system. The Portland Cement Association, not to mention the Mob, rake it in pouring ribbons of concrete. The automakers who killed the electric car probably wouldn’t mind sparing a bullet for a car that flies, while Boeing, Airbus, and the airlines are unlikely to give up their investment in the self-propelled cargo units euphemistically known as passenger planes.
But history, technology, and the earth itself are on the side of the flying car. The highway systems of the world are up to a century old, as is the basic architecture of person driving car on rubber wheels over hard-surfaced road. The technology for driverless or robot cars, able to keep their distance from others and play nice on the roads, already exists, but the historical and regulatory baggage of the land car won’t let it happen.
To Read More…
We are pleased to announce that Professor Michael Dear will join us as a plenary speaker at the Spaces and Flows Conference.
Michael Dear is professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor in the Bartlett School of Planning at University College, London (England). Michael’s current research focuses on comparative urbanism, and the future of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He was founding editor of the scholarly journal Society and Space: Environment & Planning D, and is a leading exponent of the Los Angeles School of Urbanism. His books include: From Chicago to LA: making sense of urban theory, Postborder City: cultural spaces of Bajalta California, and The Postmodern Urban Condition, which was chosen by CHOICE magazine as an “Outstanding Academic Title” in 2000. His latest edited volume, entitled Geohumanties: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place, will be published in 2010. Michael has been a Guggenheim Fellowship holder, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and Fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. He has received the highest honors for creativity and excellence in research from the Association of American Geographers, and numerous undergraduate teaching and graduate mentorship awards.
We are now accepting submissions for the first volume of Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies. The first submission deadline is Monday 20 August 2010.
Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies is peer-reviewed, supported by rigorous processes of criterion-referenced article ranking and qualitative commentary, ensuring that only intellectual work of the greatest substance and highest significance is published.
Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.
Paper submission guidelines are available online.
From Kazys Varnelis, Triple Canopy
Modern Western cities were built under the presumptions—and with the riches—of the industrial age, and their histories are intertwined with that of the machine and its attendant forms, from economics to aesthetics to urban plans. Architectural historian Kazys Varnelis has insisted on the importance of the network not only as a technological tool that connects the world but as a critical framework for understanding the dramatic shifts in culture and society that have taken place in the past few decades, and as a lens through which to examine our increasingly precarious urban situation. Earlier this year, as millions of Americans faced foreclosure and construction projects across the country were abandoned, Varnelis discussed the meaning of collapse and what might follow with the editors of Triple Canopy.
Triple Canopy: You’ve argued that it’s no longer possible to rebuild existing infrastructures or, for that matter, to build better ones. And you’ve proposed “social engineering” and “human hacking” as keys to changing how we think of and how we use infrastructure. On the other hand, a quarter of the counties in Michigan are converting paved roads to gravel to save money. Do you still believe in the prospect of technology enabling us to salvage our increasingly chaotic, dilapidated built environment?
Kazys Varnelis: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. On the one hand, I still believe that a government initiative to bring infrastructure into the twenty-first century by opening data to everyone—not just leaving it in the hands of the technocratic elite—would make things better for everyone. We can see this in the ability to monitor traffic conditions in real time on Google Maps. If there is a jam in a certain area, our navigation system should route us around it.
To Read More…
4-5 December 2010
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://spacesandflows.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. To submit a proposal, see: http://spacesandflows.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Spaces and Flows Conference, see: http://spacesandflows.com/conference-2010/register/.
Themes
From Andrew Moore, The New York Review of Books
Known for his large-scale photographs of dilapidated buildings in places like Cuba, Russia, and Times Square, Andrew Moore has now turned his attention to Detroit. These images are from his new collection, Detroit Disassembled, published by Damiani and the Akron Art Museum, where an exhibition of his work will be on view from June 5 to October 10.
Moore’s photographs present a devastating scene of urban deterioration, offering us glimpses into abandoned motor plants, train stations, theaters, schools, hotels, police stations, and office buildings, along with vistas of vacant houses and lots. All of the buildings are in deep states of decay: moss grows on the floor of an office at the former Ford Motor Company headquarters; thousands of books molder in the Public Schools Book Depository; an unseen person keeps a small fire going under a plastic shelter inside the trash-filled engine works room of the Dry Dock Company Complex. One of Moore’s photographs, showing an abandoned nursing home, appears in the April 29 issue of The New York Review, in Tony Judt’s essay “Ill Fares the Land.”
Another book on the same subject, The Ruins of Detroit, by the French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, will be published by Steidl this summer. Marchand and Meffre had already begun their project when they met Moore, whose earlier work they knew, and they urged him to photograph Detroit as well. As a result, there are now two distinctive takes on the decline of a once-powerful center of the US economy: while Moore’s book is slender, with an essay by the poet Philip Levine, Marchand and Meffre’s collection puts across a broader sociological analysis. Both books allow an astonishing amount of beauty to surface, whether in the fading traces of ornate architectural elements or in the rich colors of freshly sprouted vegetation.
To View Slideshow…
—Eve Bowen
Welcome to CommonGroundPublishing. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
