spacesandflows.com

From Misha Lepetic at 3quarksdaily.com…

Cities ceaselessly fascinate because of the problems they have solved over time – grand socio-infrastructural dilemmas such as property rights, water, sewage, electrification. But as cities grow and evolve, these solutions in turn generate new problems, or intensify existing ones, in ways that are both unpredictable and banal. Indeed, for cities to continue growing in any sense of the word, this will remain a permanent aspect of their discourse, and a precondition of their success. It would not be much of a stretch to say that, given global trends of urbanization, the ability of cities to continue planning and designing their way past new problems is not just essential for their own survival, but for that of humanity itself.

Within this context, mobility must rank as a problem par excellence. Commentators have described slums as “cities that have failed to solve their mobility problem”. The free and rapid flow of people and goods is essential to the dynamic nature of any urban setting; and while the developed world looks on China’s growth with a mixture of awe and trepidation (and hope that they will keep buying our debt), it is also true that the media greets reports of things like a 10-day traffic jam with a certain amount of Schadenfreude. Amateurs! (On the other hand, the fact that there were no incidents of road rage reported during this traffic jam may have something to teach us about the virtues of a certain national temperament. Once, we too had a sense of humour about this.) More…

From Michael Kimmelman at The New York Times…

In the old photograph, a lonely farmhouse sits on a rocky hill, shaded by tall trees. The scene looks like rural Maine. On the modern street, apartment buildings tower above trucks and cars passing a busy corner where an AMC Loews multiplex faces an overpriced hamburger joint and a Coach store.

They are both the same spot. Not so long ago, all things considered, the intersection of Broadway and 84th Street didn’t exist; the area was farmland. “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” now at the Museum of the City of New York, unearths that 1879 picture of the Brennan Farm among other historic gems. The show celebrates the anniversary of what remains not just a landmark in urban history but in many ways the defining feature of the city.

After all, before it could rise into the sky, Manhattan had to create the streets, avenues and blocks that support the skyscrapers. The grid was big government in action, a commercially minded boon to private development and, almost despite itself, a creative template. With 21st-century problems — environmental, technological, economic and social — now demanding aggressive and socially responsible leadership, the exhibition is a kind of object lesson. More…

A talk from Mark Pagel on Edge…

I’m going to talk to you about cities as gardens, continuing our theme of the garden math. And what I want you to realize is that human beings have been on this planet for 200,000 years, and up until 10,000 years ago, the world looked something like this.

This is one vision of Arcadia. There weren’t any roads, not many permanent settlements, population density was very low because all human beings were hunter-gatherers. But then about 10,000 years ago, something happened. Human beings discovered agriculture. And once they discovered agriculture, a small number of people could produce the food for everyone. Enough food for everything. That freed others from the toil of hunting and gathering.

And what did we do instantly upon inventing agriculture? We began our migration to cities. And so 10,000 years ago, right after the evolution of agriculture, we see this city in Turkey, Catalhoyuk, springing up. And already, by 10,000 years ago, maybe three, four or five, 6,000 people lived in it. Around the same time, another city sprang up, Jericho in Israel. And that impulse somehow, to move into cities, has carried on, slowly at first, but increasing over time, so that by around 1800, three percent of humanity lived in urban areas or in cities. More…

From Jim Yardley at The New York Times…

At the edge of India’s greatest slum, Shaikh Mobin’s decrepit shanty is cleaved like a wedding cake, four layers high and sliced down the middle. The missing half has been demolished. What remains appears ready for demolition, too, with temporary walls and a rickety corrugated roof.

Yet inside, carpenters are assembling furniture on the ground floor. One floor up, men are busily cutting and stitching blue jeans. Upstairs from them, workers are crouched over sewing machines, making blouses. And at the top, still more workers are fashioning men’s suits and wedding apparel. One crumbling shanty. Four businesses.

In the labyrinthine slum known as Dharavi are 60,000 structures, many of them shanties, and as many as one million people living and working on a triangle of land barely two-thirds the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Dharavi is one of the world’s most infamous slums, a cliché of Indian misery. It is also a churning hive of workshops with an annual economic output estimated to be $600 million to more than $1 billion. More…