1. The importance of the past in going forward
“We presume ways of life that must change for the better: greener, more inclusive and shareable; global in orientation; away from land use regulations that favor separation of uses, and towards healthier, less auto-dependent realms,” and there’s a risk that this can make us forget to look at our past, writes Chuck Wolfe. “I do not believe for a moment that urban change is so simple. Without a longer view, we risk undervaluing lessons learned long ago,” he argues. “We now tend to disfavor sprawl as a solution to overcrowded conditions, and stress instead old standby’s of increased height, cooperative living spaces and smaller dwellings.” In this piece for myurbanist, he uses the case of Edinburgh to explain why our ability to meet current goals safely is reflective of what we learned centuries ago.
2. A place and time for urban art
“For the arts to be an inclusive experience, where can we house it?” asks Vidhya Mohankumar. “Art galleries and museums, yes; but it’s common knowledge that the foot-fall at these places is an insignificant percentage of a city’s population. In other words, art galleries and museums haven’t been very successful in their public outreach (or haven’t tried at all) and the arts have therefore remained with a niche interest group,” she continues. In this piece for Urban Design Collective, she describes the interesting urban art project that’s being tried in a shopping mall in the Indian city of Chennai with the objective of making the public engage with art and compares it with other projects such as Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (also known as ”The Bean”) in Chicago.
3. Two years of underground trips, in data
Matt Johnson tracked every single Metro trip he took in Washington DC over two years, and offers the results in the form of glossy graphs in this blogpost. Among the things he discovered is that he has ridden on fewer than 75% of the cars. “One question I’ve been asked several times is whether the cars move between lines very often. Surprisingly, they seem to. Of the 495 cars I’ve ridden more than once, 60.4% have been on different lines,” he explains. This, however, has its downsides: now that he tracks his delays, he knows his delay rate has quadrupled, hence he is more frustrated than the average mortal. Johnson’s idea is a great one that we hope will be replicated by underground users from other cities.
4. Our relationships with historical buildings, through social media
Geo-tagged photos are creating a new world to explore, “a world which could change how we think about the built environment and its heritage” according this blogpost on the English Heritage website. About half the adult population in England visit an historical town or city in a given year, according to this story, but the details of these visits have always been a bit unclear. Now, thanks to social media data, new trends are emerging around how people interact with buildings. A study used two million geo-tagged photos from Flickr. Not surprisingly, the buildings with the highest profiles attracted more photographs, with Saint Paul’s cathedral at the top of the list.
5. Shanghai’s diaper store nail house
This week we also want to nab a post from the Shanghai Street Stories blog, even if it is a couple of weeks old. In it, Sue Anne Tay recounts the story of an unyelding man and his diaper shop, resisting – and therefore becoming a nail house – in the middle of the lilong neighborhood of Xinping Lane, which was in the midst of demolition. Her introduction makes you want to keep on reading:
“By late January, the whole area bound by Shunchang Lu, Fuxing Lu (复兴路) and Hefei Lu (合肥路) had been flattened, now a giant dustbowl for remaining scraps of wood and brick to be hauled off for sale. A hastily built concrete wall ran the perimeter of the area in anticipation of its next lease on life: luxury apartment, office building, a high-end mall or a rumored international school.
Except for a single thatched structure, a shop flanked by tightly boarded up rooms. The lone ranger that has yet to complete the negotiations on the final worth of his property.”
6. The world’s worst smog cities
We’ve heard a lot about heavy smog in Chinese cities lately, but ever wondered what the top cities are when it comes to air pollution? The Deutsche Welle site made this gallery this week with the world’s “worst smog cities”, and it turns out that there’s a few surprises: you probably wouldn’t guess that Ahwaz, in Iran, ranks the worst on the WHO’s list when it comes to dirty air because of the high amount of heavy industry it has. It’s followed by Ulan Bator, Mongolia, but cities such as Moscow and Mexico City also have a big smog problem, not helped by factors such as their geographical location or the way the wind blows.
7. A view from “the top of America”
And as an extra, we loved this interactive piece by Josh Sanburn for Time magazine about the construction of what is sure to become an architectural landmark of New York City, 1 World Trade Center – including a 360-degree view from the top, which is on the magazine’s cover and is made up of 567 images taken over the course of five hours and stitched together. The camera was attached to a 13-foot long aluminum pole and mounted just 10 feet below the tip of the 541,3-metre tall structure.
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