urban - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

31 Oct 09

Most outlying estates have not had Castle Vale’s makeover. Many are shabby and a long way from shops, jobs and power. Frankley, an estate that lies at the end of an infrequent 40-minute bus ride south from Birmingham, is one. “Here feels so far away from the power base,” complains Andy Ross, a community worker who recently lost a colleague after an unexpected edict from city hall unilaterally deployed him elsewhere.
Frankley has had a particularly rough time, straddling the boundary between Birmingham and a neighbouring council. Squabbles over who is responsible for drains, street lighting and other services mean that, sometimes, work goes undone. Ray Goodwin, who works for Birmingham Settlement, a local charity, says that these slip-ups leave gaps for the BNP. “Someone will come round and take your rubbish away, or mend your fence. The next time he knocks it’s to ask for your vote,” he says. Frankley is not alone in feeling cut-off: national polling shows that whites feel less in control of their communities and country than any other ethnic group (see chart).

30 Oct 09

Do "local currencies" really help the communities that use them? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

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community cohesion London urban economics

Money, whether pounds or Brixton bricks, isn't wealth. It's just a way of keeping accounts, and swapping one system of accounts for another isn't going to alter the basic productive potential of Brixton.
True, community currencies may very gently encourage trade with locals rather than strangers. But the gains from more trade with locals are more than offset by the losses from less trade with strangers.
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- Nor are the environmental benefits of community currencies terribly persuasive. Local trade sounds environmentally friendly, but it is a distraction: The environmental cost of driving to the shops or growing food on inappropriate local land is far greater than the cost of the carbon emissions of long-range shipping.
- The real benefits, if they exist, are not economic but social, and best explained not by an economist like me but by a sociologist such as Ed Collom of the University of Southern Maine.
  Collom's work looks, at first glance, like bad news for the community-currency movement. He has found, for example, that most currency schemes in the United States last only a few years before collapsing. The ones that thrive are in places which already have strong, liberal, middle-class communities, such as Portland, Ore., or Ithaca, N.Y. In the Rust Belt areas that would seem to need them more, they have not taken root.
- But despite the obstacles, Ed Collom is convinced that local currencies can strengthen neighborhood ties and allow people to make friends: They are a focal point for the community-minded, even when they do not last.
  That is possible. I live near a determined, community-minded entrepreneur who owns the local cafe, the sort of person who helps to get community currencies started. But rather than minting a Homerton dollar, she has founded a traders' association and is trying to set up a street market. I think she has the right priorities.

Will the Brixton pound buy a brighter future? | Environment | The Guardian

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By nurturing this highly visible sense of localism and civic pride, the organisers hope to show that self-reliant communities can not only thrive, but be better prepared for looming environmental threats and the resulting social stresses.
Is it about strengthening community bonds and boosting the local economy, though, or spreading the environmental message? Both, says Nichols. "We want to hit home the idea of localism
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- One of our early supporters told us that Jamaicans are naturally sceptical, so we've worked really hard trying to convince them about the merits of the Brixton pound, visiting some businesses up to four times. Now the likes of Blacker Dread Records, a well-known music shop on Coldharbour Lane, have signed up, and that's been important to us as the owner is very influential in the local community
- The system works like this: whenever you purchase a product or service from a participating business, you are offered the opportunity of receiving your change in Brixton pounds. These may then be spent at any other participating business, either as an alternative to sterling or in combination with sterling. By "sticking" to Brixton, the notes will, in theory, help to boost local trade and reduce the reliance on "external" economies. Some participating businesses have also pledged to offer discounts to anyone paying with Brixton pounds.
- An obvious question that arises, not just in Brixton but any community introducing its own local currency, is the issue of crime: what's to stop counterfeiters scuppering the whole scheme? Transition Towns Brixton has spent £2,000 designing and printing the bank notes, which will be available in £1, £5, £10 and £20 denominations.
- "You are always searching for the ties that bind people together," says Harris Beider, a professor at the Institute of Community Cohesion in Coventry and former adviser to the prime minister's social exclusion unit. "It is important to build the economic base and social capital of any community. If the Brixton pound can aid integration, that would obviously be a good thing. And if it can achieve the local multiplier effect [the number of times money is circulated within a community] that would be good, too."

28 Oct 09

The rise of urban gaming | Technology | guardian.co.uk

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gaming urban

26 Oct 09

The City Is Here For You To Use: (very) provisional bibliography « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird

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urban cities reading

05 Aug 09

Paul Romer's radical idea: Charter cities | Video on TED.com

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14 Jul 09

McKinsey: What Matters: Talentopolis

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innovation inequality society trends cities urban

Today a highly significant demographic realignment is at work: the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid people to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of traditional lower- and middle-class people from those same places. Such geographic sorting of people by economic potential, on this scale, is unprecedented. I call it simply the means migration.
The means migration can be seen most clearly in the increasing geographic concentration of college graduates. According to research by Harvard University’s Edward Glaeser and the University of Chicago’s Christopher Berry, in 1970 human capital was distributed relatively evenly across the United States.
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- During the past three decades, the percentage of Americans holding a college degree has more than doubled, reaching 27 percent by 2004. But those gains have not been evenly spread. For instance, more than half of all residents in the San Francisco region now have college degrees. And there are five regions nationwide where more than 45 percent of adults have graduated from college.
- In 2006 the mean household income was $80,638 in San Jose, California, and $78,978 in Washington, DC; by comparison, New Orleans and Oklahoma City each boast just about $50,000. What’s behind this phenomenon? It’s not just that people prefer to live in means metros. To be sure, many of them are aesthetically pleasing—beautiful, energizing, and fun to live in—but they can also be cramped, dense, and expensive.
- The more smart people, and the denser the connections between them, the faster it all goes. It is the multiplier effect of the clustering force at work.
- The means migration severs the long-held connection between population growth and economic development. Changing technology, increased trade, and the ability to outsource routine functions have made highly skilled people less reliant on the colocation of the unskilled and moderately skilled.
- What matters most today isn’t where most people settle, but where the greatest number of the most skilled people does.
- The consequence is this: the means migration is dividing the world into two kinds of regions with very different economic prospects. A small number of means metros attract the lion’s share of the mobile and the skilled, who see their incomes and real-estate values climb, while the masses witness the exact opposite.
- there are powerful reasons to believe that the economic disparity between some city-regions and others will continue to grow, and perhaps even accelerate, thanks to the snowball effect of talent attraction.

08 Jul 09

The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » The Choice of Cities

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cities urban future essential

almost everything that we think of when we say “culture” arose within cities. After all, the terms “city” and “civilization” share the same root.
Like most other charts depicting the technium, not much happens until the last two centuries. Then populations booms, innovation rockets, information explodes, freedoms increase, and cities rule.
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- Is the recent large-scale relocation to cities a choice or a necessity? Are people pulled by the lure of opportunities, or are they pushed against their will by desperation? Why would anyone willingly choose to leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum unless they were forced to?
- Well, every city begins as a slum.
- he eternal disdain for newcomers is as old as the first city. Romans complained of the tenements, shacks and huts at the edges of their town that “were putrid, sodden and sagging.” Every so often Roman soldiers would raze a settlement of squatters, only to find it rebuilt or moved within weeks.
- Babylon, London, and New York all had seamy ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that “slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape” of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at is peak, nearly 20% of its residents did not have a “fixed abode” — that is they lived in shacks.
- San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his wonderful book Shadow Cities, one survey in 1855 estimated that “95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] city would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land.”
- s late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first 21st century cities.
- That’s how it works. Over time slums gain permanency. Ad hoc shelters are upgraded, infrastructure extended, and makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums.
- A squatter city is, and has always been, a shadow city, a parallel world without official permission, but a city nonetheless.
- ake Burning Man, the arts festival arising every year in the Nevada desert. It is a bona fide squatter city built and run semi-legally by its inhabitants. It is, in essence, a slum with porta potties. It draws 40,000 residents who bang together huts, shanties, tents, and make-shift shelters, and then, like any other slum, trade, barter, and share their few skills and belongings. The owner-built architecture of Burning Man is thrilling, and the gift economy bracing. Because this futuristic slum is so dense and temporary, it has one of the highest concentrations of creativity I’ve seen anywhere.
- As Stewart Brand notes in the City Planet chapter of his upcoming book Whole Earth Discipline, “Cities are wealth creators; they have always been.” He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida who claims that 40 of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18% of the world’s population, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.”
- “The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, and 70 percent have been in the city at least six years…” Slum dwellers are often busy with low paying service jobs in nearby high rent districts; they have money but live in a squatter city because it’s close to their work. Because they are industrious, they progress fast. One UN report found that households in the older slums of Bangkok have on average 1.6 televisions, 1.5 cell phones, a refrigerator; two-thirds have a washing machine and CD player, and half have a fixed line phone, video player and a motor scooter. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate.
- To compensate for this outer contamination and ugliness, the insides of squatter housing is often surprisingly soothing. Recycled material covers the walls, color abounds, knick-knacks accumulate to create a comfy zone. Sure, one room will house far more people than seems possible, but for many, a slum dwelling offers more comfort than a village hut. While the pirated electricity may be unreliable, at least there is electricity. The single water spigot may have a long line, but it might be closer than the well at home. Medicines are expensive, but available. And there are schools with teachers that show up.
- “Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here?” Then he answers: “So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment…”
- “For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn’t just about money. It’s also about freedom.” Stewart Brand recounts this summation of the magnetic pull of cities by activist Kavita Ramdas: “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.”
- The Bedouin of Arabia were once seemingly the freest people on earth, roaming the Great Empty Quarter at will, under a tent of stars and no one’s boss. But they are rapidly quitting their nomadic life and hustling into drab concrete block apartments in exploding Gulf-state ghettos.
- The Bedouin are lured, not pushed, to the city because, in their own words: “We can always go into the desert to taste the old life. But this [new] life is better than the old way. Before there was no medical care, no schools for our children.” An 80-year old Bedouin chief sums it up better than I could: “The children will have more options for their future.”
- They come for opportunities.
- They could stay and not increase their technology. But they choose — very willingly, very eagerly — to run to the city.
- Some argue that they had no choice. That those who arrive in the slums are forced against their desires to migrate to the city because their villages lacked the options of education, jobs and opportunity. It is true there’s an imbalance of options — that’s the point. But there is work in the villages; it is just that this work does not pay cash (by which to buy cell phones and movie tickets), and it is boring for many, although it can be very satisfying if one is patient. That livelihood of seasonal toil, abundant leisure, strong family ties, strong conformity, rewarding physical labor — all this treasure is unquestionably available to them. They could stay. But they do not choose it. They choose possibilities and opportunities.
- Country star Kenny Rogers is the number one musician in Kenya, where there are more than one all-country-music radio stations. Dolly Parton sells out in South Africa. Modified versions of Johnny Cash cover songs can he heard in Afghanistan. Country music has fans wherever people are departing rural areas. In other words, worldwide.
- ountry music began in America during the very period when vigorous farm towns dissolved into suburbia. It is played along highways, among factory workers, and in the low-rent fringes of urbanity as a comforting reminder of what has been lost. Perhaps the songs serve as a charm to ward off further demise. The benefits of the city and technology are not free; they are paid with a sigh.
- Gratefully, forced migration happens less and less. Habitat for aboriginal tribes, however, is still being cut down, putting intense pressure on them to abandon their ancient lifestyles. A certain small percentage of the river of people streaming into the cities today are being pushed by the expansion of the technium. It is a horribly stupid policy to destroy natural habitat this way, and a horribly stupid policy to displace tribes.
- But today, as in the past, most of the mass movement toward cities — the hundreds of millions per decade — is led by settled people willing to pay the price of inconvenience and grime, living in a slum in order to gain opportunities and freedom. The poor move into the city for the same reason the rich move into the technological future — to head towards possibilities and increased freedoms.

16 Mar 09

Removing Roads and Traffic Lights Speeds Urban Travel: Scientific American

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urban cities networks interesting

A case in point is “The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks,” published last September in Physical Review Letters by Michael Gastner, a computer scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, and his colleagues. Using hypothetical and real-world road networks, they explain that drivers seeking the shortest route to a given destination eventually reach what is known as the Nash equilibrium, in which no single driver can do any better by changing his or her strategy unilaterally. The problem is that the Nash equilibrium is less efficient than the equilibrium reached when drivers act unselfishly—that is, when they coordinate their movements to benefit the entire group.
Another kind of anarchy could actually speed travel as well—namely, a counterintuitive traffic design strategy known as shared streets. The practice encourages driver anarchy by removing traffic lights, street markings, and boundaries between the street and sidewalk. Studies conducted in northern Europe, where shared streets are common, point to improved safety and traffic flow.

The world's slums are overcrowded, unhealthy - and increasingly seen as resourceful communities that can offer lessons to modern cities. - The Boston Globe

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urban cities

"in a few years' time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living."
slums embody many of the principles frequently invoked by urban planners: They are walkable, high-density, and mixed-use, meaning that housing and commerce mingle. Consider too that the buildings are often made of materials that would otherwise be piling up in landfills, and slums are by some measures exceptionally ecologically friendly.
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- "We should not dismiss them because they look ugly, they look messy," says Cruz, a professor at UC San Diego. "They have sophisticated, participatory practices, a light way of occupying the land. Because people are trying to survive, creativity flourishes."
- More recently, shantytowns have been reassessed in light of the growing awareness of the benefits of urbanization. Cities provide myriad economic opportunities that are lacking in the countryside, which is why millions of people stream in every month. They also offer freedom - especially, notes Brand, for women, who find greater access to jobs and education, as well as healthcare. Birthrates tend to fall when families move from villages to cities, not only thanks to family planning services, but also because more children, an asset on the farm, are a burden in the city.
- What's more, cities are increasingly seen as good for the planet. Aside from slowing population growth, they're also more efficient in their use of resources, and allow abandoned land in the country to regenerate.
- Shantytowns are "pedestrian-friendly. There are small alleyways, the streets are narrow. Children can play in the streets," says Christian Werthmann, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard. Some frustrating parts of slum life - the close quarters and the need to cooperate with neighbors in endeavors like obtaining services - have an upside: they can contribute to a strong sense of community. And although many shantytowns are dangerous, some actually have very low crime rates.
- There is debate about whether the informality itself is a plus or a minus. Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist, has argued that slum dwellers should be given title deeds for their plots, in order to liberate the "dead capital" they are sitting on - to enable them to get loans from banks. But many analysts are skeptical of this proposal. One problem is that individual property rights could disrupt the stable system of communal control that has evolved in many slums. Another possibility is that residents might quickly sell their new deeds for cash, and thus lose the rights to their longtime homes.
- On a more basic level, these places can teach us about where, for better or worse, urban life appears to be headed. "Squatters are the world's dominant builders," says Brand. "If you want to understand what's going on in cities, look at squatters."

26 Jan 09

The Vertical Farm Project - Agriculture for the 21st Century and Beyond | www.verticalfarm.com

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22 Jan 09

208_ideopolis_education061208.pdf (application/pdf Object)

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research cities knowledge economics urban innovation

19 Jan 09

How the city hurts your brain - Boston.com

Natural settings, in contrast, don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. This idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART, and it was first developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. While it's long been

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science housing memory interesting health culture environment design psychology behaviour brain cities travel nature architecture planning mind urban intelligence