Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged place_making →  View Popular

· Expanding the availability of visas for skilled researchers; and

· Encouraging in-migration of foreign start-ups through “soft landing”
programs.

What Ed seems to be railing against -- with good reason -- is the unhealthy reliance some cities have on the shiny new physical bauble to be a magic bullet for what ails them. (Keep in mind that Buffalo is planning to make a major public investment in a Bass Pro Store on its waterfront.) Ed's message was, invest in people, not buildings. And when physical investments are made, he favors flexibility.

"There is little evidence that development projects fix decline," Ed told his audience.

On the other hand, Ed makes a strong case for density, which is "particularly valuable for an idea economy" since "proximity enables ideas to move quickly."

"People learn from one another," Ed said. "You get smart by hanging out with smart people. It's the way you build skills."

1. Invest in building skills not building buildings.

2. Quality of life is economic development.

3. Always ask who benefits from policy. (Too many place-based policies tend to benefit either the connected business.)

4. There is little reason to favor one region over another. But it costs more to provide services to people who start with less, which provides a strong rationale for state and federal governments to pay for social services. And different forms of development have different environmental impacts so that should also be taken into account in state and federal policy and funding.

Put people ahead of place, Ed admonished.

q – gentritfication?

a – There is no smart answer to that. When you improve the area new people move in. This should not stand in the way of improving cities. You also need a social policy. Bogota used transit as social policy providing good transit not more roads for cars improves the lot of the poor.

The legislative branch has lost much of its political power to the executive, which is usually aligned with global corporate capital.

Privatization removes functions of legislature and shifts them to the private sector

Sassen believes that cities are a critical space for overcoming the hollowing of the legislative body and in their capacity to make informal politics.

As a critical regionalist, Liane Lefaivre seeks to understand the context of a place in order to give it meaning.

Le Faivre’s current project uses the concept of play to confront major issues affecting European cities, especially the tension between communities. Citing Schiller, Gross, Freud, Huizinga, and the Dutch painting genre “Children’s Play,” she talked about the importance of play in exploring our world and in crossing over cultural boundaries.

Post World War Two, the Dutch chose to instill civic values and a civic experience through play. Aldo Van Eyk designed multiple play spaces in central neighbourhood locations in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam playgrounds were not conceived individually, but as part of a net. They were polycentric, interstitial and participatory.

Michael Sorkin, whose work deals with the investigation of how politics and architecture are ‘conjoined,’ came with a stunning if somewhat ironic talk about slums as utopian propositions. At the core of the urban crisis are slums, where 1.5 billion people live. And though slums remind us of the most desperate of human conditions, and are very real problems, they are paragons of efficiency and democracy. They can respond to our environmental oversights.




The canary in the minefield has croaked and the solution is to build sustainable cities.




As Jane Jacobs spoke of good cities being self-organizing and morphological, slums, with these and other desirable qualities give us the possibility of thinking of the utopian condition:





• high degrees of internal equality, which can be identified as the basis of solidarity


• low levels of consumption


• high levels of reuse and recycling


• logical adjacencies to economic resources


• high levels of self-organization stemming from tight community grouping


• scales that are morphologically adaptable

With neoliberalism shaping globalization, there’s heightened competition amongst cities to attract industry and tourism. Rather than seeing cities as efficient and perhaps aesthetic places to live, they are being reconceived and marketed from the demand side as sites from conferences, festivals and conventions. Susan Fainstein argued that global cities can bear responses to the transitory whims of global corporations, the competition for foreign capital, and the placelessness of global culture.




Global citiies are strategic sites for economic control - yet they cannot control themselves - control emanates from them, but its not clear how much control cities have over their own boundaries.




While cities are becoming more responsive to global forces, Fainstein thinks we should encourage democracy on the local level to allow for equitable relationships. Inspired by David Harvey’s “Social Justice and the City,” and praising Amsterdam as a city with high social equality without sacrificing prosperity, she listed three factors that allow cities to deliver justice:





1. the extent to which government is entrepreneurial


2. the amount and quality of planning


3. the amount of focus given to those most in need





Fainstein praised Sen and Nussbaum for their ‘capabilities approach’ to development which seeks to ensure substantial freedoms to people, and sees poverty as capability-deprivation. One such poverty is environment degradation, which often is caused from distant global forces and reinforces environmental injustice. Global climate change has the potential to disproportionately impact poor communities who may not be able to react to problems they didn’t create. Local populations need to be able to respond to global challenges in a way that ensures social justice.

Anthony Townsend of the Institute for the Future discussed the role of mobile devices in the future of the city. With mobiles, people can record, document, and annotate social space. Ideas, insights and emotions can be transmitted. Townsend calls this functional telepathy “telepathic urbanism.”

Telepathic Urbanism would help us experiment with new social ways of urban living that are based on real-time information and feedback. Thus we could get more out of the existing structures of cities and optimize our lives in them through a better representation of their energy, resource and material realities.

And finally, Robert Jan van Pelt, expert witness in the trial against holocaust denier David Irving, explains in this video (sorry embed not working) how an architectural analysis of Auschwitz proved that the holocaust was not an accident.

we can follow all these decisions and see that their is no practice of killing, then their is a practice of murdering, then there is a policy of murdering…architecture of the camps morphed into the question of answering holocaust morphology…was it intended yes or no?