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Tall buildings are anathema here for many reasons. The City of Light is built atop a city of shadows. Paris is laid over a subterranean limestone quarry, its huge system of ancient tunnels weakening the ground. Its low-rise skyline is the product of geological circumstances. But there is another reality—a political one—that has shaped the way the city looks: Parisians don’t like authority. They’re an unruly bunch, known to tear down or burn symbols of oppression. In fact, the architectural form that is most typically Parisian is not the mansard roofline or the Haussmann facade but the barricade. A low struc­ture, usually made of a pile of cobblestones and pieces of trash from construction sites, it has been the type of edifice local residents choose most often to express their pol­itical views. Tall buildings in Paris? You must be kidding! To Parisians it would be an open invitation to dissent.

But Lion, like so many French architects, would like to see Paris compete in terms of contemporary architecture with cities like Barcelona, Berlin, and London. He says he enjoys working with clients in cities that are much more dynamic, much more creative—and much more polluted—than Paris, adding, “Yet at the same time, I can’t wait to fly back home where I can walk wherever I want and breathe freely. It’s not just the nice streets and the clean air I crave; it’s the democracy.” As annoying as it is, a convoluted “democratic” process safeguards the public good in Paris, he says. Indeed, in an unprecedented move, Delanoë has imposed on private developers the same time-consuming competition-and-jury review procedure foisted on public projects. “Things are so stagnant in this administratively driven city,” Lion says about this design-by-committee method, “but even I’m grateful for all the resistance. In Paris I feel there is hope for the human race. But they do get on my nerves!”

excise taxes on gasoline and the municipal grants pegged to them are levied on volume, not price. The less gasoline people buy for private automobiles, therefore, the lower the value of federal grants for public transit. If those grants were pegged to sales rather than excise taxes, they would be the next thing to a perfect carbon tax.

Meanwhile, the free market is applying its own time-tested solution to the problem of overconsumption, with salutary political as well as social consequences. Hillary Clinton never stooped lower than when she promised a summer "gas-tax holiday," joining John McCain in the promise. Barack Obama never looked better than when he condemned it.

left-wing doppelgangers predict that high gas prices will bring about "the end of suburbia," destroying uncountable billions of dollars in real-estate value and devastating the sprawlscape like a nuclear weapon. Neither view accounts for the capacity of people to adapt. Most Europeans pay more than $2 a litre to fill up. They pay more in gas taxes than Canadians pay for gas. Both here and there, the price of fuel accounts for about one-fifth of the total cost of owning and operating a vehicle, behind depreciation. People will cope with high gas prices by moving to smaller cars. It happened before, it's no big deal.

The big deal is what's happening to the skyline of our own city, its dramatic growth the purest expression of a post-carbon age.

Fifteen years ago, all new housing in Toronto had to have a front door. The high-rise market was dead, the 905 was booming and surface parking lots pocked the face of the central city. But things have changed - and once again prices reveal all. A beautiful house in central Mississauga with parking for four cars costs less than $200 a square foot. A slice of a midtown Toronto "filing cabinet," as Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion calls high-rise condominiums, costs well more than $400 a foot.

Why? It's the subway, stupid. It's the power of proximity, the value of choice, the enduring appeal of urbanity. As reckoned by the free market, the price of gas remains a minor factor in the total cost of the suburban lifestyle. Many ordinary people in Toronto today, especially those of the new generation, are more than happy to pay their voluntary carbon taxes - simply by moving into the suddenly fashionable, high-rise city. So let the Ottawa gang play their "revenue-neutral" shell games. The real leaders are ordinary people responding to clear market signals, calmly building a new city for the new age.

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?

4. How can we maximize our needs today?

We can maximize our needs by reconsidering our wants.

We must commonly alter our wants so they reflect what is needed for a healthy interconnected civilization on a delicately finite planet.

6. Should a city stay in its current form forever?

No. A good city, like a good tool, should reflect its purpose and function.

Cities should be constantly learning, improving and reflecting the collective and imaged ethos of its occupants.

The physical form of a city will inspire and catalyze cultural crystallizations that will be inscribed in formless media. The content of the formless media will change the form of the city as reflected in the configurations of our past and possible experiences.

10. Is agriculture the next form of urbanism?

If we define agriculture historically as the cultivation of organisms, then some of the most profound innovations in agriculture are on the near horizon of biotechnology.

The communities and buildings of cities will be the fields and fertilizer of the new age of agriculture, sprouting living things that help us find new life. Organisms will take root that produce endless harvests, including energy (food and otherwise), medicine and environmental assistance.

Our deepest societal values and civilizational needs will make themselves known through our collective biotechnological agricultural practices.

How we engineer the undertakings of living things will establish the next form of urbanism as a platform for the birthing and reflective pondering of life itself.