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Megacities. By 2050, three-quarters of the world’s population will be urban. That means more – and much bigger – metropolises At festival times, the locals don sandals and cotton indigo happi coats before heaving the neighbourhood deity through the streets on an ornate palanquin. At harvest, they gather to pound rice cakes. Even in non-festival times, there is a sense of community.

Traders call out in a sing-song voice, enticing customers into their tiny shops to buy fresh fish, homemade tofu, miso or traditional sweets. Yet this is not some out-of-the-way village or coastal town. This is a fairly typical residential street in Tokyo, the world’s biggest city – a megacity, no less, with a population of some 36m people.

The character of cities – and their larger cousins the megacities – is being rapidly redefined. The biggest Asian cities, from Beijing to Jakarta and from Mumbai to Manila, have an entirely different feel from Tokyo. Megacities are not easy to count. That’s the exception. Policies for a Shareable City. Neal Gorenflo presents a very important 20-part project: “The Policies for a Shareable City series will cover 20 policy areas to inspire discussion among citizens and city leaders. Through a partnership with Shareable, Janelle Orsi and the Sustainable Economies Law Center team have taken up the thread started by Lawrence Grodeska at SHARE San Francisco. They will cover food, transportation, housing, culture, governance, entrepreneurship, and more.

At the bottom of this post is the series index which we’ll hyperlink as we publish each article. The hope is that each post prompts you to share ideas in comments and take action in your city. And please copy, remix, and share the policy proposals as you see fit. One a personal note, the series represents an evolution in my own thinking, one that offers meaningful context to the series. But guess what? The good news is that while many national governments are gridlocked and failing to change, city governments are forging ahead.

Cities Under Siege Discussion. Cities Under Siege Discussion Tomas Rawlings 20th September 2011 The London School of Economics recently held an interesting discussion with the author Stephen Graham. Stephen has recently written ‘Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism‘. In the talk Stephen talks about a wide range of subjects, about how the continued blurring of the lines between police and military, especially in the realms of tactics and technology (for example drones). About how the front-lines in war have increasingly come to be the urban centres; think Gaza, Baghdad or Grozny. He talked about what is driving this trend; the obsession of military thinkers with techo-militarist ideas from cyberpunk to mechwarriors. Click on image to see talk Now I need to state that I’ve not read the book, only listened to the talk so please temper my comments around that point.

The recent growth of games has been in the social gaming sector with games such as Farmville – which I can’t see as war propaganda. Cities in Fact and Fiction: An Interview with William Gibson. The city looms large in the fiction of author William Gibson. In the September issue of Scientific American, Gibson's essay, "Life in the Meta-City," details how cities increase "the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts" and how they serve as "vast, multilayered engines of choice. " Cities that cease to provide choice—or which try to overcontrol their denizens—lose their spark and sometimes perish. In the interview that follows, Gibson shares his perceptions about existing cities and their links to his fiction.

There is a well-known quote from you: "The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed. " When you said that in 1999, were you thinking of cities, or perhaps certain cities? Do you think that is the case now to a lesser or greater extent? It's a very scalable observation. Your fiction has depicted wide class gulfs in which "lowlifes" co-exist with the rich and feudallike corporations that concentrate mind-boggling amounts of wealth. Megacities destroy your brain. The study of German scientists provided evidence showing that the brain of urban and rural residents perceives stressful situations differently.

Urban dwellers respond to them much more painfully than inhabitants of villages and small towns. Moreover, their neurophysiological response to stress is so intense that it can lead to destructive changes in the brain. The city and the countryside are two different worlds. Instead the noise of leaves the city has crashing motorways, instead of grass and trees - jungle of concrete skyscrapers, and instead of a small circle of friends - thousands of indifferent strangers in the streets and subways.

There is no doubt that the individuals who grew up in a quiet backwater are strikingly different from the urban dwellers. In asserting this, we mean habits, pace of life, and perhaps some psychological characteristics. However, recently German researchers have discovered that differences are far deeper. Also read: Asia to become one huge megacity. Cities - Desperately Seeking Serendipity. I’m giving the closing keynote at CHI 2011 this afternoon.

I’m thrilled to have the chance to share some thoughts with some of the smartest researchers and practitioners working on questions of human/computer interaction, and perhaps to poke some to help me think about a topic I’m increasingly obsessed with: creating structures, online and offline, to increase the chances of serendipity. I’m particularly honored to share the stage, virtually, with Howard Rheingold, who gave the opening keynote earlier this week, focused on his key work in digital learning and teaching. I know from past experience that there’s no way I can say everything about a topic in a 40 minute keynote, even talking like a New Yorker on speed. This blog post serves as an “extended dance mix” of my talk, including some digressions I probably can’t make on stage and references to the research and ideas I’m referencing throughout the talk.

As of 2008, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. Edward L. Glaeser: What Rankings Show About Cities. Many Cities Face a Long Wait for Jobs to Return. In some regions, those years are in danger of turning into a decade. According to a report to be released Monday, nearly 50 metropolitan regions — or more than one out of seven — are unlikely to bring back all the jobs lost in the until after 2020. Among those areas are Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio; Detroit; Reno, Nev.; and Atlantic City, according to the report commissioned by the United States Conference of Mayors. Detroit, which lost 323,400 jobs during the recession, and Reno, which lost 36,000 jobs, are not expected to regain all of those positions until after 2021.

With job creation having slowed to a crawl and the housing market depressed by foreclosures and falling prices, the economy is struggling to put 13.9 million unemployed Americans back to work. The report notes that metro regions account for about 86 percent of all jobs. “It is striking, it’s sobering and it’s a call to action,” said Antonio R.

Mr. “I want anything that will pay the bills,” said Mr. Mr. Now Coming out of Chinese Factories: Cities in a Box | Global News. Are the world’s megacities too big? Are the world’s megacities becoming a sprawling, overfed, and uncontrollable mass that needs to be restrained for the good of society and the environment? This column suggests that policies aimed at reducing the dispersion in city sizes will hardly improve the wellbeing of the people who live there. If anything, in some developing countries, such as China, large cities may actually be too small. The trend in urbanisation is continuing unabated across the globe. According to the UN, by 2025 close to 5 billion people will live in urbanised areas.

Many cities, especially in the developing world, are set to explode in size. The Nigerian city of Lagos, for example, is expected to increase its population by 50% to nearly 16 million in the next decade and a half (UN 2010). In recent years there has been much debate about whether restricting the growth of megacities will improve the quality of life (see for example the recent Economist debate here). UN-Habitat (2010), The State of African Cities. Charter cities. Romesh Vaitilingam interviews Paul Romer for Vox June 2011 Transcription of a VoxEU audio interview [ Romesh Vaitilingam: Welcome to Vox Talks, a series of audio interviews with leading economists from around the world. My name is Romesh Vaitilingam and today's interview is with Professor Paul Romer from New York University's Stern School of Business. Paul and I met in London in June 2011 at a conference on development policy‑making organized by the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy.

Paul Romer: The broad conceptual framework here is that progress comes from improvements in both technologies and rules. Romesh: OK. Paul: The concept derives from an analogy between thinking about technologies and rules that we now all accept: that if there are better technologies around the world, we should find a way to bring those into a country. Romesh: You've talked about some of the models from history that we might draw on. Paul: Sure. Cities. Cities Without public transit, New York would have to build nearly 50 multi-lane bridges to accommodate its commuters. Yikes. burnin' rubber A Michigan bill aims to classify fuel made by burning tires and hazardous industrial waste as renewable energy, but environmentalists say that's setting a dangerous precedent. Business & Technology Uber, I loved you, but your disregard for women's safety is bringing me down.

Cities as software, and hacking the urban landscape. What if saving a rundown city wasn’t about building expensive new infrastructure — hardware, so to speak — but instead reprogramming the existing infrastructure? Changing the software of the place? That’s the analogy used by Marcus Westbury, founder of Renew Newcastle, an innovative initiative that has breathed life into the vacant downtown of that Australian city. Newcastle, which grew up around the coal and steel industries, suffers from a lot of the same problems as Rust Belt cities in the United States. Its major employers shut down in the latter half of the 20th century, its transportation systems were dismantled, and retail decamped for the sprawling suburbs. The core of the city was vacant and neglected. But Renew Newcastle has turned that around by making it easy for entrepreneurs and artists to move into vacant spaces and make creative use of them.

Maybe a generation that has come of age in a digital world is fundamentally predisposed to seeing urban space as hackable. Charter Cities: Glass House Conversations: The Case for New Cities. The Glass House Conversations invited Greg Lindsay to host a conversation about new cities. I couldn’t resist the temptation to throw some stones: In this century, billions of people will move to cities. On the current trajectory, far too many will go to places that don’t want them.

As a result, they will live in conditions that deny them equal treatment under the law and exclude them from full participation in the modern economy. To achieve true inclusion, we will need an environment like the one that prevailed on the frontier in the United States, where cities were in frantic competition to attract more residents. In principle, existing cities could learn how to grow in ways that benefit both existing residents and new arrivals. Fortunately, those who want a chance to live as a legal resident in a modern urban center don’t have to wait for the legacy cities to act. Ideally, new cities will be created close to the greatest source of potential residents, in developing countries. McMansions dead at last? The kind of houses we'll build in the future. - By Witold Rybczynski. The U.S. housing market is going through an adjustment of historic proportions. Before 2006, when the housing slump commenced, American home builders regularly built as many as 2 million new houses annually, rarely less than a million.

This amount was needed to keep up with new household formation, immigration, homeowners moving up, and replacement due to obsolescence. Since then the number of new houses built has dropped drastically—the seasonally adjusted annual figure announced by the federal government in February 2011 was about 400,000! What's going on? The recession, obviously. Common wisdom is that eventually the housing market will stabilize. What about single-family houses, which will still remain for many people the home of choice? Mega(city)transect. Megatransecting Mexico City In 1999, American biologist J. Michael Fay set out on a project to map and survey the vegetation of Africa’s entire Congo River basin.

Heavily promoted by National Geographic as “The Megatransect,” Fay’s feat involved 455 days of walking across 3,200 miles of largely untamed territory. Biologists had actually been using the term “transect” to describe such surveys since the late 19th century, but Fay’s epic-scale journey brought it widespread public recognition. In 2004 and 2005, he and Geographic extended the brand by conducting a “Megaflyover” of Africa, taking photos every 20 seconds during a 60,000 mile plus journey in a small bush plane. Legendary as the natural surveys of explorer-biologists like Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt are, expeditions like theirs — and Fay’s — are increasingly rare now that most of “the field” has been crossed and recrossed. A long, long walk through London The Collective’s methodology produced at least one surprising result.

The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade (9780262561471): Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, Anthony J. Venables. The Auto-Auto Race. Cities are a central engine of the modern economy. Enormous gains come from folks interacting and specializing more in bigger cities. What limits these gains, and keeps us from all living in one mega-city, is transportation costs. While the cost of transporting goods and people once mattered similarly, today people transport costs dominate.

And while hopes for mass-transit remain, cars clearly dominate human transport today. Thus the near-term future of cities, and of which cities dominate the world, comes down to how cities handle auto innovation. I see three main innovations to consider: Mass Mass Transit – If a big city could coordinate to create subways, etc. on the scale and quality of New York, it could support densities like New York. So a huge upcoming policy question is: when will what big cities manage to coordinate to change road law to achieve these huge auto-auto economic gains?

Some related quotes: As recently as 1950, only 30% of the world’s population was urbanized. An Effort to Save Flint, Mich., by Shrinking It. Parasitic urban housing. Urban Environment - Sustainability Comes of Age. How Top-Level Internet Domains Could Revitalize Cities, or Be Squandered. Megacities - Opportunities at Urban Edges. Undone by their dreams. Deborah Popper on "Subtracted Cities" Sustainable Cities: What Makes an Urban Area Successful? - Kaid Benfield - Life. Smart Cities and "Liveability" The Seven Myths of ‘Slums’