A plea for beauty: a manifesto for a new urbanism - Society and Culture
AEI’s new Society and Culture Outlook will examine important ideas in areas such as architecture, art, literature, music, and philosophy that are outside today’s front-page news. Subscribe to this series A plea for beauty: a manifesto for a new urbanism Download PDF Our culture is a culture of cities, and without cities we could not conceivably have enjoyed the enormous scientific, economic, and political advances of the Enlightenment. Key points in this Outlook: The decline of American cities, which saps the nation’s social, cultural, economic, and political vitality, is due largely to the ugliness of their centers.Neither market solutions nor centralized master planning can save our cities.Urban renewal depends on attracting the middle class with the kind of beauty that flourishes in cities and obeying aesthetic side constraints that create a sense of settlement. When it comes to the difficult problems faced by our ever-growing societies, conservatives tend to favor market solutions.
Burying Bits of the City: Hong Kong Underground
Several months ago we looked at a network of artificial caves being built beneath Singapore that will, upon completion, extend the city's energy infrastructure under the Pacific seabed; and, back in 2010, we took a very brief look at huge excavations underneath Chicago, courtesy of a feature article in Tunnel Business Magazine. Now, according to the South China Morning Post, civil engineers in Hong Kong are exploring the possibility of developing large-scale underground spaces—artificial caves—for incorporation into the city's existing infrastructure. In the full text of the article, available online courtesy of Karst Worlds, we read that the Hong Kong government "is moving towards burying bits of the city—the unsightly ones—in underground caverns, freeing up more land for housing and economic development." [Image: From the Enhanced Use of Underground Space in Hong Kong]. [Image: From the Enhanced Use of Underground Space in Hong Kong; view bigger].
"City Water for All" by Peter Brabeck-Letmathe
Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space VEVEY, SWITZERLAND – How many people in the world’s towns and cities can drink the water in their tap without risking their health? The answer is probably impossible to determine. Indeed, the United Nations uses the term “improved” sources of water to describe what is supplied in many urban areas around the world. Unfortunately, “improved” does not always mean “clean” or “safe.” The 2012 update of the World Health Organization’s report Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation estimates that at least 96% of urban dwellers in emerging economies like China, India, Thailand, and Mexico have access to “improved” sources of water. Visit any major city in an emerging economy, from Mexico City to Mumbai, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone who believes that the water piped into their homes is fit to drink. It doesn’t have to be like this. With a low-key but firm management style, Chan began to turn things around.
"Intelligent Urban Design" by Esther Dyson
Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – Two months ago, I was introduced to a start-up called CityMart, a for-profit marketplace dedicated to helping vendors and city managers to find one another – and to spreading municipal innovations outside of their home turf. This month, in Thailand, I met Jonathan Hursh, who runs Compassion for Migrant Children (soon to be renamed), which focuses on migrant populations – adults and children with few resources and few rights – in the slums that surround almost every large city in the world. In mid-May, I'll be attending the New Cities Summit in Paris, a three-day forum focused on the future of cities. Cities matter, as they always have, but now more of the world is starting to take notice of their problems and possibilities. Most cities have grown through evolution, from unpremeditated beginnings. And, as we are seeing worldwide nowadays, national governments are difficult to overturn and also difficult to (re)build.
"Self and the City" by Avner de-Shalit
Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space BEIJING – What is the big story of our age? It depends on the day, but if we count by centuries, then surely humanity’s urbanization is a strong contender. True, cities cannot provide the rich sense of community that often characterizes villages and small towns. Pride in one’s city has a long history. Yet the differences between, say, Beijing and Jerusalem, suggest that cities do have such an ethos. Or consider Montreal, whose residents must navigate the city’s tricky linguistic politics. Hong Kong is a special case, where the capitalist way of life is so central that it is enshrined in the constitution (the Basic Law). Paris, on the other hand, has a romantic ethos. In fact, many cities have distinctive identities of which their residents are proud. Chinese cities seek to counter uniformity via campaigns to recover their unique “spirit.” Urban pride can also prevent extreme nationalism.
Islands on land could make towns tsunami-proof - tech - 15 February 2012
Video: Artificial islands could shield against tsunamis Elevated land-based islands could protect people living in low-lying areas from tsunamis – and archipelagos of them could form entire towns LIKE giant spacecraft that have just touched down, they give the countryside an otherworldly look. Elevated land-based islands are what one architect is proposing for the Tōhoku region of north-east Japan, the area that was devastated by last March's magnitude 9 earthquake and the mega-tsunamis it triggered. Keiichiro Sako of Sako Architects in Tokyo has created a blueprint in which groups of these islands form entire towns. Tōhoku Sky Village is not just an architect's flight of fancy: one municipality in the affected region is making moves towards building one in its locality and others could follow. Most islands will be used for residential purposes, with between 100 and 500 houses and apartments. Critics point to the complex issue of how the reconstruction will be funded. More from the web
Cities As Gardens
But by 2005, we've passed a milestone in our history, in that 50 percent of humanity, 50 percent of all human beings, lived in cities by 2005. And the projection is that by 2050, three out of every four of us will live in cities around the world. And so images like this will become the norm, rather than the visions of Arcadia. And already we can make a plot of cities around the world of more than a million inhabitants. And that figure's only going to get larger and larger. And already the world at night reflects this movement to urbanization. And visions like this, of Calcutta, are commonplace. But so are images like this. Now, one answer we can give to this is a metaphorical one, a figurative one. If we look around the world, we don't have to look very far to see the garden intruding on our cities, in some sense. The first form of predation they suffered from was from people who wanted to sack and plunder the cities they'd built. But there's a catch.
