Urbanization News: July 15

That snazzy promo video is for this week’s featured urban happening, “The Just City: A Ford Forum on Metropolitan Opportunity” held in New York yesterday. Sponsored by the Ford Foundation, it brought together “Civic leaders and policymakers, urban designers and entrepreneurs [to] explore how fairness, opportunity and equity can serve as the defining features of this new era of urbanization.” NYU-Wagner adjunct planning prof Solomon Greene, also a fellow at the Open Society Foundations, offers some remarks on Bruce Katz‘s talk in this video. The lineup was an impressive one of thinkers and practitioners doing visionary work in their metropolitan area.

And our picks of the week’s news on cities and urbanization:

This Week in Waste: A pair of articles discusses innovative strategies for what to do with waste as cities grow. This article from PRI features a hydroponic farm in a Chinese lake that gets fertilizer for its leafy greens from sewage dumped in the water from the city of Kunming (photo below, courtesy of PRI). This dispatch from India via Live Mint critiques Delhi’s privatization of waste hauling, especially where Pune offers an example of a rapidly urbanizing city implementing a zero-waste strategy that’s working both for people who sustain their livelihoods from the waste stream and for the environment too.

My city’s modal split is better than yours: The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy opened up nominations for the 2012 Sustainable Transport Award – hurry up and nominate the city where you love to commute! Right now you’re up against Seville, Minneapolis, Cape Town and a few others – Guangzhou won last year, so you won’t have to compete with their awesome BRT and bike share.

“They put a bullet through the train”: In last week’s news we reported that donors had pledged big bucks for inter-city transportation infrastructure in Brazil in anticipation of the 2014 World Cup. Long a transport investment darling of the donor community, Brazil might not be quite as sexy as previously thought – Reuters reports that an auction that opened up this week for bids to build a bullet train between Rio and Sao Paulo (this one a major project for the 2016 Olympics) failed to attract a single bid.

The “Forgotten Front”: This Big City reports on the desperate situation of water in Afghanistan – being in turmoil for decades, infrastructure and institutions needed for a reliable and safe water supply have suffered greatly. “Around 73 percent of the population relies on improvised and inadequate facilities to supply water, while water sources are becoming increasingly polluted and overexploited in places like Kabul.” Find out more in this report from the Centre for Policy and Human Development at Kabul University (photo of the Kabul River below courtesy of IRIN, see a slideshow here). And just in case you were scratching your head too, the U.S. alone has spent about $19 billion just in development aid in Afghanistan since the war effort started.

Everyone should count: Cities Alliance released a new report this week, “The Urbanisation of Displaced People.” It examines how conflicts and wars lead to a unique form of rapid urbanization as people flee their homes and seek refuge in cities – because many refugees and displaced people end up as permanent residents, the report makes a  case for planners and development practitioners to account for these populations in plans and programs.

A critique of Ed Glaeser?!?: James Howard Kunstler, in his witty weekly “KunstlerCast” podcast, critiques Ed Glaeser’s ideas on urbanism. He sees Glaeser’s vision  in his lauded book Triumph of the City as backward-looking and too sweet on skyscrapers.

Urbanization News May 6

This week’s feature, A New Class of Consumers Grows in Africa: Market on Par With China’s and India’s, does not directly address urbanization but one can not help but wonder how this new class of Africans will shape Africa’s cities in the near future. Will Africans begin to rapidly consume more formal urban housing?  Hopefully the next version of this map of slums in African cities from UNEP will show significantly less read as this middle class emerges. Read an excerpt from this story below:

“Sustained economic growth in Africa has produced for the first time a broad middle class, one that cuts across the continent and is on par with the size of the middle classes in the billion-person emerging markets of China and India. The rise of a middle class in the world’s poorest continent is a dramatic marker for the global economy. At a time when the U.S., Europe and Japan are struggling to grow, Africa is beginning to beckon as a consumer of what other nations produce, thanks in part to a young population more upwardly mobile than ever before.” Read more from the Wall Street Journal.

As infrastructure preparations lag, Brazil may deliver a Fifa World Cup to forget  Megaevents, such as the Olympics in Beijing, World Expo in Shanghai and the last World Cup in South Africa have been known to dramatically shape the structure of cities as they upgrade for these event.  Brazil however does not appear to be moving towards this goal as rapidly as it should.  Read more here: 

“I must say that in comparison with the state of play between South Africa and Brazil three years before the World Cup, Brazil is behind South Africa,” Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, warned last month… It’s been more than three years since it was awarded the tournament, but no stadiums have yet been built.  Read more from the National.

Unfunded promises and common citizens: slum rehabilitation in Mumbai The story of Mumbai’s  Slum Rehabilitation Development Scheme has been slow to unfold over the past four years that I have been following it.  This week’s Global Urbanist presents an update on this scheme’s:

“Every election has given birth to different creative promises of slum rehabilitation in Mumbai. In recent times this started with the Prime Minister’s Grant Project in 1985, which granted a onetime contribution of ’1 billion rupees’ (22.5 million US dollars) to the Maharashtra state government to ‘improve housing conditions in Mumbai’. Yet this represented only 15% of the project cost–the rest was to be acquired through individual contributions from slum dwellers and through loans.”  Read more from the Global Urbanist.

Detroit demolish 3,000 blighted, dangerous houses in 1 year Most cities would certainly not be excited about massive demolitions, but Detroit’s mayor celebrated the 3,000th demolition this week.  Image how much green space the city will have when he reaches his goal of 10,000 demolished homes by December 2013.  

Detroit has reached Mayor Dave Bing’s goal of demolishing 3,000 blighted and dangerous houses in one year…. The goal was to have 3,000 leveled by the end of April. The city has thousands of vacant structures as it deals with the effects of a shrinking population.” Read more here.

Curitiba, Brazil: Model of Sustainability

Curitiba Brazil is best known for its innovative urban planning practices from the 1970′s, including its famous Bus Rapid Transit system that functions as an “above ground subway.”  Jaime Lerner is the former mayor of Curitiba responsible for most of these innovative elements. During this first two terms, 1971–75 & 1979–84, his strategy was to implement many individuals projects separately at a very quick pace. The wire operate house is one of his famous examples of a project that was went from an idea to complete in a few months.  He calls this approach urban acupuncture – “When a small intervention can provide a new energy to the city.”

Jardim Botânico de Curitiba - Opened in 1991 as Curitiba's trademark botanical garden

Pedestrian street in downtown Curitiba

In the past forty years however, the bus system and other elements of this world famous planned city have been been tested and are now aging. I had the opportunity to study urban planning in Curitiba during the Summer of 2007 and learned that many famous elements of the city have remained unchanged since their implementation, such as the BRT that was in need of new routes and signage to meet the changing demands of residents.  During this trip my classmates and I dub this city a “Disneyland for Planners” because there were so many examples of sustainable practices and creative uses of space, however we had the feeling that many of these places, such as the pedestrian street for shopping downtown, were installed without the approval of the residents or business owners.  Although they function well now, at the time some of Jaime Lerner’s projects that were built they neglected to involve public opinion during their planning phases.

Museu Ocscar Niemeyer - Art museum designed by famed Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer

Trash seperation system

Today however Curitiba is still praised as a model sustainable city and in fact it won the Global Sustainable City Award 2010.  Curitiba is also hosting a few World Cup matches in 2014, leading planners to realize that they need to improve the city’s infrastructure to be able to handle the huge influx of football fans.  CNN also featured a story on Curitiba after it was awarded the Global Sustainable City Award in 2010.  See the video below for a profile of the city and interviews with Jaime Lerner and current planners.  Also to learn more about Jaime Lerner’s current projects with his private architecture firm see this interview with him from the Dirt.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this sustainable city plans for the future especially in with the upcoming World Cup.

- Melissa

Photo Credits: 2007 Melissa Reese

Rio’s Favelas From the Inside Out

The contrast of economic might with staggering poverty in cities like Rio de Janeiro seems to be capturing the world’s attention in a new way. Sure, voices that go beyond the “poverty-tour”-type depictions of life in megacities like Rio aren’t new, but it does seem like they’re being listened to by a wider audience.  Janice Perlman, author of Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro, is one of those voices. She’s making a stop at NYU-Wagner on Wednesday to discuss her most recent book and engage in a conversation about urban poverty, marginality, and her study of four generations of migrants and squatters in Rio’s slums. The event, from 2:00 – 3:30 on Wednesday, November 17  is free and open to the public, RSVP here.

If you’re a fan of Perlman’s work or these types of issues, you might also be interested in a feature that ran recently on Public Radio International – it takes an inside look into Rio’s favelas as well, examining both opportunities and barriers to businesses and entrepreneurship.

Amy Faust