Urbanization News: July 29

Pop Up to Permanent: The Globe and Mail features cities in North America and Europe that have embraced the idea of pop-up projects as a planning tool to rethink public spaces. The image above is from Times Square in New York, a “pilot” project that closed one of the city’s most chaotic streets to car traffic, a change that’s feeling pretty permanent these days.

HSR Crash Update: The New York Times reported that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao admitted last week’s high-speed rail crash that killed 39 people was the result of a serious design flaw – not only did a signaling device malfunction after a lightning strike, but inadequately-trained workers also failed to notice.

Extortion, Violence Cripple Bus System: In more unfortunate transit news, TheCityFix reports that thousands of residents in Medellin, Colombia are without bus service due a driver strike to protest inadequate protection from extortionist gangs. A longtime bus driver was recently murdered after refusing to pay an extortion fee, setting off the strikes.

Master Plan in Abu Dhabi: The National outlines a new master plan for two suburban communities in Abu Dhabi,  which would work to connect communities divided by a highway, promote walkability, and integrate them with the growing Abu Dhabi metro area. The revitalization would cover one of the oldest Emirati communities in the United Arab Emirates.

Green or Greenwashing?: The UK released a new national planning framework of its own that attempts to cut red tape, safeguard the environment, and prioritize sustainable development. Green groups, however, claim the lofty language obscures that the framework would actually jeopardize environmental protection and make carbon-intensive development projects easier.

Dealing With Density 1: Last week we featured a story about public housing in Hong Kong – this week the Wall Street Journal offers a personal view into the crisis of overcrowding, the trend of subdividing already small apartments, and the challenge of providing housing in the city of seven million.

Dealing With Density 2: While in Hong Kong more people are fitting into smaller spaces, the Guardian UK reports on Moscow’s controversial plan to double the city’s size to relieve crippling congestion – a plan that would destroy forests, summer homes, and relocate hundreds of thousands of rural residents. Moscow’s population has grown by 200,000 people per year since 2006.

Nixed Signals: The Times of India reports that Gandhinagar, the only city in the state of Gujarat that has no traffic lights or stop signs (but lots of roundabouts), is getting its first traffic booth as the number of cars on the road has grown unmanageable.

Urbanization News: July 24

“1 Million Dead in 30 Seconds”: That’s the appropriately jarring title of an article by Claire Berlinski in the Summer volume of City Journal, about the increasing risk of earthquakes for massive destruction as cities grow larger. It’s really an excellent piece that speaks to wealth, risk, and how this plays out in the human costs of a natural disaster: “Mother Nature doesn’t have it in for the poor. Rather, earthquakes come to our attention only when they are disasters, and they are disasters only when they strike dense urban areas full of badly made buildings.” The image above is an earthquake vulnerability map made by Benjamin D. Hennig at the University of Sheffield.

Flood Blame Game: Massive flooding in Lagos, Nigeria caused not only widespread damage but also accusations that President Goodluck Jonathan is insensitive to disaster victims for failing to visit the state after the destruction. The federal government shot back that the flood was the result of poor planning by a local government that allowed housing and road construction in drainage areas vulnerable to flooding. The housing problem that in part caused irresponsible building in the first place is now worsened by the loss of so many homes in the flood.

India in Numbers: The Wall Street Journal reported on India’s Census numbers, which revealed that the pace of urbanization is speeding up – the growth rate for urban areas over the last decade was about 32%, making the 12% rise in rural growth pale in comparison. Interestingly, the same WSJ India blog reported back in April about how the population in Central Delhi actually fell by 10% in the same time span – mostly due to massive slum clearance. Could that trend be reversed? Last week a panel of private sector, government and academic minds convened a panel in Mumbai moderated by Mint with a bold premise: “The country must stop looking at slums as a problem.” The post has an abbreviated transcript with some interesting thoughts about planning, urbanization, and the value of informal settlements in India.

This Week in Waste: With the heatwave it was unfortunate timing that a fire in a Manhattan wastewater treatment plant sent 200 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Hudson river last week – it not only smelled terrible but also brought to light an aging system that’s woefully under capacity especially as more people move to New York. On a brighter note, this NY Times post highlights how cities in the Western U.S. facing water shortfalls are finding opportunities in treated wastewater for irrigation instead of simply discharging it into waterways.

Sea Span: The longest sea bridge in the world opened last week in Qingdao, China. Over 26 miles (42 km) long, the Jiazhou Bay Bridge links more modern development on one side of the bay with the older government and banking center on the other side.

Public Housing in Hong Kong: Asia Sentinel report Alice Poon was interviewed by Shanghai’s Dong Fang Daily Shanghai Review of Books about her recent work, Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong. The interview offers interesting insights into the history of public housing and real estate development in Hong Kong, and cultural perceptions of property rights. The photos below are by photographer Michael Wolf – check out his project to photograph residents in Hong Kong’s oldest public housing estate here, where he photographed 100 rooms, each 100 square feet in size.

Armchair Engagement: Yuri Artibise’s Yurbanism blog highlighted a new tool that might just bring more people into the process of planning our cities without scheduling more public meetings. PlaceSpeak is being tested in Canada and would offer residents a way to voice their opinions about local issues using an online platform. Check it out and browse some issues in Vancouver, and what local residents have to say about them, here.

Want to take an urban land use class?: The World Bank Institute is offering a seven-week e-learning course called “Sustainable Urban Land Use Planning” starting on September 1st. The cost is $600 – registration is open until August 11.

Urbanization News April 29

This week the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy released a New Report on Housing in China from  Here is an excerpt: “While many analysts are familiar with the remarkable growth of China’s economy, its market-oriented reforms, and the large investments from both domestic and foreign sources over the past 30 years, developments in the housing market are less well known. China now represents the world’s largest construction market in terms of built space, adding more than 2 billion square meters of floor area annually—nearly half the global total. About half of China’s annual constructed space is residential, divided about evenly between urban and rural housing.” Read the whole press release here.

Haitians Forced Out of Tents to Homes Just as Precarious “More than half of the Haitians driven into tent cities and makeshift camps by the January 2010 earthquake have moved out of them, officially bringing down the displaced population to 680,000 from a peak of 1.5 million, according to the International Organization for Migration…. Very few of the people who left the camps — only 4.7 percent, by the group’s estimate — did so because their homes had been rebuilt or repaired. Instead, a vast majority appear to have been forced out through mass evictions by landowners, or to have left the camps on their own to escape the high crime and fraying conditions there. Read more from the New York Times.

Marching for Ai Wei Wei in Hong Kong  “Ai Wei Wei has become a cause célèbre in Hong Kong since his arrest by mainland Chinese authorities on April 3rd. In the week since I wrote about “Chin Tangerine“, who covered the city with “Who’s Afraid of Ai Wei Wei?” graffiti, artists have rallied to Ai’s support with a blizzard of interventions, homages and protests. Their efforts have ensured that Ai’s plight has remained on the front page for weeks. You could see that effect at work on Saturday afternoon, when a group of artists organized a protest march in support of Ai.” Read more from URBANPHOTO.

Next Weekend is the Festival of Ideas for the New City May 4-8, 2011 in New York City “Festival of Ideas for the New City is a major new collaborative initiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations working together to harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore ideas that will shape it. The Festival will include a three-day slate of symposia; an innovative StreetFest along the Bowery; and over eighty independent projects and public events.”

City Beautiful: Pop-Up Cities

This week’s City Beautiful starts from a post on BLDG Blog about a forthcoming book,  Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions. Authors CJ Lim and Ed Liu create a new genre of “architectural fiction” where fantastical  environments built in paper are inspired by actual sites in London meshed with stories ranging from the Three Little Pigs to Alice in Wonderland.

This and the other works below tell stories of what is most durable – our built environment – using fragile, ephemeral paper.  As a medium, 3D paper collage lends itself nicely not just to telling kid’s stories of the pop-up book variety, but the intricacies of cities, tales of how they change over time and even what they could be with a little imagination.

Hong Kong

Kit Lau, an animator by trade and dubbed Hong Kong’s “first pop-up book artist“, combines personal narrative, architectural history, and rapid urban growth in his 2009 book Hong Kong Pop Up.  Says Lau on the book’s website:

From the 30s Cantonese tenements, the squatters common in the 50s, the Kowloon Walled City, to the resettlement estates of the 60s as well as the public housing of the 70s, these homes of the many Hong Kong people witnessed how my grandparents struggled through to improve the living standard of the family.

We tend to meet the destruction and construction of cities with kneejerk nostalgia – Lau does document what was, and the stark contrast with current housing trends, in very personal terms. But rather than lament an idealized past it’s more a story of improving the standard of living, and how the built form has changed to accommodate not just a rapidly expanding population but also dreams of a better life (even if that fan of towers looks a little more ominous than the more human-scale low-rise tenements).

A few pages from Hong Kong Pop Up:

The old | Photo credit: Hong Kong Pop Up

The new | Photo credit: Hong Kong Pop Up

Charlotte

Charlotte, North Carolina probably doesn’t come to mind as a booming metropolis, yet it’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. that has exploded with people and skyscrapers as banking and other corporate headquarters have set up shop. This rapid growth is the subject of a stop-motion animation film by Brooklyn artist Rob Carter. I had seen one of Carter’s films last year at a papercraft exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design in New York and was happy to stumble upon Metropolis, which documents Charlotte’s development from its first house in 1775 to the current urban skyline.

Carter’s animations using paper cut-outs are humorous in a way that’s vaguely reminiscent of Terry Gilliam‘s funky collages between skits on Monty Python’s Flying Circus: skyscrapers sprout out of nowhere, a basketball arena sails in and plops down like an uninvited flying saucer, a crinkled wad unfolds itself into highway tendrils that ring the city. As Carter describes it:

The animation literally represents this sped up urban planner’s dream, but suggests the frailty of that dream, however concrete it may feel on the ground today.

I have to disagree with him here – as an urban planner, I watch the film and think that this type of development happens more as a result of a lack of planning, a lot-by-lot real estate boom driven by speculation. The last three minutes of the nine-minute video is shown below, but you can see the whole thing  here:

London

Lim and Liu’s Short Stories mentioned above takes ten actual sites in London and tells their fictional stories primarily with visuals. From the book introduction:

The short stories of this book’s title are set in different time periods of London, intentionally locating themselves in the liminal territory between fiction and architecture … The stories are neither illustrated texts nor captioned images; the collages represent a network of spatial relationships, and the text, which splices genre such as science fiction, magical realism and the fairy tale, a thread that links some of the nodes of that network together.

The work is about London’s past – its tradition of storytelling, its mythic places and traditions informed by its architecture – but gives the author/architect free reign to re-imagine those places.  Just as we interact with the built environment on a daily basis and it infuses our experience of the city, Lim and Liu’s paper sculptures and  are the setting, a character, and even a narrator of the story.

From the story "Dream Isle" | Photo courtesy of BLDG Blog

From the story "Carousel" | Photo courtesy of BLDG Blog

~Amy

Urbanization News April 8

This weeks featured story is the release of The 2011 Knight Frank Global Cities Survey.  This survey compares cities based on economic activity, political power, quality of life and knowledge and influence to rank cities. What are the top cities this year? New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Brussels.  And in case you are wondering about the most important cities in the future the survey also has projections for 2020: New York, London, Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong. Order a free copy of the whole Wealth Report 2011 from Knight Frank and read articles about the report on their website.

Kenya Receives Sh8 Billion ‘Slum Loan‘ “Kenya has received a US$100 million (approx.Sh8 billion) loan from The World Bank to improve physical infrastructure and living conditions in informal urban settlements. The project dubbed Kenya Informal Settlements Improvement Project approved by the Bank last week will be used in upgrading slums in 15 biggest towns in the country.” Read more from AllAfrica.com

The Start Ferry’s Long Farewell On March 31, “ferries on two of the Star Ferry’s four routes sailed for the last time before ferry service between Hung Hom, Wan Chai and Central is cancelled… Though the Hong Kong government put out a tender for other ferry operators to take over the routes, no one was interested. What is lost by the end of the Star Ferry’s services in Hung Hom? An alternative to the buses, which crowd Hong Kong’s overburdened roads and contribute to its increasingly dire air pollution… A direct link between neighbourhoods whose fortunes have historically depended on the harbour.” Read more from UrbanPhoto and the South China Morning Post.

IBM’s new CityOne game have high hopes that it could transform strategic thinking on urban futures. “The developers of IBM’s new CityOne game have high hopes that it could transform strategic thinking on urban futures. Players are presented with a series of energy, water and economic problems, whilst charged with providing an urban space conducive to growth – all within a total available budget. Among the challenges they face in the 100 or so ‘real world’ scenarios are traffic congestion, water shortages and supply chain problems. They’ll be expected to use techniques such as service reuse, cloud computing and collaborative technologies to help make organisations in city systems more ‘intelligent’ and responsive.” Read more from This Big City and IBM.

SimCity for Real in Nya-Raipur India “Like all planned cities, Naya Raipur is monumental. The development plan includes an area of 80.13 kilometers, which will house 500,000 inhabitants by 2031. It has well-defined zones for institutions, housing, commerce, light industry, recreation and extensive parks, including a green belt. The main roads have a 100-meter wide right-of-way with a wide green median, while the secondary roads are 60 meters wide. The superblocks are 800 square meters and will include internal roads, as well as a green internal network. More than 100 kilometers of roads have already been completed.” Read more of Dario Hidalgo’s report on Nya-Raipur from the City Fix.

Ranking the World’s Mass Transit Systems

Have you ever wondered what the best mass transit systems in the world are?  Most New Yorkers would agree that we do not have the cleanest system in the world, nor the most efficient system given recent MTA service cuts and constant construction.  However New York certainly does have the busiest and more efficient public transit system in the US.  One way of ranking mass transit is by scheme volume of passengers. The following list from Wikipedia ranks the busiest systems by annual ridership:

1. Tokyo Subway 3.160 billion (2009)
2. Moscow Metro 2.392 billion (2009)
3. Seoul Subway2.048 billion (2009)
4. Beijing Subway 1.595 billion (2010)
5. New York City Subway 1.579 billion (2009)
6. Paris Métro 1.479 billion (2009)
7. Mexico City Metro 1.414 billion (2009)
8. Hong Kong MTR 1.41 billion (2010)
9. Shanghai Metro 1.3 billion (2009)
10. Guangzhou Metro 1.18 billion (2010)

Perhaps annual ridership though is not the best way to compare systems, since so many systems may be efficient but they can not cover operating costs.  The following ticket price comparison from This Big City, shows London as the most expensive but also one of the very few systems that covers operating costs.  This Big City also notes that out the 135 metro corporations in the world, only four are making operational profits: Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong and Delhi.

Besides being one of the few profitable systems in the world, Hong Kong’s MTR also has over 7 million daily riders and 90% of all traveling within the city is done by mass transit.  After traveling quite frequently on the MTR in January, and after also experiencing transit systems in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Singapore, Manila, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Curitiba, Sao Paulo and Delhi, I have to agree with Environmental Graffiti by also ranking Hong Kong’s MTR as the best mass transit system in the world.  (Of course though I am not a mass transit expert!)

- Melissa

Hong Kong 68

I found this film of Hong Kong in 1968 on polis yesterday and it inspired to me to explore how Hong Kong has changed over the last forty three years.  Hong Kong 68 is a short video by Impactist that gives a quick view Hong Kong during 1968. Through the film the city is seen  from the air, the harbor and the streets, according to polis:  “a constantly changing landscape and yet it maintains the same feel as it does today.”

During the 1960′s Hong Kong’s population was about 3 million people, with half of the population under the age of 25.  Today Hong Kong’s population is over 7 million.  With this addition of 4 million people Hong Kong’s built environment has also grown substantially.  One of the most significant additions since 1968 is the vast amount of public housing towers and “new towns” constructed in the New Territories.  My photos below show a few of my favorite places in Hong Kong that did not exist in 1968.

Contrasting old and new towers on Hong Kong Island.

The Lippo Centre by Paul Rudolph, completed 1988.

Public housing towers in the New Territories.  Many of these projects were built in the 1970′s and 1980′s.

View of Hong Kong Island from the Star Ferry, featured in the film.

Urban Photo also shares images some interesting photos of old Hong Kong in their post that shares a story originally in the South China Morning Post on August 3, 2009. More about my recent trip to Hong Kong can be found on my other posts about housing and  general photos of my travels.

- Melissa

City Beautiful: Resisting Demolition

This week’s City Beautiful was inspired by photographs from Urbanphoto.net’s story of a village in Hong Kong that had protested relocation to make way for high-speed rail infrastructure. With new buildings and infrastructure for expanding  cities come human costs, which often go unheard (and sometimes uncompensated). Below are a few images from artists who perhaps didn’t halt demolition, but did make some noise.    –Amy

Hong Kong – After two years of protest the Tsoi Yuen village will soon be demolished to construct an emergency station for the Hong Kong-Guangzhou high-speed rail line.  Activists and villagers held a two-day art and music festival not long before demolition is scheduled to start – this is one of the artworks:

Yichang City – Li Yalong, a government bureaucrat and photographer in the Hubei province in China, is using little dolls from the movie Avatar set in construction sites to critique demolition and disempowerment:

Seoul – A mural was painted on three mattresses belonging to people displaced from the Yongsan area for a large and controversial redevelopment project that cost several lives during demonstrations against the government (Text: “The poor get poorer. The rich get richer.” And, “For sale.”):

New York: Going back in time, political posters like this one have been used as a tool of resistance against demolition and displacement from gentrification here in NYC (text: “This plan has resulted in a wave of people without housing. What are the people going to do? This is your land!! Defend it!! Free Puerto Rico Lives!”):

 

 

Hong Kong Housing Infographic

I love infographics.

Especially visually stunning infographics from Information is Beautiful and Good.  So as I was working this morning I was very excited to find an online book on public housing typologies in Hong Kong.  Celia Ho presents clear and informative graphics about the growth of Hong Kong’s population, public housing milestones and the changing shape of housing estates from 1950 to the present.  I especially enjoyed the graphic that shows how housing estates have gotten taller with fewer flats per floor.  The whole book can be found here: Reinterpretation of Hong Kong Housing Typologies.

Melissa

Housing in Hong Kong

After roaming through many public housing estates in Hong Kong during my trip a few weeks ago and researching the city’s many master planned “New Towns” I found this article in the New York Times, Hong Kong’s Forgotten Villages, fascinating.  To date about 45% of Hong Kong lives in public housing however a few informal settlements, or slums do still exist.  But these informal areas house less than 1% of the population.

While driving through the New Territories of Hong Kong I noticed many small agricultural areas but I did not realize just how many of these rural villages still existed. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Although Hong Kong is one of the world’s most densely populated cities, nearly all its seven million people are clustered in crowded urban areas, leaving about 70 percent of the territory rural and sparsely inhabited. The disparity has grown over the past six decades as many have left farms seeking opportunities elsewhere.

Fung Hang, nestled in the hills of Plover Cove Country Park in the northeastern end of the New Territories, is one of scores of rural villages that have been virtually abandoned by their inhabitants.

There are no official figures for the number of abandoned villages in Hong Kong, but various estimates put them at more than 100.

Melissa