On Informality

Taguig City, Manila, Philippines

I must apologize for my recent absence from posting. Luckily, it is due only to good things. As others have mentioned, the past month or so has been consumed with graduating from NYU Wagner’s Master of Urban Planning program, and for me, has also included accepting and preparing for a job in Cape Town, South Africa with Shack/Slum Dwellers International, a dynamic, innovative organization that is doing amazing work worldwide. Should make for some wonderful blogging, too! In the meantime, I came across this quote on The Polis Blog recently and thought I’d share it here:

“The splintering of urbanism does not take place at the fissure between formality and informality but rather, in fractal fashion, within the informalized production of space. Informal urbanization is as much the purview of wealthy urbanites as it is of slum dwellers. These forms of urban informality – from Delhi’s farmhouses to Kolkata’s new towns to Mumbai’s shopping malls – are no more legal than the metonymic slum. But they are expressions of class power and can therefore command infrastructure, services and legitimacy. Most importantly, they come to be designated as ‘formal’ by the state while other forms of informality remain criminalized.”

Ananya Roy, from “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011.

I am excited to explore these concepts further in my new job, and look forward to sharing thoughts on formality/informality in cities worldwide with you all soon!

- Ariana

City Beautiful: Portly Cities

If May was Bike Month I’m voting for June as Big Boat Month since ports have been such a hot topic.  Planning magazine’s cover story was all about port infrastructure on the East Coast of the U.S., where the expansion of the Panama Canal will bring bigger cargo ships that we might not be able to handle. Urban Omnibus recently ran a fantastic story about the shipping industry in New York that looks at past and present shipping, and makes a case for easing congestion and wear & tear on road infrastructure by using our waterways and ports not just for giant ships from Asia but for moving goods shorter distances.

For centuries ports have made cities, connecting cultures and markets through trade, driving migration and development. This week’s City Beautiful looks at a few global ports and the relationships to their home cities – ports aren’t the most breathtaking places on earth (and historically have bordered on rather skeezy), but between the sheer giganticness and the fact that everyone really loves boats they make for a nice visual reflection on the past, present and future of cities.

So if you’re into, ahem, infrastructure porn, this one’s for you.

~Amy

Port of New York and New Jersey: Despite having the largest port on the East Coast of the and third largest port in the U.S., New Yorkers don’t see much of the giant cargo ships that import much of the stuff people across the region use and eat on a daily basis. The shipping industry in Brooklyn, for example, moved to New Jersey when the port there could accommodate big container ships – a bloodletting for the local economy. Brooklyn has bounced back, and now there’s an Ikea on the former shipping hub that sells goods which likely came in over in Jersey. The first photo below was taken from a series by a New Jersey longshoreman, the “brawny backbone” of the shipping industry that have been loading and unloading ships for centuries.

Photo credit: Flickr user Free of the Demon

Photo credit: Timothy Schenck

Port of Valparaiso: One of the colorful cities I left off of the last City Beautiful post was Valparaiso, Chile. Fortunately Valparaiso is not only known for multicolored buildings,  it’s also a notable South American port city – and even the boats are  colorful. Valpo used to be a big stopping point for ships traveling from the Atlantic through the Straits of Magellan (and some of you might remember the importance of the port in Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, no?). I particularly like how giant ships and little boats (at least seem to) get along side-by-side as harbor neighbors.

Photo credit: Flickr user El Anacoreta

Photo credit: Flickr user Aplomb

Photo credit: Flickr user Maria Loreto

Port of Singapore: Congratulations, Port of Singapore, for recently being voted “Best Seaport in Asia!” There seems to be a friendly competition between the big port cities for superlatives that have no official unit of measurement, but Singapore ranks at or near the top for most of them. Melissa mentioned in a post this week about Singapore being a well-connected city more on the communication side, but its giant port also touches one out of every five containers full of stuff – it’s also connected to 600 other ports in 123 countries. The colors and patterns of containers, booms, cranes and the like are impressive, and the view from a golf course in the second image is a nice layering of the natural, industrial, and urban landscapes.

Photo credit: Flickr user Rukasu1

Photo credit: Flickr user William Cho

Photo credit: Flickr user Shiny Things

Port of Hamburg: I don’t know what German photographer Manfred Hartmann does to his photographs, but he sure can make a port look real dreamy. Hamburg is Europe’s second-largest port (after Rotterdam), but it’s actually located a good distance from the North Sea on the Elbe River. The port isn’t just a shipping hub but a cultural center too – HafenCity, for example, is a haven for arts, museums and music that breathed life into a formerly blighted area of the port where non-shipping uses had been prohibited. Hamburg also has some accolades for forward-thinking on reducing carbon emissions and thoughtful land use as the port needs to expand but room for other uses (like housing and commercial space) are needed too.

Photo credit: Manfred Hartmann

Photo credit: Manfred Hartman

City Beautiful: Subway (sound)Tracks

When taking public transit most of us prefer  to block out the squeaks and dings, the gum smacker in the next seat, and the screeeeeches of tracks, tourists and babies – we tend to pipe our own soundtracks directly into our ear canal and watch the city go by in peace. But maybe we’re missing out on something, the little rhythms produced by hulking trains moving people around, the soundtrack created unintentionally by transit infrastructure itself?

New York Public Radio’s Remix the Rails contest chose a winner last Friday – they invited musicians to “transform ordinary subway sounds from the New York City subway into extraordinary music.” Below you can take a listen to the winning entry from Lucas Carpenter, called “This is the Train” (impressive if you can listen without a side-to-side head bob):

In a more conceptual project combining transit data and sound, Google designer Alexander Chen’s Conductor project took New York subway lines, animated them, and turned the moving “trains” into a pluckable  instrument:

Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop.

See it in action here (give it a minute to get going):

The design is based on Massimo Vignelli’s elegantly abstract 1972 subway map, which some loved, some hated, but most agree that regardless of its utility for not getting lost it does look pretty cool.

Massimo Vignelli's 1972 Subway Map | Courtesy of Visual Complexity

Granted, New Yorkers spend a lot of time on the subway and it’s quite loud underground, but have musicians and designers in other big cities turned noise into anything ipod-worthy?

~Amy

 

Rail in China: high price for high speed

Out of any transit mode, for some reason trains just get people excited. And high-speed rail not only sounds cool, but have you seen those trains? That’s some sexy infrastructure.

photo by triplefivechina

China’s high-speed rail system is the world’s darling with over 4,000 miles of lines and its promises to connect mega-cities as well as the remote interior with the developed coast. But an American professor in Beijing, Patrick Chovanec, recently looked at how high-speed rail has actually changed travel habits in China. The results are interesting, if not entirely surprising, and are already starting to be used as leverage to take the wind out of the sails of high-speed rail advocates in the U.S.

The gist of it is that train tickets are expensive, mostly to recover the costs of expensive infrastructure (never mind that those trains are pretty fancy), so these trains end up being more of a substitute for air travel by the wealthy rather than mobilizing the masses. Fast train tracks displaced slow train tracks, so now with less capacity on cheap trains people of limited means are taking long-distance buses instead of new trains as anticipated.

This might sound familiar to you New Yorkers or Washingtonians who hop between the two cities. As a low-wage grad student, do I take the ridiculously overpriced Acela? Not a chance – I’ll take the $20 bus, thank you, a model that connects East Coasters from all walks of life that has its own sensational transit story that’s ironically straight out of Chinatown. High-speed trains here cater to business travelers whose jobs pay the ticket, presumably because their time is worth a lot more than mine (in dollar terms anyway).

That’s rational human behavior, but I’m skeptical of Chovanec’s argument that instead of better connecting people in China’s interior that freight transport should be beefed up using the U.S. as a model. He says, “Rather than moving people more quickly, [China] should build a rail system that moves goods and makes people more productive where they already are.”

Can’t we make a similar equity argument here, where fast transit will remain in the realm of the wealthy and regular people should just stay where they are? Can’t investments in personal mobility and goods transport happen simultaneously? Chovanec lauds the U.S. freight system, but if you’ve sat on a stalled Amtrak train in the Midwest watching freight trains pass by the people trains you can see where our priorities are too. Just having jobs nearby also doesn’t take care of the fact that people need to travel for other personal reasons, and if people do better economically with those jobs then they’ll demand to travel more.

Amy