Thinking Cities - 21 minute video

Although this is a commercial video produced by Ericsson, Thinking Cities outlines at least some of the key aspects of urban development and city planning that we are facing today. One of the biases is developed cities (not much is said about informal development even though it is the most rapid area of city growth globally). Geoffrey West, Carlo Ratti, Mathieu Lefevre along with a handful of others feature as the narrators of the changing global urban patterns.

I was most interested in the social city angles as well as the trash tracking project as both relate to my own research interests in mapping social capital in urban settings. Though West is very much criticized in some circles, I applaud his efforts to try and understand if they are variables and constants in city growth, development and change. The angle is interesting even if it will end up being refined or changed over time. Ratti's work is also well worth paying attention to, particularly where it can be integrated with other research and planning processes.

Better Cities from Better Planning

Hazel Borys wrote a great article on getting small as a way for cities to bump up their thriving. I've taken the quotes she has of some thoughtful city builders below. The whole article is worth reading. Thanks to Urban Health Prof (Jim Dunn) for tweeting the article.


Finding the economic edges of smart city building:

“It’s hard rations, and it’s tough times with most all city budgets. Any infrastructure has to guarantee a return on investment. Convention center expansions, ballparks, grade separated streets, and wide streets never yield the expected returns. Cities that continue down those paths will exacerbate their fiscal conditions. Neighborhood streets, complete streets, walkable neighborhoods have major returns.”

“Local governments – because they don’t have as much flexibility as state and federal governments – have to be more disciplined. A street with healthy retail and housing is worth more to the tax base – whether property tax, sales tax, or income tax. Giant roads and shopping centers are losing strategies. Infrastructure must add value, and the time for experimentation is over.”

--Former Milwaukee Mayor and CNU President John Norquist

Harnessing a DIY attitude to foster city building:

“Shrinking city budgets have obvious implications for infrastructure. We’ve had warnings from professional engineer associations that the water systems of American cities are dangerously old and in need of replacement. Which applies to our entire infrastructure, except for recent light rail lines. We’ve elaborated a road and street system that is so enormous – and we’ve done it incrementally over 90 years – that we will have a very tough time keeping it up, as we become a less affluent nation. Without necessary funds for repair, we’re going to keep on deferring maintenance, even though the results are obvious roadway, water, power and infrastructure problems.”

“Larger picture is that our cities have become over-scaled to the resource realities of the future: oil, coal, electricity, natural gas, but also the fiscal realities. The bottom line is that all cities will find themselves contracting. City planning may become less institutionalized, with more self-organizing, emergent task forces. It is becoming self-evident that we have to plan in a certain way, to build more densely, compactly, and flexibly. I have this fantasy that all of the great underemployed planners out there at the moment will become their own developers, doing great incremental infill, sprawl repair, and redevelopment.”

-- James Howard Kunstler

When our antiquated laws hamper us in building something better - time for change:

Most of our current laws make the economic losers – from the city’s perspective – easy to build, while mixed-use walkable neighborhoods are generally illegal. Particularly at a time when incremental, small-scale infill is more supportable than vast greenfields, tools like form-based codes and zoning reform allow flexibility in a changing marketplace, along with the walkable environments that people value and that generate the most optimal tax base.

-- Hazel Borys

City Museum - St. Louis

I had never heard of it when we arrived in St. Louis a few days ago on vacation. But after we had toured the massive St. Louis Arch, Michelle noted that one of the brochure's she picked up had flagged City Museum (CM) as a must-see. We did so.

It turns out you don't just 'see' CM - you experience it. And once you've experienced it, a kind of imprinting seems to work on you, like an embedded chip or something. CM is a strange place. When you arrive, they don't give you a map of the place with a list of things to do. Instead, you start wandering around trying to figure out exactly what you've let yourself and your kids in for. You wouldn't be surprised if Tim Burton walked past or Willie Wonka himself appeared suddenly.

CM is nothing like the McDonald's-style danger-sanitized kinds of playgrounds that surround us. Want to know what current legal contours are surrounding children and public spaces? Don't bother cracking a book - just look at playgrounds. They may be colourful but most of them are as boring as a B-grade reality show (or any reality show, for that matter).

Are you afraid of heights? CM will scare you with a dangling school bus and passenger door that opens, wire 'tunnels' six stories in the air, and wire cages that you climb inside balanced precariously on the edge of the 10-storey roof. Are you claustraphobic? CM will push your limits with tunnels under the floor, a labyrinth cave area with tiny passages, and twisty wire-cage climbing spaces. You can't quite get the sense of height in this photo we took but if you look close, you'll see kids looking out of the bus door (there is a wire barrier so your kid won't go flying out but it does little to ease the sense of hazard you instinctively feel).

Founder, Bob Cassilly, wanted a place where you would be pushed slightly off-balance, where things would verge on the edge of control. CM is a massive art installation you get to climb in, on and around. Here's a quote from a land use website:

At times integrating elements of the factory (like the spiral shoe slide that runs through it) into the spaces, at other times boring holes through it, or slicing rooms into smaller and smaller spaces, it is an architect-less architecture of accretion, excavation, and evolution. Each environment is an expository riff on form and materials, materials that were found and repurposed, clustered and flayed, from industrial remnants, to parts of other buildings, to fully formed period environments. Tight spaces shaped like dinosaur guts, galleries of gargoyles, aquariums, monstrous mosaics, plazas, stalagmites, chutes, slides, caves, chambers, mezzanines.

I haven't stopped thinking about it since we left. The idea of re-purposing a post-industrial landscape has intrigued me for a long time. Many cities, including Hamilton, have spaces ideally suited for novelty and creative re-development. City building isn't about starting from scratch - you have to work with what you have, mix it up, add some new, re-think some old.

And there is more good news. Cassilly is working on Cementland - a 54 acre abandoned cement factory that is being prepared for more craziness, including water, pitch-black caves, and more high-in-the-sky terror. I'll definitely be visiting.