Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution – David Harvey

Long before the Occupy movement, modern cities had already become the central sites of revolutionary politics, where the deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the frontline for struggles over who controls access to urban resources and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the financiers and developers, or the people?

Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways—and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.

Download: Rebel Cities-David Harvey.pdf

Utopia as Shopping Experience

“Inspired by nature’s splendor and mystery a new mall location is now opening in the heart of Umeå.

It is clear that the name of the new mall is Utopia, a name that stirs the imagination to the breath of life and excitement and magic. Utopia is the new meeting place , a haven for both families with children, teenagers and adults, where Umeå residents can hang out and stay in, at all times of the year.

‘The new mall will create a feeling that you leave your everyday life behind and step into another world’, says Per Norberg from Agren , one of the architects of mall design. ‘We play with a mix of soft and hard materials, such as matte and shiny surfaces , to reflect reality and fantasy , and the place’s uniqueness’.

‘We will be serving food from different corners of exotic settings and in the middle of the mall is the city’s natural venue – Square – surrounded by cafés and shops. All of this creates a great feeling of a moment get to be right in the action . We call City Shopping in Norrland!'”

“In the The Heart of the Cities (1964), Victor Gruen described how early marketing research determined that to be viable a regional shopping center needed to be within a 20-30 minute drive for about half a million people. Such a center requires 40 acres or more of parking space hugging a perimeter of the building at grade level, as people are unwilling to walk more than 100 feet (or climb) to an entry from their car. Once inside the mall armature, they need to encounter a diversion, such as a fountain or carousel, food court or waterfall every 600 feet along a linear armature of the mall. Such divisions prevent the consumer from becoming bored by the shopping experience, which keeps them shopping longer. This was crucial, as researchers showed, after about 20 minutes in a store or center otherwise rational shoppers tend to begin making ‘impule buys’. Formerly directed shoppers suddenly start making irrational decisions prompted by a euphoric sense of displacement, fatigure, and the drive to release pent-up frustrations, displaying what it known in marketing jargon as the ‘Gruen effect’ or ‘Gruen transfer.” David Graham Shane, Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual modelling in architecture, urban design and city theory p97.

Video: Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall

Blockholm: Crowdsourcing City Planning with Minecraft

The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design has announced a project where the topographic site for Stockholm has been reproduced in Minecraft and people are invited to rebuild the city virtually.

Blockholm opens on 24 October and allows people to realize the city they always dreamed of. It is interesting as it allows a form of modelling and design rarely practiced on a large scale in city planning. According to the website (not my translation):

Blockholm – A new Stockholm in Minecraft

In architecture, work is in digital tools and models. What happens when these tools become available to anyone? Maybe we can see where the road will be, the house was to stand. Building a model in three dimensions and show how we think. In Block Holm will all be with. A simple method, the same for all, we can build a new city, block by block. We have cleared the city of all past. There is something scary, yet liberating in to start anew.

How can we change our city?

Can the game be a way to show what we think and what we want? In Blockholm we build all side by side, adult children, our dreams and ideas. Everybody has the same conditions but with different starting points. We can test ideas and forms without preconditions, possible and impossible. We have a new way to have a conversation with each other and with policy makers.

The digital mirror image

– By maintaining the road network, we can orient ourselves in this amazing reflection. The basic structure is the same, but everything is different, says Markus Bohm, artist and project manager:
– We want to create a meeting between the game’s realities and current urban planning and architecture. Minecraft has become a great platform for creativity and we want to show new ways of working, new ways to organize.

The world’s largest Architecture and Design Projects

Each property in today Stockholm is an identical plot in Blockholm.
– We have generated approximately 100,000 construction sites. It will be the world’s largest architecture and design projects in terms of number of participants. We will release district for district to allow the city to emerge piecemeal. All participants will work side by side and see how the city is emerging from within. There is a huge process that anyone can follow. In an interactive map on the internet, the construction of blocks islet seen in real time, says Mats Karlsson, architect and project manager.

Utopia – TROM – 3.2 Resource Based Economy

The TROM documentary is trying to present, in a simplistic way, the world in which we, human beings, live. The world discovered so far, not some idea or personal choice. Moreover we tried to present alternative solutions to current problems and took into account the future, which promises to be more than interesting. An informative documentary, perhaps shocking and disturbing to many, depending on how you digest the information.

The documentary is divided into chapters and sub-chapters due to documentary’s excessive length (13 hours). Also all the parts are connected.

The documentary and website are concentrated, so it is essential to read additional information which can be found in descriptions beside each section and the video player.
– See more at: http://www.tromsite.com/#sthash.SkptRmZV.dpuf

Designing New York City Streets

 

New York City Streets

Since 2007, when she was named commissioner of the city’s Department of Transportation, DOT’s urban transport programs have quickly and inexpensively remade the streets around the five boroughs of New York, creating pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes, jump-starting Bus Rapid Transit and midwifing a bike-share program with 6,000 strategically placed bikes.

“You have to design your streets for everyone. The cities that have safe streets, that are easy to get around, are the ones that will grow and thrive in the 21st century,” Sadik-Khan told the TED Blog.

What inspired her bold slate of urban projects? She says: “We took pieces from lots of different cities to have the gorgeous mosaic that we have in New York.” So we asked: Which ones?

Sadik-Khan found inspiration for New York’s integrated bike lanes from Copenhagen’s urban bike paths. The Danish model incorporates bikes directly into the street, but protects bikers by floating parking lanes in the middle of traffic, creating a low-cost buffer zone that made it safer for bikers to move quickly around the city.

Copenhagen also has one of the earliest bike-share programs, which helped inspire the launch of Citi Bikes in New York this past summer. Sadik-Khan also cites Paris and London as powerful sources of inspiration. From Vélib, Paris’s six-year-old bike share program, she realized that New York’s Citi Bike program needed to be interconnected — that all of the stations needed to work in sync. In New York, like in Paris, users can return bikes to any docking station, and if one station is full, users will be directed to the nearest hub with available spaces. From London’s Barclays Cycle Hire, she got the idea for a privately funded project at no cost to taxpayers — and she also learned that flexibility would be key in New York, where the new bike-share stations are solar-powered and wireless and can be moved as demand changes. The idea of bike shares has spread rapidly from city to city — as of this week, you can rent a public bike in 525 cities around the globe.

At the same time, Bogotá’s Bus Rapid Transit system got Sadik-Khan thinking hard about how to best manage New York’s bus fleet, which is both the largest and slowest in the world. Bogotá got its buses moving by getting them out of congested city traffic and into speedier dedicated bus lanes. Inspired by the Colombian program, she introduced the Select Bus Service in 2008, using paint and lane markers to reallocate space on the streets to bus-only lanes. There are six Select Bus Service routes in New York now, with more planned.

In her talk, Sadik-Khan shares a bold idea for how to launch projects quickly and inexpensively — pilot them with temporary materials to test them out. In Times Square in May 2009, for instance, her team blocked off a brand-new pedestrian zone with “paint and orange barrels,” and filled the space with cheap lawn furniture from a local hardware store. “We were able to show how it worked,” she said. “If it worked better for traffic, if it worked better for mobility, if it was safer, better for business, we would keep it. And if it didn’t work, no harm, no foul — we could put it back the way it was, because these were temporary materials. That was a big part of the buy-in. Much less anxiety when you think something can be put back.” (Spoiler: The Times Square pedestrian zone was so beloved that the traffic-free zone was made permanent in February 2010.)

 

Nomadology

“Nomad science does not have the same relation to work as royal science. Not that the division of labor in nomad science is any less thorough; it is different. We know of the problems States have always had with journeymen’s associations, or compagnonnages , the nomadic or itinerant bodies of the type formed by masons, carpenters, smiths, etc. Settling, sedentarizing labor power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor, assigning it channels and conduits, forming corporations in the sense of organisms, and, for the rest, relying on forced manpower recruited on the spot (corvee) or among indigents (charity workshops)— this has always been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to conquer both a band vagabondage  and a body nomadism” – Nomadology: The War Machine. Gilles Deleuze. Félix Guattari..

Fractal Cities

Michael Batty & Paul Longley (1994)

Fractal Cities: A Geometry of Form and Function

(Academic Press, San Diego, CA and London)

You can download the book either in complete form, in low or high resolution or chapter by chapter (in high resolution).

(352 MB) Complete Book High Resolution

(60 MB) Complete Book Low Resolution

Chapter by Chapter:

(20 MB) Introduction

(48 MB) 1 The Shape of Cities: Geometry, Morphology, Complexity and Form

(38 MB) 2 Size and Shape, Scale and Dimension

(28 MB) 3 Simulating Cities and Fractal Picturescapes

(31 MB) 4 Laboratories for Visualising Urban Form

(26 MB) 5 Urban Boundaries and Edges

(21 MB) 6 The Morphology of Urban Land Use

(36 MB) 7 Urban Growth and Form

(28 MB) 8 Generating and Growing the Fractal City

(21 MB) 9 Form Follows Function: Reformulating Population Density Functions

(27 MB) 10 Extending the Geometry to Systems of Fractal Cities

(3 MB) Conclusions

(18 MB) Bibliography, Author Index, Subject Index

Building

Giorgio de Chirico, ‘The Seer’ (1915)

The building effects a brutal condensation of social relationships, as I shall show later in more (economic and political) detail. It embraces, and in so doing reduces, the whole paradigm of space: space as domi­nation/appropriation (where it emphasizes technological domination); space as work and product (where it emphasizes the product); and space as immediacy and mediation (where it emphasizes mediations and mediators, from technical matériel to the financial ‘promoters’ of construction projects). It reduces significant oppositions and values, among them pleasure and suffering, use, and labour. Such condensation of society’s attributes is easily discernible in the style of administrative buildings from the nineteenth century on, in schools, railway stations, town halls, police stations or ministries. But displacement is every bit as important here as condensation; witness the predominance of ‘amenities’, which are a mechanism for the localization and ‘punctualization’ of activities, including leisure pursuits, sports and games. These are thus concentrated in specially equipped ‘spaces’ which are as clearly demarcated as factories in the world of work. They supply ‘syntagmatic’ links between activities within social spaces as such – that is, within a space which is determined economically by capital, dominated socially by the bourgeoisie, and ruled politically by the state. – Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Production of Space’, p227.