Urbanffffinds Extra: Architectural Abstraction

With the right lighting, angle, or state of mind, a picture of a building can look like anything but. Today, a collection of images posted to ffffound! that blur the lines between architecture and abstract art.

The Endless City Q&A

After a tiny bit of prodding, the folks at Phaidon sent over a review copy of the recently released book The Endless City, edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, and containing essays by the likes of Saskia Sassen, Enrique Peñalosa, and the indefatigable Rem Koolhaas. Where will feature a review of the book soon, but first, another treat from Phaidon; the editors were asked a series of questions. The following is a selection of the highlights from the record of this Q&A.

What are the main issues that you think people should be concerned about when it comes to city growth?
The book has a section titled ‘Issues’ that we hope synthesizes the complexities of urban growth. In it, a number of the contributors outline key issues but approach them from a variety of viewpoints. For example, Richard Sennett argues that ‘over determination’ can kill the vitality and growth of urban centers. Cities need to be dynamic and its physical forms and functions need to be endowed with the capacity to respond to indeterminate, unpredictable forces. Frank Duffy applies a similar idea when explaining the urban office, so ‘adaptability’ is the central issue they both cover. Another issue the book clearly prioritizes is sustainable development. The contributions from Guy Battle and Nicky Gavron, along with the Knoflacher, Rode and Tiwari essay, all detail urban growth strategies that respond to the environment and the challenges of climate change. Another central issue summarized by the three essays by Gerald Frug, Enrique Penalosa and Geetam Tiwari is governance and civic participation – cities need to allow for a multiplicity of voices and actors as well as a variety of experiences but there needs to be an agent or authority that can intelligently negotiate this multiplicity and still get something done. Tiwari explains this with particular reference to the forces dominating the informal sector. Both Anne Power and Sophie Body-Gendrot elaborate on this as well as some of the other pressing sociological concerns that urban designers, policymakers and the general public confront in the act of city making. Of course it goes without saying that quality design is the ingredient that delivers a truly remarkable city and allows individual places to flourish. The essays by architects Rem Koolhaas, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron all contribute various reflections about how to reconcile a variety of factors and perspectives enmeshed within the city’s physical reality. It should be noted that many of the essays in the Cities section resonate with the broader themes in the Issues section as well. The result is a cross-sectional analysis between the six cities [New York, London, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Mexico City, and Berlin] and the global world with issues finitely referenced to specific urban conditions.

What world cities do you expect to go through the greatest changes in the 21st century?
The fastest growing cities are in Africa and across Asia and its up to the next generation to make sure their development does not repeat the mistakes of cities in the developed world – this means Lagos and Kinshasa, Mumbai, Deli and Dhaka, as well as Shanghai and Jakarta. It is projected that by 2030, over 4 out of every 5 urban dwellers will be in the developing world so this will have huge implications for the global economy. At the same time, mature cities such as London and New York City, Berlin and Mexico City need to ensure that their future growth reconciles their layered history of planning mistakes and prioritizes sustainable transport and inclusive, contained growth.

The book talks about the importance of cities learning from each other. Can you explain that? For example, what can NYC learn from Shanghai? Can small cities learn from big cities?
There are countless examples of cities looking to other cities when deciding how to invest in their future growth and health. Congestion charging in NYC wouldn’t be a viable option had London not demonstrated how it could be done, and Mexico City’s Metrobús is a stunning success modeled on the Transmilenio in Bogota and of course Curitiba. Ideas must be partnered with implementation strategies and learning often is a matter of scale. So yes, small cities can learn from big, and vice versa. The essay by Knoflacher, Rode and Tiwari describes how small cities can serve as incubators for innovation precisely because of their scale. Understanding how cities implement large projects such as the Olympics in London, doing it with the right amount of investment in public space, has a lot to do with acknowledging how the city and individual neighborhoods have developed over time and how open space serves to socially integrate people from disparate backgrounds. The contributions of both Saskia Sassen and Enrique Peñalosa emphasizes this learning, especially in the latter how urban centers in developed countries are recovering from their love affair with the car, delimiting the access of automobiles in favor of public transport. Cities in developing countries could learn a lot from this. Most importantly, in order for ideas to transfer from one city to another, there needs to be a complementary understanding about how policies, decision making and funding align to facilitate implementation. Frug’s essay explains how the power structures of the six cities vary and what impact permutations to each city’s existing systems could have on local and regional planning mechanisms.

What are the key ideas that you want people to take away from reading this book?
The 34 contributors to the book – along with the hundreds of policymakers, politicians, academics, architects, planners, and urbanists involved with the Urban Age project which forms the basis for The Endless City – all believe that cities can offer a better social and economic life for its citizens. Now that half the world’s population live in cities, there is an urgent need to take stock of the new urban condition and find an approach to dealing with it. City sprawl should be contained and there are innovative strategies for creating high density, highly liveable environments. We want to help those charged with running and making cities understand the relationship between the socio-economic and spatial characteristics of cities – and we want the general public to understand how sustainable urban development can actually improve the physical form of their cities and the quality of their lives.

Are you hopeful for the future when it comes to our cities?
Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, offers an incredible explanation for why we should all be hopeful for the future of cities. Cities offer the potential for ‘quality of life equality’, i.e. access to green, open space and social and economic mobility as well as physical mobility. Across the world, people are moving into cities at an alarming rate – and not just mega-cities but smaller cities comprising an overall urbanized region. Most importantly, the twenty-first century will be increasingly focused on reducing both the overall sum and per capita production of carbon emissions, and as emitters of 75 per cent of the world’s pollution, cities are the battleground on which the future and health of our planet will be determined.

Is there any way for ordinary people to make change in their own cities? Do you have any recommendations for someone who wants to get involved?
Ordinary people make change in their city everyday. They do this by opting for public transport instead of a private car, by holding their government officials responsible for the quality of the built environment, and by advocating for equal access to green, open space. Ensuring that there is investment in sustainable forms of transport, and that access to healthcare, education and community services does not depend on how much money you make or the wealth of your locality. Most importantly, if you don’t know what your community is doing locally to advocate sustainable urban development, then join a forum and find out. Participate.

(Thanks, Faye!)

(Photo from Flickr users thequickbrownfoxjumpsoverthelazydog and howzey. The original full-color versions can be viewed by clicking the respective photos.)

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My internet access was pretty limited over the past week, so Urbanffffinds had to wait. Better late than never, right?

WEEKEND READING: JUNE 23-29, 2007

It's that time again, folks. The weekend is here at last, and it looks like it might actually be a nice one in Chicago. If you're supposed to get crappy weekend weather, these links might actually be useful!

ITEM ONE: Mayor Daley wants Chicago to host the Olympics in 2016, but there are a few hurdles left to clear. Unfortunately for him, many of them happen to be the Windy City's citizens. (Via No Land Grab.)

ITEM TWO: The first Jane Jacobs awards are given to two urban innovators in New York.

ITEM THREE: The best book this year about San Francisco? SFGate thinks it's "The Suburbanization of New York".

ITEM FOUR: Wired features an article that serves as a great follow-up to yesterday's post on the Dawn of Digital Urbanism. (Via The Map Room.)

ITEM FIVE: This is even better -- an imagined glimpse of geo-blogging DC, Berlin, Dubai, Mumbai, and Torino in 2017. (Photo credit to Wired.)


Adios, compadres. Have a great weekend.

Capitals of Glamour

Berlin, it seems, is a city of paradox. The city has the image of an exciting, healthy metropolis set to ride globalization into the 21st Century. The reality is that, while vibrant, the German capital is a whopping $83 billion in debt, "[epitomizing] the costly, unfinished task of economically uniting east and west." (LA Times)

The much-buzzed-about city, which began rebuilding itself almost two decades ago, certainly looks good in photos. Splashy images of Renzo Piano and Helmut Jahn's towers at Potsdamer Platz and the then-edgy Sir Norman Foster's Reichstag rehab made the rounds in architectural circles, and tourist brochures promoted the city as a hedonistic party haven. The Glamo-magic worked, and international opinion of the city appears to have soared even while unemployment and debt mounted. Now, foreign investment is carving out a new Berlin where abandonment and low land values -- a rarity in a modern European capital -- are actually adding to the glamour of the place by practically promising high returns on investments. Berlin has become, in short, a testament to the power of reputation.

Stateside, Washington DC is apparently beginning to experience growing pains thanks to the American urban renaissance. As land becomes increasingly scarce in the mostly-gentrified areas surrounding downtown, the law that restricts building heights to 130 feet is being called into question. This idea is as ironic as it is controvertial, as a big part of the visual allure that adds so much to the city's Glam quotient (GQ?) can be attributed to the uniform building heights throughout the city, which have preserved historical character and internationally famous vistas.

Though crime is notoriously high, DC maintains a sizable measure of glamour; Los Angeles and New York are the nation's centers of culture, entertainment, commerce, and celebrity, but Washington has the special distinction of being the political center of the Western world. Long before globalization kicked into high-gear in the early 1990s, Washington was an international metropolis. Now, with every city from Taipei to Indianapolis claiming international importance, the District's monuments and the Americanized Parisian streetscapes that frame them so well in billions of tourists' photos have even more weight; these vistas put to shame many cities claims of relevance, serving as reminders of what a true Global City looks like.

Berlin, until recently, was another capital city with a low-slung skyline. Now, towers continue to push into the himmel (like my German skills?) and the city's popularity continues to grow. It's hard to imagine the Washington Monument and the Capitol Dome sharing the skyline with the types condo and office towers that appear on postcards of other American cities, but as land values in the central part of the city climb ever higher, some people are starting to ask whether its realistic not to. Their argument is not completely irrational.

Washington DC and Berlin are vastly different cities. Still, it's almost impossible to miss the parallels between the two in the tiny, tiny modern world. As DC struggles to calm its violent crime rate and re-imagine itself as a city that is accessible to people throughout the economic spectrum, it will be interesting to see whether the Glamourous City effect raises the city up like Berlin...or ruins it.


Links:
Investors betting on a Berlin boom (LA Times)

High-Level Debate On Future of D.C. (Washington Post)