Category: Articles

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Machiavelli’s advice for nice guys

ARTICLE / SHORT FILM

The School of Life, 10 February 2017

And so, proposed Machiavelli, the secret to being effective lies in overcoming all vestiges of this story. The Prince was not, as is often thought, a guide to being a tyrant; it’s a guide about what nice people should learn from tyrants. It’s a book about how to be effective, not just good. It’s a book haunted by examples of the impotence of the pure.

For another article and short film from The School of Life on Niccolò Machiavelli and his ideas click here.

Articles Galleries Historic Cities India Indonesia Japan Netherlands Networked Cities Physical Geography Short Films Singapore / Malaysia

Multi-cultural communities and global trade from 1500-1900

ARTICLE

Honeycombers Editorial, 3 Feb 2017

Centuries before the proliferation of social media, networks of people, cultures, and information flowed freely between port cities such as Batavia (Jakarta) in Indonesia, Goa in India, Canton (now Guangzhou) in China, and, of course, Singapore. Spawned by advances in ship technology and knowledge of sea routes, these cities were thriving, cosmopolitan hubs of trade. They’re great examples of early globalisation and the hodgepodge – or “rojak” – of ethnicities, language, culture, lifestyles, and fashion.

For short films about the Port Cities exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore click here for a presentation on the life of Cornelia van Nijenroode, and here for another on the Indian Chettiars of Saigon.

Articles Cities for People City Solutions Community Community Participation France Government Agencies Tools

Participatory Budgeting: What are Parisians dreaming about?

ARTICLE

PB Network, 24 Jan 2017

Launched in 2014, Paris implements a successful method of citizen participation. Ideas are developed and submitted on an Internet platform by residents or groups of residents. In 2015, Parisians submitted over 5,000 projects. In 2014, the first year of its operation, over 40,000 Parisians chose 9 winning projects at a cost of 17,7 million €.

To learn more about Participatory Budgeting in the USA click here, and in the UK click here.

Articles City Planners / Urban Designers City Solutions Codes, Density & Urban Form Newspapers (Print & Online)

What makes a city tick? Designing the ‘urban DMA’

ARTICLE

Kim Dovey & Elek Pafka, The Conversation, November 2, 2016

When we talk about “urban DMA”, we’re talking about the density of a city’s buildings, the way people and activities are mixed together, and the access, or transport networks that we use to navigate through them.

For more from The Conversation on cities, click here.

Articles Newspapers (Print & Online) Urbanisation

This is humankind’s ‘great urbanisation’. We must do it right, or the planet will pay.

ARTICLE

Dimitri Zenghelis and Nicholas Stern, The Guardian, 8 November 2016

The world will never again build cities as rapidly as it does this century. If we are serious about limiting global warming, tackling air pollution and promoting innovative, resource-efficient growth, there is a narrow window of opportunity.

For more from Guardian Cities, click here.

Articles Australia City Planners / Urban Designers Global Leadership & Decision Making Smart Cities Social & Economic Inequalities Sustainable Cities Urbanisation

Ten things you need to know about the New Urban Agenda

ARTICLE

Lucinda Hartley, Landscape Australia, 24 Oct 2016

The New Urban Agenda represents a paradigm shift in global thinking, recognising what professionals have perhaps understood for some time: that our future is urban. From gender-equity to youth-empowerment, participatory planning to inclusive public space, The New Urban Agenda sets a high benchmark for the type of urban development we should strive for and a global accountability framework for achieving it. Its catch-cry to “leave no one behind” commits to reducing urban inequality. This is a challenge that we can take up and apply to every city and neighbourhood.

For UN Habitat‘s New Urban Agenda whiteboard video click here.

Articles Newspapers (Print & Online) Short Films Urbanisation

The rise and fall of great world cities: 5,700 years of urbanisation – mapped

SHORT FILM

Kanishk Tharoor, The Guardian, 27 June 2016

Recent research, published in the journal Scientific Data, transcribed and geocoded nearly 6,000 years of data (from 3700BC to AD2000). The report produced a gargantuan resource for scholars hoping to better understand how and why cities rise and fall – and allowed blogger Max Galka to produce a striking visualisation on his site Metrocosm.

For more from Guardian Cities, click here.

Archaeologists Articles Lessons from History Newspapers (Print & Online) Short Films

Revealed: Cambodia’s vast medieval cities hidden beneath the jungle

ARTICLE / SHORT FILM

Laura Dunston, The Guardian, 11 June 2016

That survey uncovered an array of discoveries, including elaborate water systems that were built hundreds of years before historians believed the technology existed. The findings are expected to challenge theories on how the Khmer empire developed, dominated the region, and declined around the 15th century, and the role of climate change and water management in that process.

For more from Guardian Cities, click here.

Articles Driving Meet the Urbanists: The Canon Modernist Cities Newspapers (Print & Online) USA

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro review – a landmark study

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, 23 Oct 2015

ARTICLE

Technically, Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker is a biography of urban planner Robert Moses, but that description feels laughably inadequate on multiple counts. For more than four decades, this particular urban planner was the most powerful man in New York, an unelected emperor who dominated the mayors and governors who were supposedly in charge, and who physically reshaped the city through sheer force of will. Caro’s enormous book, meanwhile, is less a life story than an epic, meticulously detailed study of power in general: how it’s acquired, how it’s used to change history, how it ultimately corrupts those who get it.

See also Citizen Jane: Battle for the City.

Articles Codes, Density & Urban Form Economists Historic Cities Mega Cities Modernist Cities Urbanisation

Mapping the ‘Urban Fingerprints’ of Cities

ARTICLE

Linda Poon, City Lab, Sep 11, 2015

The most valuable visual information that these maps convey is the density of a particular area. Planned right, a dense city can be a positive environment for productivity. Griffiths explains that the clustering effect creates “agglomeration economies.” “If you cluster a whole lot of people close to each other, with skills that aren’t necessarily the same,” he says, “you get opportunities for new creations.”

Activists Articles Cities for People City Planners / Urban Designers City Solutions Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century The Public Realm Tools Urban Activism USA

What ‘Tactical Urbanism’ Can (and Can’t) Do for Your City

ARTICLE

Sarah Goodyear, CityLab, 20 Mar 2015

The phrase “tactical urbanism” came into use just a few short years ago, coined by a group of young planners and activists and popularized by an online guide to phenomena such as guerrilla wayfinding, pop-up markets, and DIY traffic-calming.

Many of those nimble urban-improvement techniques, which often originated in the activist community, have since gone mainstream. Cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia, for instance, have been rapidly installing parklets where parking spaces used to go, a practice that originated with an annual grassroots action called Park(ing) Day.

To listen to a panel discussion about Tactical Urbanism, hosted by the New York Times and including Mike Lydon, click here.

To find out more about Mike Lydon and his Street Plans practice click here, for links to Street Plan’s books click here, and to download their guides to Tactical Urbanism click here. Several of these guides have been co-authored with similar placemaking firms around the world including Co-Design Studio (Australia), Ciudad Emergente (Chile), and TaMaLaCà (Italy).

Architects Articles Codes, Density & Urban Form France Global Meet the Urbanists: The Canon Modernist Cities USA

AD Classics: Ville Radieuse / Le Corbusier

ARTICLE

Arch Daily, 11 August, 2013

In accordance with modernist ideals of progress (which encouraged the annihilation of tradition), The Radiant City was to emerge from a tabula rasa: it was to be built on nothing less than the grounds of demolished vernacular European cities. The new city would contain prefabricated and identical high-density skyscrapers, spread across a vast green area and arranged in a Cartesian grid, allowing the city to function as a “living machine.” Le Corbusier explains: “The city of today is a dying thing because its planning is not in the proportion of geometrical one fourth. The result of a true geometrical lay-out is repetition, The result of repetition is a standard. The perfect form.”

For images and information on Le Corbusier’s architectural projects on the UNESCO World Heritage List click here. See also Citizen Jane: The Battle for the City, The Human Scale and The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.

(New) Traditional Cities Activists Articles Cities for People Codes, Density & Urban Form Garden Cities Mega Cities Modernist Cities

The evolution of urban planning in 10 diagrams

ARTICLE

City Lab, Emily Badger, 9 Nov 2012

The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.

For more about SPUR and their work in the San Francisco Bay Area click here.

Articles Books (16+ yr) Economists Global Leadership & Decision Making Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Networked Cities Talks Urban Economics USA

The Triumph of the City

BOOK

Edward L. Glaeser, Penguin Press, 2011

Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution. The great prosperity of contemporary London and Bangalore and Tokyo comes from their ability to produce new thinking. Wandering these cities—whether down cobblestone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways—is to study nothing less than human progress.

For a talk by Edward Glaeser at UC San Diego summarising this book click here. For a discussion of Glaeser’s work on eliminating barriers to innovation for food trucks by The Urbanist, Alan Davies click here.