SHORT FILM
Anette Lien, Monocle, 27 January 2017
In Japan’s Unzen City, the adventurous ideas of Taku Habino, the head of Habino Sekkei Architecture have revolutionised early childhood development in the city’s nurseries.
To visit Japanese architecture firm Hibino Sekkei’s website, click here. For a survey of their work from ArchDaily, click here.
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.
DOCUMENTARY
Matt Tyrnauer, Altimeter Films, 2016
Jacobs understood when cities really work they’re phenomena that come from the bottom up. So a great neighbourhood is what happens when thousands of different actors – that’s the shop keepers, bar owners, the people walking the streets – they come together in an uncoordinated, but meaningful way to create the flavour and personality of the distinct neighbourhood. That not ‘planned’, that’s much more a question of organised complexity.
远亲不如近邻 (Close neighbours are better than distant relatives).
What is the city but the people?
SHORT FILM
Urban Think Tank / LafargeHolcim Foundation
Old slums actually function as villages, they’re medium rise, high density urban areas in cities. And actually you have an infinite number of diverse productive businesses going on all along in Dharavi. And what you see in the background here, in the distance, is the alternative, the modern housing block. Now what’s better? To upgrade this village or to house people in those vertical, kind segmented ghettos. I believe the village culture is much more interesting and the village must remain in the city.
For more about ETH Zurich’s Urban – Think Tank’s work on social architecture and informal development, click here.
For more about The Holcim Foundation’s support for sustainable construction, click here.
TALK
Mark Gorton, Street Films, 22 April 2014
We know that for much of the history of urban planning and architecture the people who build our cities, who build public spaces, who create buildings and city systems, often they will tell us they are building for our happiness, it’s the end goal of everything all of us do anyway, except they rarely provide evidence to demonstrate that they are making us happier with their creations. So I found this very curious, and looking at the last couple of decades of terrific work being done in neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology, we’re actually starting to gain some evidence that tells us a little bit of the effect of the urban system on our our own well being, on how we feel and how we treat other people.
For see Charles Montgomery’s book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design on Good Reads click here.
DOCUMENTARY
Chad Freidrichs, Unicorn Stencil, 2012
Long after the duct settled and the site was cleared this is the Pruitt-Igoe that remained. The mythical Pruitt-Igoe with a fatal flaw, doomed to failure from he start. Little was said about the laws that built and maintained it, the economy that deserted it, the segregation that stripped away opportunity, the radically changing city in which it stood. In the years of Pruitt-Igoe the American city was wrenched apart by devastating forces. They were felt most deeply by a large, but vulnerable housing on the north side of St Louis. It’s a powerful story with a dramatic end and its after shocks are still with us.
BOOK
Jane Jacobs, Vintage, 1961
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.