Cosmopolis

What makes for a successful city?

2012-02-12T10:14:00.002-05:00

Urban gardens: The future of food?

2012-01-21T13:21:00.001-05:00

With penny-farthings, handlebar mustaches and four-pocket vests back in fashion, the rise of urban farming should just about complete our fetish for the late 1800s. Today, you can find chicken coops on rooftops in Brooklyn, N.Y., goats in San Francisco backyards, and rows of crops sprouting across empty lots in Cleveland.

That it fits so snugly into the hipster-steampunk throwback trend is what makes urban farming ripe for ridicule. (“Portlandia” has taken a crack or two at it.) But could city-based agriculture ever make the leap from precious pastime to serious player in our cities’ food systems — not just for novelty seekers and committed locavores, but for the Safeway-shopping masses?

“I don’t want to make a statement like, ‘This is the future of farming,’” says Gotham Greens co-founder Viraj Puri, sitting at his laptop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, steps away from hundreds of rows of butter lettuce. “It’s probably never going to replace conventional farming. But it has a role to play.”

For more read: Urban gardens: The future of food?

Hour of the Furnaces - Ideological Warfare

2012-01-16T23:28:00.000-05:00

The One AM Radio - In a City Without Seasons

2012-01-16T18:18:00.000-05:00

Rick Santorum's Evisceration of the 'Family'

2012-01-02T12:25:00.001-05:00

In my article "Family Values, Social Capital and Contradictions of American Modernity" (abstract below), I show how former Senator and current Presidential candidate Rick Santorum's defense of family comes at great expense--he actually has to empty the concept of family of all meaning.

"Family Values, Social Capital and Contradictions of American Modernity," Theory, Culture & Society July 2011 28: 96-123.
Contemporary American social and political discourses have integrated concerns about family values into the realm of debates about the associational life of social capital. In these discussions, theoretical and historical confusions about the relations between family and civil society run rampant. In this article, I first bring theoretical clarity to these social structures and the type of relations upon which they are predicated and, second, briefly historicize the relationships between an American idea of family and civil society. By tracing changes in popular understandings of family and civil society, I demonstrate that the modern family values movement spurns its Victorian roots by maintaining the nostalgic language for a life and family of old built around a Christian home, while embracing means and institutions, and even more importantly, a form of family, which belies the nostalgia. The family has now become an institution or association which can be sustained through instrumental interventions; it is no longer to do with the organic relations of sentiment remaining from some long-faded Gemeinschaft. The family and the Christian home ideal, which were at the center of American critiques of modernization, have ceased to be.

In the future, urban bikers go faster than cars

2011-12-25T20:27:00.001-05:00

In Hollywood movies, the cities of the future have speeding monorails and flying cars, everyone careening toward their destination at a zillion miles per hour. (The future always looks surprisingly like “The Jetsons,” which turns 50 next year.)

It makes for great CGI. But does it make for a great city? For generations, velocity has defined the urban experience: screeching subways, maniacal taxis, hustling crowds. Life in the fast lane. A New York minute is no minute at all. Even as our roads become clogged with traffic, we think of cities as most city-like when they move at a blur.

But look around (if you have a second) and you might notice that a lot of the new ideas seeping into cities are aimed not at making them faster, but slowing them down. The buzziest mode of transport now is a bicycle. Streetcars, a pokey throwback, are returning. Walkable neighborhoods, traffic-calming measures and “slow zones” are catching on, and freeways are being torn down and replaced with lower-speed boulevards. Even things like sit-down pedestrian plazas and pop-up cafes seem to indicate a desire to slacken the pace.

For more, see: In the future, urban bikers go faster than cars

The New York Times' Critique of 'Home'

2011-12-18T10:06:00.002-05:00

In his fin-de-siècle novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells writes of Basil and Isabel March’s frantic search for housing, as they decamp from the staid Boston for a New York that was thought to be a homeless city. (Middle class commentators—like Jacob Riis and Howells, among others—considered the city to be homeless.) For them, a Babelian cacophony arose from the streets, decades before towers glowered down on the mutually incomprehensible sounds. Five-story tenement walk-ups enclosed darkness, staleness—holding light and air at bay. Journalists wrote of these throngs as spilling out from the stale, dank air of their semi-private enclosures. Though kitchens—with rough-hewn tables and stoves for warming coffee, food and people—provided a small locus for gathering, domestic life was thought to spill forth from tenements to flow into fire escapes, streaming onto sidewalks to join among the cart peddlers, and surging into the streets.

Into this industrializing city overflowing with immigrants, the puritanical Marches undertake a frenzied search for quarters. After a relentless day of unsatisfactory house-searching, Isabel tells her husband:

[T]he flat abolishes the family consciousness. It’s confinement without coziness; it’s cluttered without being snug. You couldn’t keep a self-respecting cat in a flat; you couldn’t go down cellar to get cider. No: the Anglo-Saxon home, as we know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in the Franco-American flat—not because it’s humble, but because it’s false.

Apparently, the new millenium New York Times, agrees. I have been trying to receive home delivery from the Times for several weeks, after recently moving back to the East Coast. I had migrated away from Times online, since they began charging a fee to access their website. Most other newspapers around the globe have found a business model which enables readers to access their online content for free, so I have frequented the BBC, the Washington Post, and for local goings on, The New Yorker.

When I moved to the tri-state area, I thought I would resume weekend home delivery, which would then in turn enable online access. I was quite excited about getting back to the Times. My first weekend went off without a problem. Alas, that was the end of the home delivery. The following Saturday I received no paper and no replacement paper—but was given a credit. On Sunday morning, again no paper. A replacement paper arrived in the afternoon but was only delivered to the lobby some twenty floors below. But the escalation in communications was to resolve the issue.

On a Saturday, a week later, I again received no paper but was assured that I would have the replacement by 2:30 in the afternoon—so much for morning coffee and the newspaper. Alas, when the replacement paper never materialized, I received another credit and a promise that all would be well. I assured customer service that one more mess up would result in cancellation of my subscription.

On Sunday morning, the delivery person decided that a sarcastic joke was more important than customer retention—the New York Post was delivered.

I am now back to the BBC, the Post and a host of other papers around the globe who want customers. I cannot help but think that the high-rise flat must not measure up to the expectations of home, and so home delivery is impossible.

Lobbying Firm's Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-20T09:33:00.003-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

ClGC Memo.

1932 Bonus Army Marchers

2011-11-17T21:40:00.000-05:00

Ransacking of tents and possessions of those demonstrating for economic rights sadly has a long legacy in the U.S.

Brazilian Police Take Over Rio's Largest Slum

2011-11-13T08:47:00.001-05:00

BBC News reports on the latest slum take-over in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics:

Brazil's police say they have completed an operation to clear Rio de Janeiro's biggest slum, Rocinha, of drug gangs.

Hundreds of special forces police and navy commandoes backed by armoured military vehicles and helicopters moved into the slum before dawn.

The chief of military police said "there were no incidents and no shots were fired" during the operation.

Police are trying to clear Rio's shantytowns of drug gangs ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

Since 2008, they have occupied some 20 slums, or favelas, to drive out the dealers who controlled the areas.

We have previously looked at some of the impacts of these preparations on the city of Rio in Olympic-Sized Displacement in Rio, BOPE Operation in Mangueira Favela, and The Continuing Olympic-Sized Displacement in Rio.

Indian Cities have more women than ever

2011-10-24T00:30:00.000-04:00

Subodh Varma reports that Indian cities have the largest female population in history:

Women constitute a larger proportion of the population of Indian towns and cities today than has ever been recorded in Indian history. This startling fact is despite the child sex ratio (the number of girls for every 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group) having fallen alarmingly in recent decades.

Data from the 2011 census reveals that the population of urban women grew at a brisk 34% in the decade spanning 2001 to 2011. In the same period, their rural population grew by just over 12%. As a result, the sex ratio for urban areas jumped from 900 women per 1,000 men in 2001 to 926 in 2011, the highest decadal increase since Independence. In rural areas, the sex ratio increased nominally from 946 to 947.

The sex ratio in urban areas has been rising since 1961, when it was 861, even as it dipped in rural areas from 963 in 1961 to 902 in 2011. But the past decade has seen the sharpest rise ever.

Mute magazine--Anustup Basu's 'Reflections on the Arab Spring'

2011-10-16T10:09:00.001-04:00

Twittering teens or absolutist ayatollahs, men we can do business with or loony autocrats? The media's proliferation of polarities is a strategy to fragment the connectedness of events and disavow western Realpolitik. Here Anustup Basu reveals the transnational composition of a Spring that is now an Autumn

Mute magazine PRINT / ONLINE / SUBSCRIBE | Reflections on the Arab Spring

Police Attack on Occupy Wall Street Protestor

2011-10-15T19:28:00.000-04:00

From The Daily What:

Demonstrator Felix Rivera-Pitre, who was involved in a serious altercation with an NYPD officer, spoke out in the aftermath of the incident to insist that he did nothing to provoke Deputy Inspector Johnny Cardona’s right hook.

“The cop just lunged at me full throttle and hit me on the left side of my face,” Rivera-Pitre, a former dancer from Queens, told Gothamist. “It tore my earring out.” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne disputes this claim, saying Rivera-Pitre provoked the attack by attempting to assault Cardona.

The police are seeking to arrest Rivera-Pitre on several charges, but his attorney Ronald Kuby warned against pursuing that line of action.

“On the off chance they were intending to arrest him for injuring the captain’s fist with his jaw, I strongly suggest that you decide not to add insult to injury and avoid such a retaliatory move,” Kuby wrote in a letter to the NYPD.

Rivera-Pitre said he chose the identify himself after leaving the scene because his injury caused blood to be spilled, and he is HIV-positive. “That cop should get tested,” he was quoted as saying.

Cairo on edge after deadly clashes

2011-10-15T19:01:00.000-04:00

Cairo remains tense after clashes left at least 24 people dead and up to 200 injured in the worst violence in the Egyptian capital since the country's revolution in February. An overnight curfew was lifted on Monday but dozens of people have been arrested, according to state media reported, and a heavy security presence remained on the streets near Tahrir Square. Al Jazeera's Omar al Saleh reports.

How to correct Chicago's open space shortage: 10 ideas that could help city's park-poor neighborhoods away from the lakefront

2011-10-15T18:01:00.000-04:00

When I lived in Chicago, I lived on the lakefront and so had plenty of open space around me. I could sit in my sun room and watch the lake lap up to the beach by my apartment. Within the blocks just north and south of me, parks dotted the landscape to afford residents access to Lake Michigan. However, many of the city's residents away from the lakefront have little open space.

In his Cityscapes blog at the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin outlines ten ways to increase open space for residents of the city:

1. Make better use of existing parks
2. Improve access to open space
3. Bring life to the boulevards
4. Turn city streets into 'play streets'
5. Turn rails into trails
6. Turn old industrial sites into new parks
7. Turn parking spaces into 'parklets'
8. Use urban agriculture to plant seeds of revival
9. Use parks to create commercial hubs
10. Make new plans for new realities

His discussion of these ten points is well worth the read.

Sonatas with a Cosmopolitan Intent

2011-10-09T23:48:00.001-04:00

Okay, this has probably even less cosmopolitanism than a Kantian essay, but it is lovely.

Smart cities get their own operating system

2011-10-02T09:36:00.001-04:00

Katia Moskvitch reports on a new Urban Operating System which in which the diverse parts of urban infrastructure can communicate with each other to coordinate operations:

The idea is for the Urban OS to gather data from sensors buried in buildings and many other places to keep an eye on what is happening in an urban area.

The sensors monitor everything from large scale events such as traffic flows across the entire city down to more local phenomena such as temperature sensors inside individual rooms.

The OS completely bypasses humans to manage communication between sensors and devices such as traffic lights, air conditioning or water pumps that influence the quality of city life.

Channelling all the data coming from these sensors and services into a over-arching control system had lots of benefits, said Steve Lewis, head of Living PlanIT- the company behind Urban OS.

Urban OS should mean buildings get managed better and gathering the data from lots of sources gives a broader view of key city services such as traffic flows, energy use and water levels.

"If you were using an anatomy analogy, the city has a network like the nervous system, talking to a whole bunch of sensors gathering the data and causing actions," said Mr Lewis.

"We distribute that nervous system into the parts of the body - the buildings, the streets and other things.

Having one platform managing the entire urban landscape of a city means significant cost savings, implementation consistency, quality and manageability, he added.

For more see, Smart cities get their own operating system.

Cycling in Cities

2011-09-05T08:39:00.000-04:00

The Economist explores the differences in urban bike riding in Europe and the United States.

Calmer traffic is just the beginning. In much of northern Europe, cyclists commute on lanes that are protected from cars by concrete buffers, rows of trees or parked cars. At busy crossroads, bicycle-activated traffic lights let cyclists cross first. Traffic laws discriminate in favour of people on bikes. A few American cities have taken European-style steps to make streets safer for cycling, most notably Portland, Oregon, which has used most of the above ideas. The result: more bikes and fewer deaths. Nearly 6% of commuters bike to work in Portland, the highest proportion in America. But in five out of the past ten years there have been no cycling deaths there. In the nearby Seattle area, where cycling is popular but traffic calming is not, three cyclists, have been killed in the past few weeks.

Mumbai's Water Woes

2011-08-25T13:02:00.000-04:00

The Times of India reports that water shortages in Mumbai will continue until waterworks projects, like Gargai and the Pinjal Dam are completed in 2016.

"There is no way to increase the water supply beyond the current supply, unless all major water supply projects are implemented. These major projects will only be completed by 2016," Kumar said at the general body meeting.

The city receives 3,400 million litres of water daily (mld), while it needs 4,200 mld of water to fulfill the water requirement of the city. To bridge the gap between the demand and the supply, the BMC is now pinning its hopes on new projects such as the Middle Vaitarna and Gargai.

'Big Brother' on Kuala Lumpur's Roads

2011-08-22T12:17:00.001-04:00

The New Straits Times reports on the installation of cameras at accident-prone intersections around Kuala Lumpur.

Motorists will soon have a sense of “Big Brother” watching over them on roads and highways, officials said.

Under the delayed Transport Ministry’s automated enforcement system (AES), cameras will be installed by year-end at 600 to 800 accident-prone areas with signs alerting motorists to the camera spots.

Motorists who speed, beat traffic lights, overtake at double lines, weave dangerously or use a mobile phone while driving, are the targets.

The principle behind the AES was to deter motorists from violating road rules.

“It is to give a feeling that Big Brother is watching. The cameras are useful because we do not have enough manpower to deploy, especially at accident-prone areas,” said a road safety expert, Professor Farhan Sadullah.

He said the project would benefit motorists in the long run as they would be reminded constantly not to drive recklessly.

While road safety is the cited reason for finally implementing this plan, it is just one month after the Bersih 2.0 protests against the government spread across the city. Perhaps, the city has a range of motives for installing the CCTV cameras around the metropolis.

Homeless gang suspected of Budapest murders

2011-08-22T12:04:00.000-04:00

The Prague Post reports on the arrest of members of a homeless colony who are suspected of culpability in a mass murder in Budapest.

On Aug. 10, investigators found a shallow grave on the Danube River's largest Hungarian island, which they say contained four corpses. The victims were allegedly buried alive, according to reports.

Police released a statement Aug. 13, which said they had arrested three members of a gang that has lived among a colony of homeless people in a forest at the northern point of the heavily wooded island - including a Macedonian man believed to be the leader. Three other men suspected of being part of the gang were arrested several months ago in connection with other crimes. The gang has been under investigation for several months and is suspected of a number of robberies and violent crimes.

Bright Lights in Big Cities

2011-08-22T11:43:00.001-04:00

Christina Seely's series "Lux" contains long-exposure portraits of Earth's 43 brightest cities as shown by NASA's map of the planet at night.

via Andrew Sullivan.

Arundhati Roy: "I'd rather not be Anna"

2011-08-22T11:40:00.000-04:00

As the 'I am Anna' craze has been taken up as a marketing blitz of buttons, shirts, caps and stickers, the writer and activist Arundhati Roy declares why she would rather not be Anna Hazare:

While his means may be Gandhian, Anna Hazare's demands are certainly not. Contrary to Gandhiji's ideas about the decentralisation of power, the Jan Lokpal Bill is a draconian, anti-corruption law, in which a panel of carefully chosen people will administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of employees, with the power to police everybody from the Prime Minister, the judiciary, members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down to the lowest government official. The Lokpal will have the powers of investigation, surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that it won't have its own prisons, it will function as an independent administration, meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one that we already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.

Skyliners Paris Trailer

2011-08-22T10:57:00.000-04:00

To follow up on Boston's cliff diving, we now have Parisian antics atop skyscrapers.

Skyliners Paris trailer from sebastien montaz-rosset on Vimeo.

via kottke.

Cliff Diving in Boston

2011-08-20T13:30:00.000-04:00

Red Bull has sponsored a cliff diving competition in Boston off the Institute of Contemporary Art into the Boston Harbour.

via boston.com.