Carolyn Steel is a London based author, an architect and a historian of connection between food and a modern city. This is her presentation at TED global. ►►►read more
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urban
An interesting article about an imaginary prefect city in the WSJ: A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City. David Burn writes about these components for a perfect city: Size, Density, Sensibility and attitude, Security, Chaos and danger, Human scale, Parking, Boulevards, Mixed use,Public spaces. David write about sensibility and attitude:
“New Yorkers are viewed as being tough as nails, no-nonsense but with hearts of gold—or maybe just gold-plated. This might not be the sensibility I would choose if I had a choice. The people of Glasgow, where most of my relatives live, are working class, blunt and free of pretenses. (They see their sister city Edinburgh as putting on airs). Their sense of humor can be scathing, though I find it hilarious. There’s a wicked sense of humor associated with Berlin as well—Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder and Helmut Newton all shared this dark and sometimes transgressive sensibility. New Orleans is a city where people make eye contact. There’s a more open sensuality there as well. I’d take that in my perfect city, minus some of the other aspects of that town, such as its tragic poverty, corruption, and crime.”
A delightful put down of the bourgeois, nouveau riche culture around The New York Times Magazine, what is being called there the “Urban Modern”. Leon Wieseltier in The Washington Diarist – Against the Plane:
“…what is being celebrated here is the ideology of no ideology–the ascendancy of the Nora Ephron view of the world, which may be succinctly described as “food and drink and bathroom fixtures.” What moves such a heart most (aside from children, the poor, and the homeless) are amenities and trivialities. The conferring of importance upon the unimportant, and of unimportance upon the important: this is a mark of decadence, the cognitive inversion of people who live “mostly in aesthetic terms” because they have secured themselves materially–or so they would like to believe—against philosophy and pain. They live for lightness and distraction. Their laughter is the sound of luck. They acquit themselves of their intellectual obligations with opinions. The anxiety that arguing may be bad manners is plausibly held by someone whose primary arena of political action may be the dinner party.”
(via bill wasik)
New York based artist Ross Racine creates the amazing computer generated images about the culture of suburbia.
Heavenly Heights
Tyler Cowen skeptically quotes in Marginal Revolution from the new book by Chris Wickham – “The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000”:
“The other important feature of the Great Mosque was that, as a space, it was closed off to the outside. Roman cities were structured by wide streets leading to central forum areas, to which processions led and where public participation could be considerable, as continued to be the case in Constantinople for centuries. Amphitheatres (in the West), theatres and racetracks were other major venues for public activity, and the Hippodrome of Constantinople carried on this tradition for a long time. In the Islamic world, the mosque courtyard took over from all of these; major political events, like collective oaths of loyalty, took place there, not in any secular location. And the Arab states did not use processions as a major part of their political legitimization; the assembly in the mosque courtyard was sufficient for that. The need for wide boulevards ended; pre-Islamic Syrian and Palestinian colonnades were quite quickly filled in with shops in the eighth century, some of them commissioned as public amenities by caliphs. The narrow streets of Islamic cities resulted directly from this, for there was no public interest involved in keeping them clear from obstructions like vendors’ stalls, beyond a certain minimum (enough for two loaded pack animals to pass each other, later jurists said). Public display came to be focused on the mosque, and secondarily, rulers’ palaces and city gates, rather on the cityscape as a whole…The caliph and his advisers were nonetheless making a set of conscious symbolic and political points by organizing the Great Mosque as they did; and the way the public space in Islamic cities change, to focus so exclusively on mosques…would have seemed to them auspicious and fitting.”
I don’t know much about urban history of Rome or Greece. Someone in the comments there mentioned chariots, an interesting point worth looking into. But I can say with certainty that historic European capitals were as dense as the cities in the Middle East. Many European cities where build predominantly with wood and burned down. European cities were developed over the old dense grid. For example for military and aesthetic reasons Napoleon III commissioned Baron Haussmann to cut the famous boulevards through the historic maze of Paris. Many “modern” cities copied French boulevards rather literally. For example Commonwealth Ave. in Boston or Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, the latter comes complete with an arch.
It might as well be true that the classical Roman parades where not part of the Arabic culture but it would hardly excuse or explain the density. More interesting question is if Islam’s Mosque plagiarized from Judaism were designed to mirror the traditional urban role of the Jerusalem Temple?
Someone mentioned to me today that the discovery of the Times Sq. beach chairs (my post White Nights Carnival on the Times Square) proves an intelligent life is possible within a bureaucracy. I believe this is not about a functioning bureaucracy but rather a serendipity at work. The chairs are an accidental, temporary solution for the permanent fixtures that failed to show up on time. The beach chairs prove the power of an aside project. Discovery is always accidental, form the Penicillin to Potato Chips, from the American continent to Twitter… Similarly a savior in every culture is always an illegitimate son. You want to break the mold, you would have to be born breaking the rules.
I am fascinated by this project – The Empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square:
“This summer, sculptor Antony Gormley invites you to help create an astonishing living monument. He is asking the people of the UK to occupy the empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in London, a space normally reserved for statues of Kings and Generals. They will become an image of themselves, and a representation of the whole of humanity.
Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, a different person will make the Plinth their own. If you’re selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like.”
A classical ceremonial European square as a stage for the exceptional talent of the ordinary people, not an elevated monarchical symbol. The creativity imagination and the latent genius of every human being. The creative process lifted up on the pedestal, how deservedly so.
The Guardian Plinth Watch 2009 group on Flickr
All photos in this post are taken by me in the NYC few days ago
Coming off a bus on the 8th in Manhattan Av. your first impression is people across all age groups. But Newton first (and Newton as a proxy for the American suburbia). There was never a single person who grew up and came back to Newton. In fact there might be some secret agent that kills off everyone who is between 18 and 35 in Newton. Because of this (give or take an estate sale) most who live in Newton are new money people, they are not as relaxed about the wealth as aristocrats, they live in a constant fear that someone would come and take away the toys. In fact you might not know it but they actually play King of the Hill 24 hours a day and when a stranger approaches, they treat him accordingly.
This happened to me in Newton, try it as an experiment. Take a break for a walk in Newton on a wonderful afternoon. You can walk for miles without seeing anyone except gardeners and construction workers fixing things. But than you notice a real pedestrian (not a car). Chances are when your paths cross the pedestrian would try to avoid eye contact as if his or her life dependent on it.
Wasn’t the metropolitan Boston a student town you ask? Yes but the students and the youth energy in general is treated in Boston in accordance with the New England wasp tradition – spontaneity, playful exuberance must be contained and segregated at all times, never shown to the world. The most persistent urban resistance in the greater Boston is the containment of the student population away from residential areas and strenuous opposition to the urban density, the very two reasons why Manhattan is such an exiting magnet. Can you imagine the Washington Square Park without NYU? The kids from Kansas are dreaming of the “New York experience” and it is that radiance that makes the city come alive.
In fact when you think of exiting cosmopolitan cities like Paris, New York, Jerusalem and even Moscow, you would find that a week old babies, 18 years olds and 100 year olds all share the same urban roof. This youth exuberance animates the flow of the human river.
