Video: Jane Jacobs: Neighborhoods in Action

Video: Antanas Mockus - Miradas Urbanas (Pt. 1)

Articulo: Rethinking Lower Manhattan: What If?

Anthony Townsend

Since its founding in the mid 1990s, Alliance for Downtown New York has long been one of the world's leading business improvement districts. This non-profit organization has presided over the reinvention of New York's historic Financial District as a thriving 24-hour live/work district, while retaining a respectable share of the city's financial services sector. The Alliance built a network of Wi-Fi hotspots that lit up nearly every major public space in the district - not just outdoor locations like Bowling Green and City Hall Park, but also indoor atria like the Winter Garden and 60 Wall Street. More recently, they announced a new initiative to create a new kind of incubator, the Hive@55, which will model itself off the exploding grassroots coworking movement that is sweeping the country.

Thus its no surprise that such an innovative advocate for Lower Manhattan has just blown the roof off the debate on what to do with the long-neglected area south of the World Trade Center known as Greenwich South, with a study released yesterday titled simply "Greenwich South: What If?". Developed over the last year with the input of numerous stakeholders and award-winning architects, the study presents a series of provocative questions that hope to accelerate the debate about the area's future far beyond the rather unambitious proposals that have circulated in recent years. My personal favorite - "What if you could Live, Work and Raise Sheep in the same building?" - is about the most delightfully playful urban planning idea to be floated in New York City in a decade.

Greenwich South has long been the stepchild of Lower Manhattan - blighted first by an elevated railway, then the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel approach, then the closing off of northern access by the World Trade Center superblock - nearly any action would be an improvement. And that's what most of the proposals to date have been limited to - incremental improvements. The Alliance study offers the possibility to turn the area into a living laboratory for bold new planning ideas that bring great streets, public art, and even urban agriculture into the place where New York City started. One of the study's other provocations, which asks "What if it all started here (again)?" might just be a wish that turns out to be true.


http://www.planetizen.com/node/40938

Articulo: Transformative Public Works

The remarkable, four-year revitalization of Medellín has become a model for cities around the world. The construction of visually striking libraries, schools, parks and science and cultural centers in some of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods, has turned Medellín, once considered the deadliest city in the world, into a thriving, livable urban hub.

Beginning in 2004, a team of renowned architects led by Alejandro Echeverri, former director of urban projects, and Sergio Fajardo, former mayor, implemented this initiative in consultation with local neighborhood residents. Together, Echeverri and Fajardo, as well as an extensive team of architects and technicians, helped champion and realize this cornerstone belief: “Our most beautiful buildings must be in our poorest areas,” as expressed by Fajardo.

Paired with sweeping social programs, including education and micro-lending to small businesses, these projects helped rout the city’s deeply entrenched social inequalities. “From the beginning, we involved the people in the activity of using public spaces to solve social problems and to change the lives of the community,” said Echeverri.

A number of these projects have become landmarks of the city, including the Orquideorama, a 42,200-square-foot structure whose defining feature is a soaring, fractal-like canopy of wood-framed hexagons that shelters the Botanic Garden’s orchid collection and houses cultural events. One of the Medellín’s most visited attractions is the iconic Parque Biblioteca España, which resembles three massive, etched black boulders and is perched in the hilltops of Santo Domingo, a barrio once notorious for drug violence.

In 2004, the design process helped extend the city’s modern railway system by building an elevated gondola tramway that connects some of Medellín’s poorest and most isolated neighborhoods to the rest of the city. Today, residents from the sprawling hillside slums of cinderblock shacks have more opportunities to take advantage of schools and the growing construction, textile, and tourism economies of the city.

These architectural and urban projects have “changed the skin of the city,” in Farjardo’s words. A guiding principle of these public works projects was el efecto demonstrativo, or using the “power of example” –- in this case, the dramatic symbolism of modern architecture -- to instill a sense of pride and possibility in the minds of local residents and beyond.

Echeverri and Fajardo’s social programs and their faith in the galvanizing power of design and architecture has been credited for contributing to a decline in crime. According to national statistics, the number of homicides dropped from a peak of 381 for every 100,000 inhabitants in 1991 to 29 in 2006.

Leaders worldwide have taken note. Today, both men are in high demand to speak at conferences throughout Latin America, Europe and elsewhere, as advisors to governments in cities such as Caracas, Guadalajara and Lima, Peru who view Medellín’s transformation as a possible blueprint for charting the future of their own communities.

Articulo: A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City

Osaka's robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician's fantasy metropolis

There’s an old joke that you know you're in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it's the other way around you're in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I'd take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney's with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it's not really possible to cherry pick like this—mainly because a city's qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place's cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.

As someone who has used a bicycle to get around New York for about 30 years I've watched the city—mainly Manhattan, where I live—change for better and for worse. During this time I started to take a full-size folding bike with me when I traveled so I got to experience other cities as a cyclist as well. Seeing cities from on top of a bike is both pleasurable and instructive. On a bike one sees a lot more than from a freeway, and often it's just as fast as car traffic in many towns.

A "livable city" means vastly different things for many people. In Hong Kong it might mean that your family is in a comfortable apartment while you play in the exciting mercantile world in a glass tower overlooking the harbor. In Dallas livability might mean that you live near an expressway that isn't jammed up, at least not all the time, and your car runs most days. For some it might mean super fast Wi-Fi, the possibility of lucky and lucrative business opportunities and plenty of strip clubs. If that's what rocks your boat then try Houston, though to me that city, oil money made physically manifest, is my worst nightmare.

Here are some things that make a city livable for me:

(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574403293064136098.html#video%3DCC7135BE-7B21-4EAE-8761-A7E1B0571FA1%26articleTabs%3Darticle)

VISION DEL CNU