virtual flânerie chez MOOC

…late in the day or game of my life ~ figuratively speaking, but this flâneuse persona is off on another city jaunt...virtual flânerie in the form of MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses about cities.

The first, nearly over, is Technicity, and the other, in development and yet to start, is City MOOC.

Best #CityReads of the Week

…The Atlantic Cities' weekly roundup by Sommer Mathis of the most intriguing articles about cities and urbanism we've come across in the past seven days. Share your favorites on Twitter with #cityreads.

"In the Traffic of Cairo's DIY Highway Exit, an Urbanist Movement Grows," Joseph Dana, Next American City

Paris versus New York

Playfully pitting Paris and New York against each other, graphic designer Vahram Muratyan has created a visual homage to two evocative cities.

Vahram Muratyan says:

"It all started when I wondered, if I was stranded on a desert island, what aspects of Paris and New York would I keep? What would be the perfect collection of things? They could be habits, or landmarks or food, anything that would bring the two cultures together in one image."

Paris versus New York: A Tally of Two Cities, Penguin, £11.99

Paris versus New York - in graphic form | Books | The Observer

As many American cities as possible

Would cities be a places along the way topic or a one for flâneuse? Flip a coin. Un coup de dés jamais n'obolira le hasard. Next city post goes to the other. Maybe. Depends on what it is. Now, to post and get back to reading these gems. I need a cityspace break in the worst way today. 

Mariana Valverde (Toronto): Seeing Like a City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance. Dean Stansel (FGCU): Why Some Cities Are Growing and Others Shrinking. Michelle Wilde Anderson (UC-Berkeley): Dissolving Cities. From The American Conservative, a symposium on Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 

From n+1, the City by City project gathers reports from as many American cities as possible, to see how things are going and what can be done, including Baltimore, Milwaukee, Northern Kentucky, Greensboro, theDistrict of Columbia, Cincinnati, Seattle, and Chicago. Why city rankings always get it wrong: Happiest cities, most livable cities, loneliest cities — the Web's filled with lists. Why do cities get so little respect from state and national governments? 

An interview with Richard Florida, author of Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life. Joel Kotkin on the demise of the luxury city. Variety show: A new way to measure a city’s diversity. Ryan Avent on one path to better jobs: More density in cities. Nate Berg on defining cities in a metropolitan world. 

Are freeways doomed? Several cities are tearing down highways, creating bold new public spaces — and building a future without cars. Suburban hip is where it’s at: UBS might like Manhattan — but for all the talk of an urban renaissance, most growth is happening beyond the city. Could you actually be hurting the environment by going green and moving to the suburbs?

"As many American cities as possible" at Omivore, the Book Forum blog

cities rise and fall

How nice to find a city something to blog (re-purpose) for places, among other functions, also designated citylit destination ~ all the more so when I'm behind on posting. All MLA'd out too, without even attending. Appropriate for places along the way though, all those LA images, plus irresistible "MLA in LA" (aka "MLALA") inspired juxtapositions ~ Academy in Hard Times, End of the Univeristy as We Know (and other examples of the genre), The Day of the Locust and so on.

From Lapham's Quarterly, a special issue on The City. From City Journal, Victor Davis Hanson on the destiny of cities: Throughout history, forces both natural and human have made cities rise and fall; Asian megacities, free and unfree: How politics has shaped the growth of Shanghai, Beijing, and Seoul; and Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer on cities from scratch and a new path for development. From THES, a review of The Just City by Susan S. Fainstein; and a review of City Life by Adrian Franklin. There is a growing understanding that it is actually “love” that will be the prime force in the future economy of successful 21st century cities. The 30 most dynamic cities on Earth: Which metropolis is leading the world out of the recession? The answer is Istanbul — and the rest of the list is equally surprising. Mario Polese on seven reasons why big cities matter more than ever. Ross Perlin on ten megacities of the near future. What makes a city grow and thrive, and what causes it to stagnate and fall? Geoffrey West thinks the tools of physics can give us the answers. Tom Vanderbilt on how a planned highway can change a city, even if it never gets built. A new era for the city-state: Joel Kotkin on the New World Order. An article on predicting the climate-changed city of the future. An innovator in every apartment: Conor Friedersdorf on how cities should unravel their pre-digital regulations.

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via bookforum.com

... time enough tomorrow (or whenever the rest of the convention post-mortems roll in) to blog collected observations and links.

Posted via email from Meanderings

Urbanites and their cities

1:00PM

Nov 17 2010

Andrey Korotayev (RSU): The World System Urbanization Dynamics: A Quantitative Analysis. William A. Fischel (Dartmouth): The Evolution of Zoning Since the 1980s: The Persistence of Localism. Urban-rural divide no more: An increasing number of urban dwellers are retreating to the country — and taking the city with them. Witold Rybczynski, author of Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, on the cities we want (and part 2 — and a review). Could the increasngly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence?

More thoughts on a town square, public space, its use, and mental mapping

The tone on this one may run too much to the academic for most tastes (mine included), but grad school habits die slowly. I'll try to infuse more juice and life into it on succeeding revisions.

I can't resist the intersection (and thus its stylistic pitfalls). After all, it's not often (what about NEVER?) my dissertation research (space in literary representation of cityscapes – from Vergil’s Troy, Rome, and Carthage to Baudleaire’s, Balzac’s, and Flaubert’s Paris, Dicken’s London, and Fuentes’ Mexico City) applies to Mountainair. The town may be a "gateway to ancient cities" (why that & not "Geronimo's raiding path"?), but that slogan is the only thing even remotely urban about it. Even the transplants gravitating here lean to the provincial (despite self-images to the contrary).

Space is space. How used and by whom shapes its nature and our perceptions of it. Urban space gets the long look because of population density - more people using it, imagining it, defining it, contesting how it should be used. Yes, small town space is qualitatively different, perhaps a liminous space between symbolically loaded spaces of city and wilderness.

Yet a number of urban design principles apply here as well. Although research and findings by urbanist William H. Whyte, architect Kevin Lynch, and the Project for Public Spaces focus on urban space, their findings also apply to a Mountainair Town Square project. Whyte's studies and work by the Project for Public Spaces offer proven techniques for measuring how people use public space, which and what kind of spaces attract users, which repel them, and which invite the most interaction among users. Armed with cameras, William H. Whyte tracked the use of small urban parks and plazas. He then mapped the specific amenities and seating available at each park and charted the patterns of use. Whyte asked:

• Where did people sit, and what places did they avoid?
• How were their movements affected by sun, shade, water, flowers, trees, food, and types of available seating?
• What kinds of seating did they prefer?
• How did use patterns change over the course of the day?
• Did people use the space as single individuals or in groups?
• What elements of design invite them to move into the public space?
• What moved them to interact with others using the public space?
• Would they move out of the path of foot traffic to conduct conversations, and if so, would they move to quieter, more out of the way spaces?
• How did these public spaces relate to the commercial and civic buildings around them?
• Did they have a cross-fertilizing effect, generating foot traffic and more business, which might in turn generate users of the public spaces?
• If they were relatively unused, or used for undesirable purposes, did they cause people to stay away from the entire neighboring area?

Based on this - not to mention plain old common sense - a Town Square not only needs to be attractive and inviting but should also have scattered but ample seating - maybe even areas with tables, quiet visiting or just sitting and reading/people watching spaces, shade areas, water (so they don't leave when they get thirsty), etc.