KSA's new cities

New Economic Cities planned for Saudi Arabia...
more here at NY Times article:

Small-House Utopia

The Home for the New Economy was announced at the International Builders’ Show. So interesting to see the building climate change in what seems like a blink of an eye.

Nice write up about it all by Andrew Rice here

Third Spaces

Interesting article not only on how we are changing the live/work dynamic, but on how our cities themselves can change, evolve to foster that. Ray Oldenburg talks about these new spaces as "third spaces"...":where we go not just to drink coffee but also to send an e-mail; the hotel lobby where we take a meeting; or the local library where we write a report, edit a document or revise a business plan." Its those places where no one looks like they are working, but in fact are.

And these places can be anywhere...so people are looking at where we live over where we work. Bigger cities then become the magnets for this sort of "senergy".... but the author offers some interesting perspectives of how any size place can foster this sort of momentum...

"All successful revitalization efforts focus on upgrading existing local assets — developing better ties among colleges, universities and communities, strengthening business districts, upgrading parks and open spaces, preserving and reusing old buildings and supporting local art and music."


image credit

Slumburbia

Opinion Piece by Timothy Egan

"...a few lessons about urban planning can be picked from the stucco pile.

One is that, at least here in California, the outlying cities themselves encouraged the boom, spurred by the state’s broken tax system. Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.

Second, look at the cities with stable and recovering home markets. On this coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and San Diego come to mind. All of these cities have fairly strict development codes, trying to hem in their excess sprawl. Developers, many of them, hate these restrictions. They said the coastal cities would eventually price the middle class out, and start to empty.

It hasn’t happened. Just the opposite. The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums.

Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live"

photo and article credit

The Counterfeit Triangle

New York's Street of Schemes
 By ALEX KALMAN and LOLA SINREICH
The New York Times

Privatizing Public Infrastructure

Leveraging public need with private financing...

KFC fills potholes
Neo Nazi's clean the highways
Strip club adopts highway

Building a Process

Related Article

Basically: Non-profit invests in foreclosed real estate, employs own clients to renovate and live, while profiting and empowering more clients in new process of housing those in need.

"Pikes Peak Behavioral Health ...

The nonprofit group, a mental health counseling center with a growing number of military veteran clients and patients, wants to buy a half-built foreclosed apartment project near the Fort Carson Army base. Using military veterans to complete the construction project, the group would sell the buildings and use the proceeds to buy another property, and repeat the process.

The group also wants to hire veterans as “peer navigators” in a buddy system to guide wounded and troubled veterans into civilian life, helping them with things like job applications and the fine print at the department of motor vehicles..."

Design Corps

Design Corps:

Design Corps' mission is to create positive change in communities by providing architecture and planning services. Our vision is realized when people are involved in the decisions that shape their lives, including the built environment.

Design Corps was founded in 1991 and became a 501-c-3 in1996.

Design Corps' community service program that is ten years old and has a proven record of success. It brings the skills of recent architecture and planning graduates who provide technical assistance to communities in need. We primarily serve small rural communities composed of low-income families who do not have access to the technical services needed to shape their physical needs. The design and planning expertise provided by these interns allows communities to shape their physical environment and create positive change. Design Corps' community service program offers technical assistance in planning, design, and grant writing. Known as Community Design Fellows, they bring their technical educations and experiences to bear at each local site where they are placed and are supported by trained professionals. Once at the site, Fellows work to identify challenges and pool needed resources through community involvement and participation to ensure that the community shares in identifying challenges, creating a vision, and implementing design responses.

Design Corps

Mini-Gulf Courses for a City in Recession

Queens:

Miniaturized Entertainment? Whats going on with all the putt-putt courses?
Downsized Golf...manageable landscapes?
















Governors Island:














Brooklyn:

Malls Evolve

related article and image

Changing Economy = Changing mall programming

- store closings
- discount stores move to more prominent places
- lower priced rents provide opportunities for the more resistant businesses
- community infrastructure enter malls
- schools, medical and youth activities
- new "lifestyle" attractions to lure customers (gimmicky attractions, grocery)

articles/sites:
Repurpose-Driven Life
Rethinking the Mall
Fall of the Mall
Malls Test Experimental Water to Fill Vacancies
Dead Malls

Vendor Power!

Vendor Power!
Center for Urban Pedagogy
Urban Omnibus

Food Traceability

Farm 776: Linking object with landscape...connecting food with its source.

Forging a Hot Link

"Beginning this month, customers who buy its all-purpose whole wheat flour ... can go to findthefarmer .com, enter the lot code printed on the side of the bag, and visit with the company’s farmers and even ask them questions."

other sources:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/do_you_know_whe.php

Toy... - Land

http://www.toyotawhynot.com/#/home

(Built) Environment and Landscape used as representation of values, image and business strategy.

I love how they say it all begins with you.

wow, adjust, compromise

Battle Between Budget and Beauty, Which Budget Won

By Nicolai Ouroussoff

Published: June 8, 2009

"...Typically, a developer comes to the city with big plans. Promises are made. Serious architects are brought in. The needs of the community, like ample parkland and affordable housing, are taken into account. Editorial boards and critics, like me, praise the design for its ambition.

Eventually, the project takes on a momentum of its own. The city and state, afraid of an embarrassing public failure, feel pressured to get the project done at any cost, and begin to make concessions. Given the time such developments take to build, sometimes a decade or more, we then hit the inevitable economic downturn. The developer pleads poverty. Desperate to avoid more economic bad news, government officials cut a deal.

It’s a familiar ending, made more nauseating because we have seen it so many times before. And it can’t be solved by simply crunching numbers. It demands a profound shift in mentality. What we have now is a system in which decent architecture and the economic needs of developers are in fundamental opposition. Until that changes, there will be more Atlantic Yards in our future."

Shanty Towns

image: Jim Wilson and related article: Cities Deal With Surge in Shantytowns by Jesse McKinley

"Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns."

"Dozens of homeless men and women here have found more organized shelter at the Village of Hope, a collection of 8-by-10-foot storage sheds built by the nonprofit group Poverello House and overseen by Mr. Stack. Planted in a former junkyard behind a chain-link fence, each unit contains two cots, sleeping bags and a solar-powered light."

NYTIMES: Designing Through a Depression, by Allison Arieff

"At its heart, design is about problem-solving, but it’s also about problem-identifying. Instead of creating a need for things, designers can now focus on responding to things we do need. We may have never been confronted with as many problems as we are today; the blame for them can’t be attributed to designers, but many future solutions can — and will be."

Water Rights

In Chile, where water rights are private property and not a public resource, agricultural producers and mining companies siphon off rivers and tap scarce water supplies. Drinking water is trucked into Quillagua because the river that fed this oasis town is contaminated and all but dried up. Photo: Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Who owns the water? In chile it depends on who buys it...the rights that is. In several portions of the country one Spanish company, Endesa, owns 80% (NY Times: Chilean Town Withers in Free Market for Water).

Other countries, such as Australia and here in the Southwest US, water rights are said to be handled with more environmentally and conflict resolutions...

In my backyard, water is a commodity. My house has water rights...a value, that I could sell. And the lawsuits can be found.

"The historic water users and the large water interests of Taos Valley are now involved in what is known as the Abeyta Lawsuit. Included in this lawsuit are: Taos Pueblo, Taos Valley Acequia Association, the Town of Taos, and several mutual domestic water consumer districts. If our water existed in abundance, then the judge could have told everyone to drill deeper long ago. The long term implications for both surface and ground water use are so contentious that this lawsuit has been in court for more than 40 years.

Sources:
Taos Horse Fly: Taos County Water Supplies
Taos Pueblo

Reading:
Cadillac Desert by M. Reisner
Blue Covenant by M. Barlow
Rivers of Empire by D. Worster
Blue Gold by M. Barlow
Water Wars by D. Ward
Whoes Water Is It? by Douglas Jehl
Water Wars by Vandana Shiva
Every Drop for Sale by Jeffrey Rothfeder

American Foreclosures

Excerpts taken from article: All Boarded Up by ALEX KOTLOWITZ

"...And in December, just when local officials thought things couldn’t get worse, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, posted a record number of foreclosure filings. The number of empty houses is so staggeringly high that no one has an accurate count. The city estimates that 10,000 houses, or 1 in 13, are vacant. The county treasurer says it’s more likely 15,000..."

"...When Jimenez arrived in Cleveland, he learned that the house had been vacant for two years; scavengers had torn apart the walls to get the copper piping, ripped the sinks from the walls and removed the boiler from the basement..."

"...When they lost the house to foreclosure, they left nothing for the scavengers. They stripped their own dwelling, piling toilets, metal screen doors, kitchen cabinets, the furnace and copper pipes into a moving van. “They said, ‘Why should someone else get it?’ ” Gardner told me. “So they took it themselves.” In December, Gardner’s neighbor watched a man strain to push a cart filled with thin slabs of concrete down the street. It explained why so many of the abandoned homes in the city are without front steps, as if their legs had been knocked out from under them. Perhaps such pillage is part of the natural momentum of a city being torn apart. If you can’t hold onto something of real value, at least get your hands on something..."

"...Already places as diverse as Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas and Minneapolis have neighborhoods where at least one of every five homes stands vacant..."

“Cleveland is a bellwether,” Immergluck says. “It’s where other cities are heading because of the economic downturn.”

"...The first question outsiders now ask is, Where has everyone gone? The homeless numbers have not increased much over the past couple of years, and it appears that most of the people who lost their homes have moved in with relatives, found a rental or moved out of the city altogether. The county has lost nearly 100,000 people over the past seven years, the largest exodus in recent memory outside of New Orleans..."

"...The legislation was labeled the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, but Cleveland and a handful of other cities had to lobby hard to convince Congress that “stabilization” in their cities meant tearing down houses — not renovating them. Last month, Cleveland said it planned to use more than half of its $25.5 million allotment to raze 1,700 houses. This presents an opportunity to reimagine the city, to erase the obsolete and provide a space for the new. (There’s little money now to build, so imagine is the operative word.) ..."

The life of clothing

Artist Zoe Leonard

Within the city a number of environmental, economical, cultural flows move in and out and around. From water to the water shed, to immigration and GDP. Artist/photographer Zoe Leonard documented the life chain of clothing. The simple item, created for the material culture of America...doesn't begin here or end here. Her work almost could act as a photographic mapping of clothing.

"The project then expanded in scope as Leonard concentrated on tracing the circulation of everyday commodities, particularly secondhand clothing, as they were sold and resold in far-flung destinations. The final compilation includes images captured in Mexico City, Mexico; Kampala, Uganda; and Warsaw, Poland."
Dia Art

"...While exploring the neighborhood, she became intrigued with clothing resellers who purchased garments from thrift stores, sorted them by type and quality, and then packed them in large bales for export to Asia and Africa. In 2004, she traveled to Uganda to see how these items were distributed to their end users. Leonard also visited markets in Poland and Cuba, constructing a meandering travelogue that links images of mom-and-pop shops in New York with shots of jackets, pants and Nike T-shirts in African market stalls. A visual diary illustrating the flows of international commerce, the images also explore how objects are reassessed and reused in different contexts, raising questions of relative worth and the affluence and poverty that influence it..."
Time Out New York

Dubai Slow Down

With the global economy slowing things down, what will come of Dubai? Will it be merely a 21st century urban glitch? Will it evolve to accept the slower economy? What sort of resiliency does a place like Dubai have?

"With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield."

"Last month, local newspapers reported that Dubai was canceling 1,500 work visas every day, citing unnamed government officials. Asked about the number, Humaid bin Dimas, a spokesman for Dubai’s Labor Ministry, said he would not confirm or deny it and refused to comment further. Some say the true figure is much higher."

full article

United Arab Emirates Aid Debt-Ridden Member, Dubai