Why Portland’s Public Toilets Succeeded Where Others Failed

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For the residents of Portland, Ore., taking a whiz in a public toilet is not just a matter of necessity. It’s an act of civic pride.

That’s because the city is home to the Portland Loo, a unique, patented outdoor bathroom that inspires such worship in its fanbase you’d think that Steve Jobs himself had designed it. This adoration comes despite the fact that the 24-hour loo was built to be as inhospitable as possible. This toilet does not want to be loved, but in Portland, it is No. 1 (and, presumably, sometimes No. 2 as well).

[Source: The Atlantic Cities]

The design definitely solves most problems that plague the public toilet.

When Dharavi grows up, it does not want to be Shanghai

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These neighbourhoods are hives of building activity. The houses here have long passed the hutment stage and are now as pucca as your own homes, albeit in constrained conditions. Unlike most flat owners (this means you), these homes occupy a plot on the ground and rise to a height that will not get them in trouble with the BMC. They are built in RCC and brick masonry, finished with ceramic tiles, both inside and outside, are clean and largely maintenance-free. They have electricity and piped water running to their kitchens and toilets. This is clearly seen by the miles of running pipes over ground, on both sides of the streets. The roads outside their homes are paved with interlocking tiles, just like any other part of the city.

Despite this, the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) chooses to name these localities as ‘difficult’ areas, and damn them to the eternal hell of rehabilitation.



Managing cities is often more about understanding how people that live in them use the spaces where they work and live rather than imposing an outsider view of how cities should be.

[Link to FirstPost.Mumbai]

Is Your City Smart Enough?

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“Smart” cities herald a new age where information technology, not roads, buildings or bridges, will form the core infrastructure. A network of sensors, cameras, wireless devices, data centres and powerful analytics will enable the government to provide more efficient services, maintain a low carbon footprint and create an entrepreneurial environment for its citizens. Given the potential for such intelligent governance, cities with digital infrastructures are called “smart” cities. Today, there are over 125 smart city projects of varying sizes all over the world, including new cities like Songdo in South Korea and Masdar in the UAE, and existing cities like Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro.

[Link to Is Your City Smart Enough?]

Revealing Economic Terrorists: A Slumlord Conspiracy

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The EJO had been working with local tenants in run-down properties and soon started to notice some patterns. The EJO began to collect public data on the properties with the most violations. As the collected data grew in size, the EJO examined various ways they could visualize the data making it clear and understandable to all concerned. They tried various mind-mapping and organization-charting software but to no avail — the complex ties they were discovering just made the diagrams hopelessly unreadable. They turned to social network analysis [SNA] to make sense of the complex interconnectivity.

[Source: Revealing Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Conspiracy]

So it turns out that social networks do have some use beyond selling us as products.

Between the Lines

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That prized garage space or curbside spot you’ve been yearning for may be costing you—and the city—in ways you never realized. A journey into the world of parking, where meter maids are under siege, everybody’s on the take, and the tickets keep on coming

[Source: Los Angeles magazine]

I haven’t lived in an American city yet which has parking problems but I have heard that availability of a parking spot is often the deciding factor in where you live in the city. But even with an assured spot, you can still not be worry-free.

Screwing Over Urban America

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“Cities and metropolitan areas are the engines of our economy,” says Robert Puentes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metro Program. “The top 100 metropolitan areas alone claim only 12 percent of our land mass but harbor more than 65 percent of our population, 74 percent of our most educated citizens, 77 percent of our knowledge economy jobs, and 84 percent of our most recent immigrants. They also generate 75 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.”

[Source: Screwing Over Urban America]

The primary objective of the article discussing GOP’s non-preference for cities aside, the excerpt highlights the diminished role of urban centers in electoral politics. I would favor electoral policies that represent areas where most people are because isn’t that what democracy is all about?

Infrastructure in India: Infrastruggles

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For the past half decade India’s infrastructure industry has enjoyed a Sea Link moment; a blast of growth when one could imagine that the private sector could deliver all the new roads, bridges, power stations and airports that the country needs so badly. The government says the boom will continue. Over the next five years it predicts that infrastructure investment will reach a new high relative to GDP, with some $1 trillion spent, half of it by the private sector. The trouble with this rosy prediction is that the balance-sheets of many Indian infrastructure firms are as potholed as the roads they resurface.

[Source: The Economist]

After the tremendous growth India enjoyed in the past decade, hope it has something more than malls to show for.

Buffalo, Then and Now (1902-2011)

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Time has not served Buffalo well since. Fighting rapid population loss and economic stagnation, the city’s attempts to revitalize itself have resulted in swaths of surface parking and clusters of vapid office towers that impede on its radial street grid. We pulled sections from this 1902 map via the Library of Congress and compared it to current satellite imagery to see just how much has changed.

[Source: The Atlantic Cities]

Sadly, too many parking lots.