What if in-town big box stores encourage people to drive less? That is, after all, a major policy objective of smart growth. Plenty of people who don’t want a big box store in their midst still drive 20 miles to get to one. Why not cut out those unnecessary emissions? And if you could go to a Sam’s Club once a month instead of a Safeway every week, wouldn’t that get people out of their cars more, too?
[Link to Why In-Town Big Box Stores Might Not Be As Awful As You Think]
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]
The completion of the skyline in Battery Park City comes at a crossroads moment for the neighborhood, which was conceived in 1968 by the State of New York as a way to redevelop a moribund shipping area. Trade Center dirt later filled in rotting piers, though it was not until the 1980s that construction really ramped up. Today the area has 34 residential buildings and a population of 13,000.
"We have a global icon in our backyard. The first thing people want to do when they get here is see the sign. And we're going to tell them we can't deal with them?" said Fran Reichenbach, president of the association. "We're battling elitism and a self-serving mentality we think is inappropriate."
"Jugaad" is a Hindi term referring to the ingenuity of citizens living in resource-constrained environments, a concept from which New Yorkers might derive some enlightenment. Enter Jugaad Urbanism: Resourceful Strategies for Indian Cities, an exhibition created with the help of curator Kanu Agrawal that opens at New York's Center for Architecture next week.
The exhibition is "design by the people, for the people, of Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Pune," says Agrawal, and showcases everyday innovations of slum-dwelling residents and the designers and architects who work around them.
The redesign will be in line with many new urbanism projects. There will be shops, cafes and offices connected by walkways. Storefronts will be on the first floor and residential units will occupy the top floors. There will also be a mix of cottages, multi family homes, and condos in the neighborhood as to add variety. Parking will still be present but will be hidden behind the retrofitted mall, away from the storefronts.
[Source: Mall in Utah Being Transformed into a Mixed-Use Walkable Neighborhood]
Amidst all the hype and talk about China’s oh-so-beautiful capital, little is known about entire ‘ugly’ neighborhoods hidden behind temporary walls. Would this really work in a real democracy?
Seems unlikely, eh? The Case against Homework, a book by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish explores the myth of importance of homework towards your child’s educational outcomes. I remember being piled with homework after school and threatened with completing it before going out to play so as to “stay ahead of my classmates”. I bet they were told the same in a classic game of pitting one kid against the other and watching them slowly rot away in the rat race. But does homework have any other external effect apart from harming an individual’s outlook toward life (as if that isn’t dire enough)?
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing mentions the effect of No Child Left Behind on neighborhoods and property prices:
No Child Left Behind and standardized testing not only turns your child into a slave to her test-scores, but they can even affect your property values: a school with low test-scores brings down the neighborhood property values. That means that whatever your approach to your kids, the chances are that the other parents in your neighborhood are busting their asses to get their kids great test scores, drilling them, sending them to tutors, helping them with assignments that they were meant to complete themselves. If you don’t do the same, your kids will suffer by comparison [emphases mine].
So it isn’t enough just getting in but also more important to keep fighting hard by keeping at it and how? By doing homework that in all probability is not going to make much difference in your education anyway. But it is like the rolling juggernaut that no one wishes to jump off in fear of being crushed under.
Living in cities is once again a viable option as trends of suburbanization are seen to be reversing at least in some urban areas. The inner city was long neglected and seen as a haven from poverty and crime. This was much in part to the dilapidated structures and abandoned property that resulted due to the changing economy from manufacturing to services. Industries no longer needed central city locations or simply found cheaper land outside the city due to advances in telecommunications and transportation. So they left lock stock and barrel leaving behind either contaminated lands or simply abandoned structures that the vandals took over.
Of course, the people that worked in those establishments didn’t follow the path of the retreating industries either because it wasn’t feasible or affordable to but largely because the industries no longer needed them. They found themselves to be out of a job and the poverty status wasn’t too far behind. Crime and poverty are often unwilling partners in these neglected parts and soon everyone else including the government writes them off and let them remain in these godforsaken parts of inner cities.
But things don’t remain the same as economy changes and so does attitudes and perceptions of people. It once again became hip to live in cities. At first, certain sections of the seemingly middle-class started moving back in the city. They spruced up their neighborhood a little, tried fitting in with the neighbors and soon got their friends interested in moving next door to them. The neighborhood, as they say, started gentrifying. Homes that once housed low income residents slowly began to be occupied by higher income people who moved to the city owing to low rents or property prices long suppressed either by crime, dilapidation, or simply due to the fact of being where it was.
People who moved in didn’t just move in but they fixed up their houses, cleaned the yards, and even got the government to cleanup the nearby brownfields. It doesn’t take long for the laws of economics and real estate to notice such changes. Prices start rising and so do the property prices. Unfortunately, the ones that had always lived there enduring years of poverty, crime, dilapidation suddenly find their homes to expensive to live in as the state comes calling for the increased property taxes. If you can’t afford your property taxes, why don’t you sell your homes to those nice people who would love to fix it up, says the state (or the market). Economically it makes sense but do they really want to leave? Probably they have lived there all their life, went to school there and built their childhood memories in the neighborhood. But the calling of the market is strong enough to stifle such sentiments.
The city isn’t complaining. It can finally look at the neighborhood without feeling sorry for its residents; after all they seem to have gotten a new lease of life. And of course, there is that little matter of increased tax revenue through property taxes for the city coffers. Everyone loves the new folk and like what they are doing to the neighborhood. Soon there is a Starbucks to cater to the new clientele and a wine bar is opening shortly. You hear faint music and laughter on Friday nights.
Where are the erstwhile residents, you ask? Who knows. Probably in some old-age home living their last days in peace or some other ignored neighborhood that hasn’t yet been gentrified. You never know they just might have to move once again when it is the turn of that neighborhood to be gentrified. The gentrified neighborhood sports a new look but where are the people that made it a neighborhood in the first place? Should we care about the place or the people?
Technorati Tags: gentrification, redevelopment, planning, neighborhood, community, revitalization
The Orlando Sentinel [link not available] finally reported on what most of us already know – gated communities are not any safer than non-gated communities [via Governing.com]. Although vandalism and smash-n-grab incidences were relatively lower in gated communities, home burglaries and car theft incidences were about the same. This definitely underlines the oft-cited sense of security value concept that real estate developers hobnob about. People are willing to shell out extra for that sense of protection that they are safe in their little haven even though they really aren’t.
I had always lived in gated communities in Atlanta until I moved to College Station. My personal experiences tell me that the gates were only a psychological barrier in the minds of the residents and not the potential criminal. The first community I lived in, visitors could mention any random apartment number that we were supposedly visiting and the guard would let you in. The second one was controlled by access codes that any Tom, Dick, and Harry seemed to know. Pizza delivery guys, Fedex/UPS delivery employees, local Chinese takeout guys, etc knew the code and the codes were never changed; at least the two and half years that I lived there. Anyone could easily tailgate if they were quick enough and if you could not, residents would offer their card just because you were blocking their way. If anyone happened to ram into the gate while it was in motion, it would instantly stop function and just because gate repairs are extremely expensive, they never got repaired until it was move-in season.
Gated communities thus offer only a sense of security that doesn’t seemingly exist although, the location of your community matters. It will not help installing gates on your community if your neighborhood is in a high-crime locality. What do gates do? They slow down cars and make it slightly safer for children. Honestly, I can’t think of anything else.