Rio - City of Splendour (1936)

An interesting video of Rio De Janeiro in 1936. It would have been been great if the short documentary had shown Rio's favelas ala the movies City of God and City of Men to show a true portrait of the city.

A New Tool for Planners?

The Global Planners Network has recently created a tool to help help future global planners assess their skill sets in dealing with the challenges of providing basic services such as sanitation, clean water, clean air and adequate health care in an increasing global urban environment.

"A ‘Self-Diagnostic Tool to Assess Planning Capacity’ has been developed by the UK’s Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and Commonwealth Association of Planners, to help planning organisations across the world to assess their capacity to respond to the challenges of urban growth.

By assessing their skills-base, organisational capacity, leadership and working methods it is hoped planning organisations will find themselves better placed to cope with the challenges that lie ahead.

To read more, click here.

Proposed Philly Skyscraper would be taller than the Empire State Building

Image of the proposed skyscraper

The Philadelphia Business Journal is reporting that a developer is proposing a 1,500 foot skyscraper on 18th and Arch Street. The new Comcast Center, which currently the city's largest skyscraper stands at 1,000 feet. Philadelphia is definitely booming with skyscrapers with several office and condo towers being built within the last fiver years and even more being proposed. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that the owners of the parcels along the south side of Market East may soon be proposing more high rise offices and condos.

Let's hope that these new skyscrapers do not continue the Curse of William Penn on the city's sports teams.

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Here is an excerpt of the article:

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"The structure is being called the American Commerce Center. It would have 1.3 million square feet of office space, a 300-room, high-end hotel and 315,000 square feet of retail space above and below street level. An underground garage would have 383 parking spaces...

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...So far, Walnut Street has lined up tenants for the retail portion, Miller said. While he declined to give specifics, Miller said a high-end home store, restaurants ranging from moderate to high end, a gourmet food store, a health club as well as a movie theater have committed. The theater, based on a new concept emerging from Australia, would have eight screens that can seat 18 to 40 people each and offer light fare, spirits and first-run movies. The hotel flag is in negotiations and would be a full-service, five-star facility."

A Dubious Distinction...the World's 25 Dirtiest Cities

Moscow, Russia

Last month, Forbes recently wrote an article about the world's dirtiest and polluted cities. Many of these cities face the same problems that European and American cities faced at the turn of the 20th centruy. The lack of planning of sanitation and sewage for booming cities in developing nations has reached near crisis mode for the general health of city residents and the environment.

Ironically the basis of city planning stems from the planning of sanitation, sewage and foul land uses to have their waste properly disposed of and placed away from the main living spaces of people. As planners, in developed nations we argue, theorize and conjecture on how to make our developed neighborhoods more walkable but we must always be aware of the city planning needs of developing nations to make city dwellers have the basic infrastructure needs to survive.
Many of the environmental hazards currently found in cities on these list could have been addressed if they were properly planned. While some developing nations may not have had the funds necessary to construct and maintain public infrastructure, I'm sure all can agree that haphazard planning has not worked in favor on the development growth of these cities.

An excerpt from the article:

"Economies suffer, too. Health care costs and lost productivity drag on business. Companies also face added costs in the form of remuneration packages when relocating employees and their families to some of these cities, noted Slagin Parakatil, senior researcher at Mercer. Cost-benefit analysis certainly suggests making progress toward cleanup. According to a study done by WaterAid, for every $1 spent on improved sanitation, the benefit equals $9 resulting from decreased cost of health care and increased productivity."

What is your opinion?

Poverty Pimping...Tour Visits of the world's slums

A tour of a favela in Rio De Janeiro

The New York Times wrote an article this week about poverty tours and whether or not that they were tourism or voyeurism. The article mentioned that there were tours in such cities as Rio De Janeiro, Johannesburg and Mumbai that all had tours to the lighted sections of their cities.

While some tourists feel that they can get the real experience of the city's culture through poverty tours, I can't help but feel that for the most part, all tourists will experience is a culture of poverty which can be a distortion of a city's real culture. Just as only visiting hotels and museums will not let you experience a city's true culture neither will visiting it's slums.

Often times, impoverished neighborhoods are not apart of the mainstream culture and have their own separate trades, economies, lifestyles and housing based out of necessity then a cultural or historical tradition.

Here's an excerpt of the article:

“Would you want people stopping outside of your front door every day, or maybe twice a day, snapping a few pictures of you and making some observations about your lifestyle?” asked David Fennell, a professor of tourism and environment at Brock University in Ontario. Slum tourism, he says, is just another example of tourism’s finding a new niche to exploit. The real purpose, he believes, is to make Westerners feel better about their station in life. “It affirms in my mind how lucky I am — or how unlucky they are,” he said.

What is your opinion of Poverty Tours?

The City of the Future

A tenemant building in Johannesburg

BusinessWeek recently ran an article about a book focusing on he ever expanding growth of mega cities called, The Endless City. The authors of the book hope that readers will view cities as sources of strength instead of isolating slums.

Here's an except of the artilce:

"The Endless City, a new book edited by the London School of Economics' Ricky Burdett and design curator Deyan Sudjic, aims to put urban expansion into perspective. The growth of cities, they argue, is not just a problem for local government agents or urban planners. Instead, urban growth is inseparable from major political and economic forces including globalization, immigration, employment, social exclusion, and sustainability (themes that track closely with the issues currently being debated in the runup to the U.S. Presidential election.)"

To read more, click here.