Metropolis

Expo Magic of the White City, 1893 Chicago Worlds Fair

White City, a feature length film about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair released in 2005 and narrated by Gene Wilder.

The White City - Built to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America, a "White City" with structures resembling the great marble columns of Rome resides at its unlikely home - a reclaimed swamp in Chicago. On May 1, 1893, over 300,000 people gather at the site for the World's Columbian Exposition opening. No crowd of this size has ever before assembled in one place in the United States.

Will Africa soon become an Urban Continent?

According to the Economist, maybe so...

"…Africa is still something of a demographic outlier compared with the rest of the developing world. Long berated (or loved) as the sleepiest continent, it has now become the fastest-growing and fastest-urbanising one. Its population has grown from 110m in 1850 to 1 billion today. Its fertility rate is still high: the average woman born today can expect to have five children in her child-bearing years, compared with just 1.7 in East Asia. Barring catastrophe, Africa’s population will reach 2 billion by 2050. To get a sense of this kind of increase, consider that in 1950 there were two Europeans for every African; by 2050, on present trends, there will be two Africans for every European (see chart 1).

…One African in two is a child. The numbers are such that traditional ways of caring for children in extended families and communities are breaking down…

…Africa’s rate of urbanisation is the fastest the world has ever seen, says Anna Tibaijuka, the head of Habitat, the UN agency responsible for urban development. In 1950 only Alexandria and Cairo exceeded 1m people. When the city rush is done, Africa may have 80 cities with more than 1m people, plus a cluster of megacities headed by Kinshasa, Lagos and Cairo—none of which show signs of mass starvation. Intermediary towns of 50,000-100,000 people will soak up most of those coming from the countryside. Urbanisation is part of the solution to Africa’s demographic problems, not a manifestation of them."

The biggest question I have is whether African cities will adopt city planning methods to strategically plan and control growth and not let new development grow haphazardly as seen in other developing nations. There are several urban locales in South and Southeast Asia that have dense populations of 1 million people or more but they hard to define as cities. They appear to be more of a collection of dense high rise developments or communities that all function independently of each other. The same can be said of many current African cities today. Hopefully small African cities now that are expected to explode in population can implement plans now before they become overrun with major developments.

Another question I have for anyone to answer is how will Africa becoming a more urban continent change your perception of the continent?

The Jetsons and New Urbanism

The Jetsons in Orbit City

The other day I was reading an article about how Dubai planners wants to employ New Urbanist principles for new developments. I couldn’t help but think that Dubai, a skyscraper wonderland, reminded me of Orbit City, the fictional futuristic utopian city from the cartoon show, The Jetsons. Both cities are made up of super-tall skyscrapers surrounded by “highways” (Orbit City’s highway was in the sky). Neither city had much a street life and residents were forced to take singe-serving transit to get their most basic needs. The cities also featured a high-tech, upper middle class or luxury lifestyle that excluded the working class. While Dubai had transient shantytowns for all their construction workers and the working class, the Jetsons entirely replaced low paying jobs with robots. Although I always wondered if there was some Orbit City housing project just out of view…or did the poor live on the ground while the rich lived in the sky.

Dubai in the clouds

As a city planner, the most striking thing about these two cities in their quest to become futuristic utopias is there lack of advancement in human connection and planning. How ironic is it that the creators of The Jetsons created a technologically advanced society that innovated everything except human interaction with each other and the places they live. When it came to concepts such as building to human scale and livability, Orbit City was based on a 1960’s planning construct of highways and separate land uses. So while the physical tasks of everyday life had become advanced in Orbit city, human development had not.

One would think that future real life utopias would be more advanced in their planning for human scale and place greater emphasis on how people live versus how we travel and accomplish tasks. Sadly are new utopias are still being planned off the same 1960’s construct of sporadic dense development along highways with no consideration for public transit. For as spectacular and glamorous as Dubai is, the city is not walkable and lacks grand pedestrian streets and boulevards that are full of life, activity and vitality. Just like Orbit City, the best way to view and experience the grandeur of Dubai is from afar.

The proposed Spire Tower in Dubai. The Spire would be almost a mile tall.

The irony for Dubai is that it is located near the cradle of all civilization where the first towns and cities of the world were developed. 3,000 thousand years later, the awe-inspiring futuristic city is now trying to employ some of the same developmental principles of the region’s past ancient cities.

In fiction and in reality, technology cannot advance how we plan and regulate our cities. Technology can help us plan more efficiently and construct buildings faster and quicker then ever before but it can not advance human interaction…in most cases it only diminished interaction. For all the great gadgets that Elroy Jetson had, he had no park to play with his dog. No matter how advanced we become as a society in out communications system, our healthcare system or any other system, technology can not advance a walk to a local grocery store from your house or a stroll in a park in your neighborhood. The Jetsons may have had everything they wanted…except a real community.

Whites to become minority in U.S. by 2050

A Febraury 11, 2008 AP article showed by 2050 Non-Hispanic whites will make up only 47% of the population and the Latino population, who will be responsible for 60 percent of the population growth until 2050, will account for 29% of the population. The Asian population is expected to nearly double and the Black population is expected to remain stable at 13%.

To read the entire article, click here.

As America is becoming more urbanized it is also interesting to see if also becoming moee diverse. It will be interesting to see whether population diversity will translate into have diverse viewpoints on space, land uses, density and housing structures. Different cultures have different ideologies on how they utilize space and housing structures. For example a large immigrant population may desire to have housing with multiple bedrooms or may require to live near public transit.

What is your opinion? Do you believe, future immigrant populations coming to American cities will assimilate to current design standards or do you believe they may have an effect in changing development and zoning codes to adapt to their cultural norms?

Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition

Shanghai, China one of the fastest growing cities in the world displays it's past city planning history and future with their new museum, the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition. While Shanghai maybe not the first city people think of for city planning history but for a city that plans to triple their metro lines in eight years, build 12 towns in the suburbs and host a World Expo in 2010, the city is definitely on the cutting edge of planning.

The Exhibition has five floors that detail the ambitious plans of Shanghai's urban planners. Visitors are provided with a glimpse of how Shanghai will look like in a couple of decades. The centerpiece on the third floor is a huge model of the city as it is now.

For an article and video about the Exhibition, click this link.

So what is your opinion? Would you like to see an Urban Planning Museum in your city? And if you did, what exhibits would you like to see?

I Am Legend...Visions of a Post-Apocaluptic Tokyo

Motoda Hisaharu’s Neo-Ruin series of lithographs depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where familiar landscapes in the central districts of Ginza, Shibuya, and Asakusa are reduced to ruins and the streets eerily devoid of humans. The weeds that have sprouted from the fissures in the ground seem to be the only living organisms. “In ‘Neo-Ruins’, I wanted to capture both a sense of the world’s past and of the world’s future,” he explains.











































































Motoda’s view of the future at first seems nihilistic, but the proliferation of plant life in the ruined streets seems to suggest that there are other ways for the plant to survive even after our great cities have fallen.

Magic Highway USA

Great City Planning Documentaries

The City, Parts I, II (1939)
A documentary which pleas for less development in the inner city while promoting what we call today, urban sprawl.
http://www.archive.org/details/CityTheP1939
http://www.archive.org/details/CityTheP1939_2

A Place to Live (1948)
This documentary was about slum clearance in Philadelphia. For any who has lived in Philadelphia, you will get a kick out of the new upscale housing project known as "The Richard Allen Housing Projects." These projects were some of the worse projects in the country. They were eventually torn down in 1999.
http://www.archive.org/details/PlacetoL1948_2

The Dynamic American City (1956)
A 1950's documentary which is advocating the removal of blighted neighborhoods through Urban Renewal.
http://www.archive.org/details/DynamicA1956_2

Community Growth & Crisis (1959)
Every Planner should watch this film. This is a documentary about homebuilders decrying unplanned urban sprawl. Their solution? Planned Unit Developments, Cluster Zoning, Flexible zoning controls and Pro Land Use laws... if only we had listened
http://www.archive.org/details/Communit1959

Detroit: City on the Move (1965)
And after the King riots in 1968, the city residents were on the move to the suburbs. Such high hopes for the city in the mid 1960's. Has there been a major American city that has fallen harder than Detroit?
http://www.archive.org/details/DetroitC1965