Cities/Architecture

Draft review of “Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226443221/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, by Eric Klinenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forthcoming in “Imprints”:http://www.imprints.org.uk/.

In the middle of July of 1995, temperatures in Chicago rose to record heights as a mass of hot, humid air settled over the city. On Thursday the 16th, the high temperature was 106 degrees Fahrenheit, or just over 41 degrees centigrade. The humidity made it feel even hotter, more like 126 degrees (52 degrees centigrade). Chicago prides itself on being “the city that works,” but during the week of the 13th to the 20th, the city’s infrastructure, its administration and its people were tested to breaking point. Like the city’s buildings and roads, Chicago’s government, police force and hospitals buckled in the heat as they tried to deal with the crisis. In the end, epidemiologists found that there had been 739 excess deaths that week. “According to emergency workers, the task [of dealing with these deaths] was equivalent to having one fatal jetliner crash per day for three consecutive days” (p8). Eric Klinenberg describes and analyzes the effects of the heat wave in this ambitious book. His goal is to produce a “social autopsy” of the disaster by looking closely at the “social organs of the city” to “identify the conditions that contributed to the deaths of so many Chicago residents that July” (p11).

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Reason Magazine “has a long piece attacking New Urbanism”:http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.st.crime.shtml co-written by an architectural liaison officer with the West Yorkshire Police and someone from the Thoreau Institute. It would be tempting to suggest the Onionesque headline:

bq. Libertarians: “World would be better if designed by the police.”

Laurence Aurbach has “a detailed rebuttal on the City Comforts site”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2005/02/correcting_the_.html .

Via “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/, a cool index of “photographs of cities”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/. Of the cities in the index, I’ve lived in “Cork”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Ireland/IRE-Cork-webshotscheryllynn121.jpg, “Tucson”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/UnitedStates/USA-AZ-Tucson-luvbride1.jpg and “Canberra”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Australia/AUS-Canberra-anueduau1.jpg, in that order. I imagine our cosmopolitan CT crowd can do better than that.

The database isn’t without its errors: “this”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Ireland/IRE-Cork-webshotstommy371.jpg claims to be Cork but is in fact “Cobh”:http://www.cork-guide.ie/cobh.htm, a town down the road that was the _Titanic’s_ “last port of call”:http://www.cobhheritage.com/index2.html.

Mira Bar-Hillel has an “interesting piece in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=old&section=current&issue=2004-09-18&id=5036 about the way in which English Heritage has undermined its own role by backing a deal not to reconstruct the Baltic Exchange in the City. I did a little googling to find out what the old building looked like and I was surprised to discover that the whole thing is up for sale in a dismantled state! Not on ebay, but on a web page of “Complete Large Buildings for Sale”:http://www.salvoweb.com/complete-buildings/forsale.html (scroll down). I happen to think that the Baltic Exchange would serve nicely as a new Crooked Timber corporate headquarters, though getting my colleagues’ agreement on location might be difficult.

This is a _colour_ photograph of Lake Windermere last Thursday afternoon! Fortunately there were other things to do and among them was a visit to “Blackwell”:http://www.blackwell.org.uk/index.shtml , the masterpiece of Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. It is a wonderful example of the Arts and Crafts Style, brilliantly conceived and stunningly decorated. It also incorporates work by other leading designers of the period, most notably William de Morgan. It is, I think, worth a very long drive to visit. We also caught the “Sickert and Freud exhibitions”:http://www.abbothall.org.uk/exhibitions/exhibitions.shtml at Abbot House in Kendal before a much sunnier trip up to Scotland. Normal blogging will resume shortly.

The Financial Times has “a profile of Jane Jacobs”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373901880&p=1012571727085 , author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067974195X/junius-20 (which I think of as a very great book indeed). Jacobs’s other works haven’t achieved as much and some of them have been pretty crazy, but she’s still at it, now aged 88. Worth a look.

I work right beside the Pont de l’Alma where Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul died in that infamous car crash. It’s a very ordinary underpass, and probably disappoints the tourists who still come to see the accident site. It’s also much too dangerous to walk into the underpass, so most visitors leave their mark on a superbly tacky and incongruous sculpture across the road. (The sculpture is a brassy looking ‘eternal flame’ meant to symbolise American-French friendship, and probably deserves a post of its own.)

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I arrived in Pasadena (from Sydney) yesterday. Or possibly today. I’m still adjusting to jetlag, driving on the right and Los Angeles in general. The view of the mountains from the hotel is beautiful, at least in the photo in the hotel guidebook. Right now the smog makes them invisible. The area around the hotel has the usual collection of dull office blocks and carpark-like structures that turn out also to be office blocks. I’ve seen three buildings so far that are more than three stories tall, face the street on at least two sides, and have no windows at all: a Bank of America, a Target, and a Macy’s. I don’t have very high expectations when it comes to urban design, but these things look like the _Simpsons_’ Springfield Mall. They might as well have “Ministry of Truth” or “Central Reprocessing” written on the side. Is Pasadena particularly bad in this respect? Or has nine months away from the U.S. been enough for me to start paying attention to this kind of thing again?

Time to compare and contrast “rejected proposals for the World Trade Center Memorial”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/submissions.html, from “prehistoric”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=089108.html to “prehensile”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=089062.html, from “schmaltz”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=089118.html to “spikes”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=832924.html, “literal minded”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=656222.html to “questioning”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=409025.html, “melted”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=350625.html to “missed the point”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=350511.html, “patriotic”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=446388.html to “flowery”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=409102.html, “amateur”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=858995.html to “amateurest”:http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=656367.html … on and on they go, all 5,201 of them.

There’s been light blogging from me over the past few days as I’ve been in “Bilbao”:http://www.bilbao.net/WebBilbaonet/home_c.jsp?idioma=c , biggest city in the Basque country and home to Frank Gehry’s wonderful “Guggenheim Museum”:http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/idioma.htm. The Guggenheim is really the main reason to visit the city and is a visual and technological marvel. The computer-generated curves link sufaces of stone, glass and most memorably titanium scales which shimmer over the bank of the Nervion river. Gehry isn’t the only architect in town, though, with Norman Foster represented by “the new Metro”:http://www.metrobilbao.net/Indicei.html which runs all the way out to the sea. Building the Guggenheim cost around US$100 million of public money but the effect has been to regenerate a decaying industrial city and put it back on the map as a tourist destination. Good to see a practical demonstration of the power of compulsory taxation and state-sponsored public works projects!

I watched “North By Northwest”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/ again last night and was struck more than I had been before by the boldly modernist style the film projects. The texture of the film is wonderful: the future we were promised and never had. The opening title-sequence in which the titles are aligned with the straight lines of an international-style skyscraper with New York taxis reflected in the windows is really striking (the Seagram building?). And Roger O. Thornhill and Eve Kendall (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) throughout project a thoroughly enviable lifestyle that is sharply at variance with other images of the 1950s. In fact the whole film (1959) has a taste of the optimistic side of the 1960s about it: the NASA–Expo 67–white-heat-of-technology–007 side. That optimistic image of the future is something I grew up with: children’s comics like Look-and-Learn painted a picture of future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes (those who weren’t travelling by monorail of course). That isn’t exactly what is happening in North by Northwest, but rather a projection of of what the future might be like if the world of North by Northwest were the present (a TV in every hotel room in 1959!). Architecture and design do the work: from that opening sequence, through the United Nations (clean, sharp lines) through the exquisite train ride from New York to Chicago, through the scene in the cafe at Mt Rushmore (such a clean Scandinavian feel) to the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house at the end. Fantastic.

Many aeons ago I posted on a controversy about crime and the new urbanism (“here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000696.html and “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000761.html ). David Sucher has “an update on that argument over at City Comforts Blog”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2004/01/welcome_to_new_.html .

I haven’t been blogging the last couple of weeks, because I and my wife have been on a belated honeymoon in Venice and Florence. For Venice, I brought along one of my favourite books, Italo Calvino’s _Invisible Cities_. Calvino’s book is a series of accounts of imaginary cities – thin cities, hidden cities, trading cities, continuous cities, cities of signs – each of which is Venice, or refers to Venice, or points to Venice by virtue of Venice’s absence. By happenstance, I also brought along “Steven Berlin Johnson’s”:http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com _Emergence_, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while. To my surprise, Johnson’s book also turns out to have a chapter that is more or less about cities of signs, and moreover uses Florence as its main example of how the city makes itself legible to its inhabitants. Johnson talks about how the organization of cities into neighborhoods, each of which may be a discrete and specialized cluster of activity, stores knowledge and makes it legible. If you are a Florentine who wishes to buy silk products, you know that you need to go to Por Santa Maria. Similarly, if you are a producer of silk, it may behove you to locate your activities close to other silk producers in Por Santa Maria, so that you may more easily exchange ideas, goods and services. In this way, neighborhoods may serve to collate, exchange, and represent information. All of this is of particular interest to me – the larger part of my Ph.D. research was on the “clustering of economic activity in Italy”:http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/farrell-knight%20Final.pdf. More importantly, Calvino’s and Johnson’s books offer refreshing and unusual vantage points on two cities which are a little stale to many tourists because of the overwhelming conventional wisdom about where you should go and what you should do.

The image of “Hogarth’s Gin Lane”:http://www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/hogarth/Decay11.html comes to mind after reading three pieces on Open Democracy on the booze culture in “England”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-4-64-1659.jsp , “Ireland”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-4-64-1660.jsp and “Scotland”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-4-64-1664.jsp . Central Bristol on a Friday and Saturday night is very much as Ken Worpole describes the centre of many British cities: full of inebriated teenagers, casual violence and, eventually, vomit. Dublin — a destination of choice for young Brits seeking to get smashed out of their brains — also has a big problem:

bq. The results of this behaviour are alarming –- doctors, from a variety of hospitals, estimate that from 15-25% of admissions to accident and emergency units in 2002 were alcohol-related. In March 2003, representatives of the medical profession highlighted some of the horrendous consequences of excessive drinking. Mary Holohan, director of the sexual assault treatment unit at the Rotunda Hospital in central Dublin, said the pattern of alcohol consumption had changed greatly. One shuddering statistic that emerged was that in the past five years there had been a four-fold increase in the number of women who had been so drunk they could not remember if they had been sexually assaulted.

That last could be a dodgy statistic (if the number rose from one to four for example) but it sounds like there’s a serious issue.