URBLOG

Living off the land

  China becomes an urban nation at breakneck speed. With the government seeking to increase domestic demand, places like Guiyang are at the heart of its urbanisation strategy.

'Beijing may drive urbanisation, but it does not control it. The results are often messy, chaotic and unanticipated.'

China's rural poor left stranded as urbanites race ahead

As workers leave the countryside in the hope of better pay, the communities they leave behind face increasing poverty.

China's incomes are increasingly polarised. This large income gap is definitely a contributor in the background to the more frequent and violent protests and unrest in the last few months.

'For every one yuan of a rural resident's income, a city-dweller enjoys 3.23 yuan in disposable income – and that may significantly understate the gap. Include the extra services and benefits enjoyed by urbanites, such as subsidised housing, and "many observers believe that the ratio would easily be in the range of four to five and is arguably among the highest in the world."'

 

URBANIZED - London screening

Urbanized is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.

Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? Unlike many other fields of design, cities aren’t created by any one specialist or expert. There are many contributors to urban change, including ordinary citizens who can have a great impact improving the cities in which they live. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized frames a global discussion on the future of cities. 

LONDON SCREENING

October 21
Sheikh Zayed Theatre, London School of Economics
6:30pm. Special Screening and post-film discussion with director Gary Hustwit and cast members Ricky Burdett (LSE Cities/Urban Age), Alejandro Aravena (architect, Elemental) and more TBA.

 

 

Campaign to boost cycling in Beijing

BICYCLES are the solution in Beijing

After wrestling for years with Beijing's appalling traffic and pollution problems, city planners have come up with a distinctly old-fashioned solution: bicycles.

 

Urban Population Trends

URBAN POPULATION GRAPH

Orginal Guardian data blog

Urbanization is, to be sure, still manifested in the continues massive expansion of cities, city-regions, and mega-city-regions,   it equally entails the ongoing socio-spatial transformation of  diverse, less densely agglomerated settlement spaces that are, through constantly thickening inter-urban and inter-metropolitan infrastructural networks, being even more interlinked to the major urban centres. We are witnessing, in short, nothing less than the intensification  and extension of  the urbanization process at all spatial scales and across the entire surface of planetary space.

Neil Brenner     ‘What is critical urban theory’ in CITY 13/2-3 June- September2009 p. 205

 

In Britain's dockland mirror, China is sailing into view

Tristram Hunt in The Guardian

Emblems first of empire, then post-industrial drift and rampant capitalism, London's docks are now in hock to a new power. [...] This unbecoming location on the Isle of Dogs has always told us a broader truth about the condition of Britain. In the Victorian era, the docks symbolised the prosperity and progress of empire.

Canary Wharf, an icon of modern capitalism, is now a totem of state-funded corporatism. The docks that once played host to the British empire and housed the finance titans of US imperialism are now in hock to a new power rising in the east.

LSE Autumn Public Lectures

Events open to the LSE community and the public

 

Tuesday 6 October, 6.30-8pm

Bringing the Penal State Back In

SPEAKER: Professor Loïc Wacquant

 

Monday 19 October, 6.30-8pm

Beijing Inside Out: Caochangdi

SPEAKERS: Robert Mangurian, Mary-Ann Ray

 

Tuesday 10 November, 6.30-8pm

 The First Legacy Games: the physical and

socio-economic transformation of East London

SPEAKERS: Andrew Altman, Councillor Paul Brickell,  Ricky Burdett

 

Tuesday 17 November, 6.30-8pmC

Cities, Design and Climate Change

SPEAKERS: Professor Saskia Sassen, Professor Richard Sennett

Politics, recession and China in Africa

Will the gains of Africa's economic revival be completely lost?

Will the world recession return African economies to their knees? Not if China has anything to do with it. This is one friendship that stands to flourish through the hard times.

Most Africans play no part in their country's politics, apart from (if they are lucky) voting once every few years. But there is one group that governments have to take into account - the urban poor. These people are vulnerable to the smallest shifts in the cost of living and can take to the streets and cause headaches for those in power. When politics breaks down, they provide the foot soldiers for Africa's wars. When prices of food and fuel shot up last year, riots broke out in several African cities.

Jenkins on Dubai (and Detroit)

As they did Ozymandias, the dunes will reclaim the soaring folly of Dubai

Hovering over Dubai is a cloud called nemesis.

"I can only imagine that Dubai will one day be seen as a punctuation mark on the architectural follies of the past half century. This off-the-shelf city state has been built on laundering the profits of oil, drugs, arms and western aid."

Digital divide persists but decreasing slightly

ITU’s new ICT Development Index (IDI) compares developments in information and communication technologies (ICT) in 154 countries over a five-year period from 2002 to 2007. The Index combines 11 indicators into a single measure that can be used as a benchmarking tool globally, regionally and at the country level. These are related to ICT access, use and skills, such as households with a computer the number of Internet users; and literacy levels.

Developing countries drive explosion in global mobile phone use The Guardian

Revolving buildings: the new shape of things

Darmstadt and Dubai present the extreme possibilities of contemporary living. In the first, a small town south of Frankfurt, you find the Passivhaus Institut. Since 1996, it has been experimenting with the ultimate in environmentally intelligent building design. [...] Architecture, they used to say, is frozen music. In Darmstadt and Dubai, the extreme possibilities seem to be a solemn fugue or a drunken samba. Maybe the real future will have a different soundtrack.