Modernist Urban Planning

credit to Urban Memes Crushing NIMBY Dreams

Assorted links

1. 25% of students think they are in the top 1% of social skills. 94% of professors think their work is better than their peers. The Social Psychology of Biased Self-Assessment (ht Leo Monasterio)
   
   
2. What happened when New York City (randomly) increased street lighting? Crime fell by 36% as a direct result. HT John B. Holbein ‏, who is great at finding this kind of gems by the way.
   
   
3. Sacred Spaces: a series on modernist churches' by Thibaud Poirier, HT Darran Anderson
   
   
4. Interesting report comparing housing in London , New York City, Paris and Tokyo, by Jim Gleeson. Some key results summarized in this short thread.
   
   
5. The power of a single book. Beautiful metaphor for how ideas can have real impact
   
   
6. The data that was missing in your research: an incredibly detailed 3-D maps of the lunar surface
   
   
7. Microsoft Researchers trained a neural network to analyze satellite imagery and generate the footprints of 125,192,184 building in all 50 US states. The data are available on GitHub. Great coverage in the NYT, by Tim Wallace et al.

image credit: NYT

The suburbs of Mesa, Arizona

image credit: NYT

Assorted Links

1. Government surveillance planes routinely circle over most major cities in the USA
   
   
2. Neat 3D globe animation of atmospheric flow on Earth
   
   
3. Lego versions of Brutalist buildings (via Tyler Cowen)
   
   
4. An interactive tour to Bosch's “The Garden of Earthly Delights”
   
   
5. CityBikes API Documentation, via Leo Monasterio
   
   
6. Book: Batty & Longley (1994) Fractal Cities: A Geometry of Form and Function (ht Iury Lima)
   
   
7. What's really warming the world?
   
   
8. Top speeds of elevators in eight of the world's tallest buildings. I guess this proves that procrastination has no limits
   
   
9. Data-Mining photos from the Internet to create time-lapse videos - via Achim Tack

Assorted Links

1. The domestication of Amazonia before European conquest via Leo Monasterio
   
   
2. A city of Pure imagination: great visual work of Víctor Enrich
   
   
3. Places in the US with streets named after Martin Luther King Jr via Geoff Boeing
   
   
4. paper: Based on CBA analysis, the cost of car driving in Copenhagen is more than six times higher than cycling
   
   
5. This will change your internet  porn  habits sooner than you think
   
   
6. Where the population of Europe is growing – and where it’s declining
   
   
7. The capital of Indonesia is the world's largest city without a subway. via Deden Rukmana
   
   
8. Mapping the electrification of India over the past 20 years via Tanvi Misra
   
   
9. John Lennon jams with Eric Clapton, Keith Richards & Mitch Mitchell
   
   
10. Fertility in Jpan and USA, 1947-2010 via Randy Olson
     * Bonus: It is ridiculously simple to create animated charts (.gifs) in R using gganimate

Urban Picture

the Zipper building, by Victor Enrich

[image credit: Victor Enrich]

Assorted Links

1. Large cities are less green (via Araz Taeihagh). Disputable, but very interesting.
   
   
2. Apparently, the entire human population could fit inside the Grand Canyon (via Alberto Jakob)
   
   
3. Great video: 'Where time comes from'
   
   
4. The Strange, Post-Soviet Architecture of Astana, Kazakhstan
   
   
5. Looking at evictions in San Francisco since 1997. It would be great to have a similiar map showing the WorldCup evictions in Rio
   
   
6. The scaling of human interactions with city size (via Annalee Newitz)
   
   
7. The Easter Rocket War of Vrontados
   
   
8. Fruits and Vegetables Under an MRI Scanner (via Rob Simons)
   
   
9. Amazing project using Drones, Community Mapping and 3D printers to remap Lima (via Flora Roumpani) 

Assorted links

1. Oscar Niemeyer and his buildings- Some of them are incredibly beautiful. Most of them are incredibly nonfunctional
   
   
2. After-tax income in different counties
   
   
3. Classic album covers in Google Street View – in pictures
   
   
4. Cesar A. Hidalgo explaning why we don't really have meritocracy (paper)
   
   
5. Foucault with a Full Head of Hair
   
   
6. Porn trends in the UK
   
   
7. What Does the World Eat for Breakfast?
   
   
8. Fat city: Questioning the relationship between urban sprawl and obesity
   
   
9. Mapping flows in ArcGIS, by Alasdair Rae

[image credit: Alasdair Rae]

Soundtrack: Jorge Ben

"Thinking in terms of space rather than place"

A few comments by Chris Bertram (Crooked Timber) on Brasília (ht Pedro Souza)

"As a new city, built on the red highland earth in the 1950s, Brasilia incorporates all the best town-planning theory of that era. [...] Apparently, nobody had the idea that the people staying in hotels might want to see anything other than more hotels …"

ps. The title of this post is actually a quote by Robert Hughes.

• Related Link: Brasília From Above (and here)
  
• Related Image: Brasília's Weird Traffic System

Urban Picture

Chinese Architecture, Old and New. Awesome pictures! (via Tyler Cowen)

Urban Picture

Brasília from Above (by Bento Viana)

Oscar Niemeyer passed away yesterday (obituary). He was considered as the greatest Brazilian architect of all time. He is 'author' of this beautiful building pictured above. Believe me, it is a cathedral! 

We also lost Dave Brubeck yesterday.

Related Link: Niemeyer & Kraftwerk

off-topic: Modernist Modernist Monuments

I bumped into these bizarre and still beautiful Modernist Monuments. I would say that we have something similar here in Brasília in a much smaller scale with the Crystals Square (by Burle Marx).

This reminded me of a book with fascinating photos from Frederic Chaubin depicting socialist architectural eccentricities: 

Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed 

soundtrack for the weekend: Legião Urbana

The death of Modern Architecture(?)

Is Modern architecture dead?

Pratik Mhatre (Urban Planning Blog) posted the trailer for the documentary film "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History" . Here is the Trailler (and the documentary official website):

Trailer – The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.

I didn't know of the existence of Pruitt–Igoe until this post. And now, thanks to wikipedia, I know that Pruitt–Igoe

• "was a large urban housing project first occupied in 1954 and completed in 1955 in the U.S. city of St. Louis, Missouri".
• "The complex was designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the World Trade Center towers."
• Furthermore, "The Pruitt–Igoe housing project was one of the first demolitions of modernist architecture and its destruction was claimed by postmodern architectural historian Charles Jencks to mark 'the day Modern architecture died'."

One particular point caught my attention: Pruitt–Igoe's collapse seems to be attributed exclusively to its modernist architecture. Isn't a too simplistic statement? Brasilia (a remarkable urban experiment) is doing fine so far (?is it?).

What could help us understand the different fates (failure and success) faced by modernist urban planning experiences ? [urban scale? capita income, and other sociodemographic characteristics?....]

These are some photos of Pruitt–Igoe back then.

[photo credit: Legmountain]

[photo credit: Wikipedia]

[photo credit: Wikipedia]

a few photos of Brasilia :

[photo credit: designKULTUR]

[photo credit: Prof. Frederico Holanda]

[photo credit: urbanism.org]