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New Orleans to remove prominent Confederate statues and monuments

Statues to Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis will be removed.

Source: www.businessinsider.com

I find issues such as these endlessly fascinating because it the cultural politics behind the shaping of the landscape are so evident. The cultural landscape clearly isn’t just an innocent reflection of the society, but is actively constructed and contested.  Some, including the NOLA mayor, claim that it isn’t political, but preserving or reconfiguring a place’s public cultural heritage is always political.

 

Tags: monuments, New Orleans, the South,  urban, architecture, landscape.

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Investing in Monumental Architecture

City Hall in Philadelphia is a fantastic example of using architecture to create civic pride by investing in iconic, public buildings. Monumental architecture helps to create a sense of place and communal identity. This building has open air access, making the public feel that this is more their building.”

Source: www.instagram.com

Question to Ponder: Is it “worth it” for government’s to invest taxpayer dollars on ornate architecture? 

 

Tags: space, monuments, urban, architecture, place, landscape.

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Sprawling Shanghai

If you could go back in time to the 1980s, you would find a city that is drastically different than today’s Shanghai.

Source: earthobservatory.nasa.gov

This series of seven satellite images shows how quickly the economic development of China has impacted the urban sprawl of China’s biggest cities.  Pictures of the downtown area’s growth are impressive, but these aerial images show the full magnitude of the change. 

 

Tags: urban, remote sensing, megacities, China, urban ecology.

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Urban world: Meeting the demographic challenge in cities

The days of easy growth in the world’s cities are over, and how they respond to demographic shifts will influence their prosperity.

Source: www.mckinsey.com

Some cities throughout Africa and Asia have experienced spectacular growth.  Europe, on the other isn’t see the same level of growth and is even experiencing urban decline in a few regions. 

 

Questions to Ponder: What patterns do you see in these maps?  What cultural, demographic and economic factors explain some of the regional patterns in these maps?        

 

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City lights quiz: can you identify these world cities from space?

Astronauts on the International Space Station took these images of cities at night. Note that up doesn’t necessarily mean north. All images: ESA/NASA

Source: www.theguardian.com

I’m a sucker for online quizzes like this.  Here is another quiz that shows only the grid outlines of particular cities.  This isn’t just about knowing a city, but also identifying regional and urban patterns.  What are some other fun trivia quizzes?  GeoGuessr is one of the more addictive quizzes  where 5 locations in GoogleMaps “StreetView” are shown and you have to guess where.  Smarty Pins is a fun game on Google Maps that tests players’ geography and trivia skills.  In this Starbucks game you have to recognized the shape of the city, major street patterns and the economic patterns just to name a few (this is one way to make the urban model more relevant).  If you want quizzes with more direct applicability in the classroom, click here for online regional quizzes.         

 

Tags: urban, models, fun, trivia.

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Battle Cry for the Bodega

Why the chainification of the corner store is a bigger deal than losing book stores and record stores combined.

 

The term Bodega originally referred to a neighborhood grocery in a mostly Spanish-speaking part of town, it has come to be used (in my experience) to cover just about any independently owned small grocer in the city. The fear is that the corporate behemoth (7-Eleven) will destroy the neighborhood bodega, a New York institution of long standing. The quintessential bodega is a beloved part of the fabric of the city.  The outcry has been loudest in the East Village, a neighborhood that despite gentrification still prides itself on its countercultural attitude and grimy authenticity.

Source: www.citylab.com

When we discuss food deserts, we typically think about places that lack supermarkets.  In an urban context, the places that often fill this void are the bodegas.  In some major cities, these are going away as chains like 7-Eleven want to expand their reach and squeeze out these independent grocers. However you view this issue, “There’s no denying that the texture of the city would be flattened if the idiosyncratic bodega became an endangered species.”

 

Tags: food, urban, poverty, place, socioeconomic, food desert.

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Death toll doubles in Ethiopia garbage dump collapse

“The death toll from a collapse at a landfill outside Ethiopia’s capital has risen sharply to 113, an Addis Ababa city official said Wednesday, as the country began three days of mourning for victims who were mostly women and children. Saturday’s collapse of a mountain of garbage buried makeshift mud-and-stick homes inside the Koshe landfill on the outskirts of the capital.”

Source: www.cbsnews.com

Some geographies are uncomfortable to discuss because they expose some of the social and spatial inequalities that we wish weren’t part of economic geographies.

 

Questions to Ponder: Why did this happen?  Why were so many people in the landfill?  

 

Tags: Ethiopia, Africa, development, urban, poverty, squatter.

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The Most Popular Running Routes in the 20 Biggest U.S. Metro Areas

These are the top running routes in the 20 biggest metro areas in the United States, according to Strava data.

Source: www.runnersworld.com

I’m a big advocate of running/mapping apps for my own personal training (I use Map My Run and Strava).  These maps were created with raw data from Strava to show the most popular urban runs in the US.   Prominent on this list are urban parks, scenic waterfronts, and retrofitted railways…in other words, successful urban planning that has help to foster a strong sense of place.

    

Tags: urban, place, neighborhood, planning, urbanism.

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Mexico City, Parched and Sinking, Faces a Water Crisis

“A host of environmental factors are threatening to push a crowded capital toward a breaking point.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

Urban ecology, environmental justice, gendered inequities, primate city politics, the struggle of growing megacities…it’s all here in this fantastic piece of investigative reporting.  The article highlights the ecological problems that Mexico City faces (high-altitude exacerbates air pollution, interior drainage worsens water pollution, limited aquifers that are overworked lead to subsidence, importing water outside of the basin requires enormous amounts of energy, etc.).  just because the article doesn’t use the word ‘geography’ doesn’t mean that it isn’t incredibly geographic. All of these problems are at the heart of human-environmental nexus of 21st century urbanization. 

   

Tags: urban, megacities, water, environment, Mexico.

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