#mega-cities

[urbangeographies]

An innovative effort to keep a megacity's urban edge green.

[zakray11]

angel lecture 1 2

Angel Pre-Lecture, SeeLab, 09/2016.

[urbangeographies]

GLOBAL CITIES:  A new typology

A new report, “Redefining Global Cities,” by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program provides detailed data on the 123 largest global cities based on their metro economies, as noted recently by Richard Florida in The Atlantic City Lab (6 Oct 2016).

The report, released as part of the Global Cities Initiative (a joint project of Brookings and JP Morgan Chase), develops data on economic output, productivity, globalization (via foreign direct investment), innovation (based on patents and venture capital investment), talent (population with tertiary education), and global connectivity (via measures of airline passengers and Internet connectivity). The report uses these data to create a new typology of the seven types of global cities. The first three are the world’s leading economic power centers.

Global Giants: These are the world’s leading economic and financial centers, its foremost global cities. They include New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Osaka-Kobe.

Knowledge Capitals: These are world’s leading knowledge and tech hubs. They include 19 cities centers such as San Jose (the Silicon Valley), Boston, Seattle, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta, Portland, and Denver in the U.S. and Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Zurich in Europe.

Asian Anchors: These are Asia’s five established and rising economic power centers: Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul-Incheon, Shanghai, Beijing—and Moscow. Their ability to attract foreign direct investment makes them serious global power players despite having lower levels of economic output than the Global Giants.

In addition to the global economic powerhouses, the report identifies four other types of global cities in the U.S. and around the world which occupy the middle ranks of the world economy. Some are growing in sync with globalization, others are more challenged by it.

American Middleweights: These are 16 mid-sized U.S. metro areas, including places that are growing via connections to the global economy, including Miami and Rustbelt metros like Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, which have up until now have seen their major industries challenged by global competition.

International Middleweights: This group includes 26 mid-sized metros outside the U.S., including Toronto and Vancouver in Canada; Brussels, Rome, Milan, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and Barcelona in Europe; Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth in Australia; and Tel Aviv in the Middle East. Many of these cities are aspiring tech and knowledge hubs and serve as centers for talent, as well.

Factory China: This set includes 22 second- and third-tier Chinese cities that are manufacturing powerhouses. Even though these metros have experienced rapid growth based on export-intensive manufacturing, they remain relatively poor.

Emerging Gateways: These are 28 large global business and transportation gateways for major national and regional markets, including Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Mumbai, and Johannesburg.

[ctrychristian]

Alarm bells toll for human civilization as world's 12th largest mega-city to run out of water in just 60 days

Alarm bells toll for human civilization as world’s 12th largest mega-city to run out of water in just 60 days

(NaturalNews) The city of Sao Paulo is home to 20 million Brazilians, making it the 12th largest mega-city on a planet dominated by shortsighted humans. Shockingly, it has only 60 days of water supply remaining. The city “has about two months of guaranteed water supply remaining as it taps into the second of three emergency reserves,” reports Reuters. [1]

Technical reserves have already been…

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[raghavsapra]

Mega-regions

Mega-cities are blooming into mega-regions. More than half of all mega-cities are in Asia (list of all mega-cities), and China has the most and fastest growing mega-regions.

(For context, a dense Boston to Washington DC corridor would be a single mega-region.)

Mega-regions are a necessary progression from the mega-city, but to succeed, the region must have many complementary city centers -- very few mega-regions do. With the planning flaw, comes challenges.

A few articles on the challenges of the current designs:

China's Mega-Cities are Combining to Mega-Regions, But They're Doing It Wrong 

China's New Megalopolis Would Be Bigger Than Uruguay and More Populous Than Germany

Introducing China's Future Megalopolis: The Jing-Jin-Ji

[deeannmarie]

Showing an image of sprawled-out Mexico City,Ricky Burdett, Professor of Urban Studies, London School of Economics, told the crowd at the Innovative Metropolis conference hosted by the Brookings Institution and Washington University in St. Louis that we are now living in the era of the “endless city.” These cities are endless because they are humungous and also joining up together into megapolises, region-cities. But within the endless city, there are differences. As an example, Burdett said the average commute in Mexico City is 4 hours each way, while it’s just 11 minutes in Hong Kong. In other words, some are strained to the max and not very efficient while others work pretty well.

I found the part about Sao Paulo to truly describe a dysfunctional city. Over 1,000 people commute by helicopter in Sao Paulo, which is the same number as do in New York City and Hong Kong.

Many growing cities are chewing up their ecological functions. “Sao Paulo’s extraordinary city center has only grown outwards, pushing the poor out of the city.” The result: the edges have now been decimated, with people living in shacks right up to the city’s water reservoirs. Parks have almost all been totally consumed. The same story could be told for many other developing world cities.

The article concludes by stating, "Well-connected density is more likely to occur through tighter urban redevelopment projects than through more amorphous sprawled shapes," and that reducing distances between where people live and where people work is paramount in a city that works well.

The problem/opportunity in many cities, especially prairie cities is that there are no natural barriers that hem the city in. Higher density is confusing for folks who can travel 10 minutes to the edge of the town and watch their dog run away for three days (you know, the old saying). The flat plains do nothing to determine the limits of a city.

The point is the importance of density can be confusing for some people. It takes bold decisions by elected officials and city administration to plot a course for urban centres long-term. It also involves educating people on what a world class city can look-like and be, and also the pit-falls that other cities have experienced. No one should have to take a helicopter to get to their office in the same city, we can at least all agree on that.

[txchnologist]

Researchers Seek to Measure the Oppressiveness of Streetscapes

by Rachel Nuwer

In the urban canyons, pedestrians shuffle in shadowed gullies carved between skyscrapers. Enclosed by hundreds of stories of steel and concrete, the hapless passersby feel the buildings loom over them like dark sentries.

It may sound like a scene from Blade Runner, but some researchers are concerned that mega-cities like New York, Tokyo or Hong Kong darken more than pedestrian walkways. The built environment, some believe, may be an additional source of anxiety in an urbanite’s day-to-day life, as much as pressure from work and relationships.

At its worst, Asgrazadeh suspects that streetscape oppression may aggravate depression, overeating, diabetes, mental disorders, cardiovascular disease and suicide. But the field is in its infancy, and pilot studies investigating what, exactly, constitutes an oppressive streetscape are needed before investigating its actual consequences.

So Asgarzadeh recently teamed up with researchers from the University of Tokyo to develop a controlled environment for measuring oppression. They took images from Hongo Street in Tokyo, a passage characterized by high-rise buildings, narrow pedestrian sidewalks and rows of leafy ginkgo trees.

With the photos, they generated 3-D computer graphics, which allowed them to control for distracting factors like pedestrians and traffic and also adjust the size of the buildings, the amount of visible sky and the presence of trees. They were most interested in testing the impact of a building’s solid angle—or the measurement of how large an object appears to a street observer—and whether or not the presence of trees or sky might be able to neutralize that effect.

Tokyo seemed like a good place to start because the Japanese are perhaps the world’s foremost thinkers on apakukan, or oppression. Apakukan is a nuanced term that refers to violation of personal space, which can be manifested as claustrophobia, fear of suffocation or fear of restriction. The Japanese speak of apakukan as the experience of being packed into a crowded subway train; or pushing through bodies at a swarming Shibuya street crossing; or feeling as if the city’s high-rises are creating a low, crushing ceiling. It is this latter definition that Asgarzadeh is most interested in.

They recruited 40 University of Tokyo students and graduates to sit and view images of the buildings, then rank each scene’s oppressiveness and pleasantness according to a set of 5 questions. Their results showed that, as a building’s solid angle increased, its oppressiveness perception also significantly increased. For buildings over 30 meters, however, adding trees sharply mitigated that feeling of oppression. For buildings over 60 meters, the trees’ positive effect was even more dramatic. Even more than the presence of sky, trees are most responsible for alleviating the feeling of urban oppressiveness, the researchers concluded in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

Asgarzadeh and his colleagues don’t know why trees seem to be so important for calming our nerves, but he points out that other recent research that has highlighted nature’s important role in human health. “The more you look into built environment research, the more questions you have to answer,” he admits.

In future studies, the researchers hope to add measurements of physical stress, such as blood pressure, temperature and breathing rates. They also plan to layer on more details of urban life, like flashy signs, traffic noise and building color and texture.

For the time being, Asgarzadeh is working on a follow up study investigating whether the perception of streetscape oppression is a universal phenomenon or a uniquely Japanese disposition. “This is a very new concept, especially in the U.S.,” Asgarzadeh says. “We hope to get more attention from regulators, planners and other offices that care about people’s health.”

Obviously, the researchers know that cities can’t just stop building high-rise buildings. “We have to find a way to keep economic development growing and flourishing in a city while we also take into consideration people’s health,” Asgarzadeh says.

Top Image: Courtesy Flickr user mugley.

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science journalist who writes for venues including the New York Times, ScienceNOW and Audubon Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. She tweets @RachelNuwer.

[dwgparallels]

cItIes 0n the m0ve

Megacities on the move - Sprawl-ville from Forum for the Future on Vimeo. According to David Sims in Understanding Cairo there are roughly 53 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants in Greater Cairo compared to 95 in Tehran, 200 in Mexico City, Bangkok and 301 in Sao Paulo. One can easily expect that Cairo will inevitably be swamped with cars whose owners will expect a privileged treatment for it is clear that transportation strategies for Greater Cairo-if there are any- are biased to make the desert gated communities work.This means by consequence that these strategies are mainly serving the private car as it is the main mode of transport in these new walled towns. that is being the case while currently only 11% of Greater Cairo's population only have access to private cars and only 4% live in these desert towns! As for the remaining overwhelming majority there is a proposal to privatize the government operated public bus system. additionally the construction of the new extension of the Cairo Metro system is going increasingly slow. If the Egyptian state doesn't start on developing traffic management strategies and public transport sytems incl. dedicated busways, improving river bus systems and providing separate lanes for bicycle and motorbike riders- as this will encourage many who are eager to use this mode of transport but find it extremely difficult not to mention dangerous to manage their way through, it's expected that Cairo will go the way other mega-cities have gone were the private car rules an increasingly dysfunctional metropolis.