Hanoi: Small Business and Mobile Markets

One question that follows from the incredible mode shift detailed in the previous post is, so what happened to all of the bicycles? The cause of the mode shift was the increasing role of the market economy. The market also found use for the bicycles as, well, markets. Hanoi has an incredible number of small businesses - nearly every building's first floor is a small shop of some kind, manned by the residents who live in the stories above or even, in many cases, in the back of the shop, laying mattresses out on the showroom floor to sleep at night. These people man their storefronts from 6 or 7 in the morning until 8 or 9 at night, allowing little time to leave to shop. As a result, informal vendors throughout the City use modified bicycles as a means to efficiently role their products from storefront to storefront selling clothing, housewares, electronics, flowers, food, and everything imaginable from these slim rolling carts.

Hanoi: Transportation

The image of Vietnamese cities we construct from films and photographs is full of bicycles peacefully pedaling through the streets. However, the increasingly westernizing market economy has transformed personal mobility to a state where most people now move by motorbike. According to one study, in 1995, more than 60% of trips were made by bicycle and less than 20% by motorbike. In 2005, the numbers had switched. The Japanese International Cooperation Agency reports that in a country of 86 million people there are over 25 million motorbikes and 1.3 million cars. Despite the low rate of car ownership, the number of cars is increasing quickly as they become an increasingly important status symbol. Streets already clogged to the point that, at rush hour, roads informally become one-way streets by force of critical mass, including motorbikes traveling on sidewalks.

Hanoi: Pattern

Streets in Hanoi’s ancient quarter are named for the trade – blacksmith street, silk street, fish soup street, etc – that was historically performed there, and many streets still have only one trade in shop after shop for the entirety of a block. Though some streets maintain their historic vocation, many have changed to sell plastic toys, hinges and door handles, etc. Just as each street has a long history of a specific trade, many of the surrounding villages that have long been part of the City's economic network and have now been absorbed into the city’s new perimeter host not only residential development, but also specialize in one specific trade such as bottle sorting and recycling, chicken and duck feather cleaning and sorting (the above street is a few inches deep in drying feathers), vermicelli noodle making, pottery, tailoring.

Hanoi: Rapid Urbanization

Perhaps the most notable change in Hanoi, a 1,000 year old city, has been the rapid physical growth. Buildings, even in the historic Ancient and French Quarters, have grown quickly upward and inward, as floors have been added and new buildings have been constructed over historic courtyards, yards, and anywhere there was space (the photo above shows a retail infill structure added to an older French villa). At the citywide scale, in 2008 the City expanded its boundaries to encompass villages and green areas in the periphery to allow for urbanization around the edges of the City. Farms near the adjacent urban areas were purchased to allow the construction of New Urban Areas (NUAs). The NUAs are huge residential and office projects, many in the hundreds of hectares, with some commercial mixed use components.

Hanoi: Globalization

Since 1986, when the communist government of Vietnam began Doi Moi, the process of opening the country to economic markets, change has come at an accelerating pace. In particular, the last 10 years have seen immense growth and change as industrialization and modernization have been the mantra of government in an attempt to follow in the footsteps of China to the north. As growing middle and upper classes have come to demand new and bigger homes, first motorbikes then cars, and global consumer products, the landscape of and life in Hanoi have changed dramatically.

From the field: Letters home

Just a reminder that detailed "Letters Home," written by me with help from students, about each country are online at http://ihp.edu/page/lettershome/#ct. Also, a slideshow of student photos and captions about their experience in Brazil are compiled into a short slideshow/gallery at http://goo.gl/mSpq.

Still just Detroit and Sao Paulo/Curitiba, but Cape Town should be online soon!

And now, on to Hanoi, Vietnam. This is going to be fun!

Cape Town: Mega-Events - The good

This mural celebrating the 2010 FIFA World Cup is not in South Africa, but on a house in a favela in Sao Paulo. Though the event was a financial debacle for Cape Town, as described in a previous post, it was an enormous public relations and image success both in Cape Town and abroad. People in Cape Town recounted partying in the streets, late into the night, with people of all colors and ages - no small statement in a country where people are afraid of their shadows and can't be seen at night due to a terrifyingly real violent crime problem - and claimed to feel a new sense of pride in their country and countrymen. And while a boom in tourist dollars is still an unrealized hope, the global awareness and goodwill are real, and have a benefit that will be hard to measure, but I've certainly heard expressed in many countries in the past months.

Cape Town: Mega-Events - The bad

The 2010 FIFA World Cup was held in South Africa, necessitating the upgrade and construction of new stadiums across the country. Scenic though it is, Cape Town's Green Point stadium was both the most expensive to build, and will be the most expensive to manage, as well as hardest to book. Though Cape Town had two other stadiums that could have been upgraded, by account of City officials, FIFA strong-armed the City into building the Green Point stadium rather than using stadiums in poor, more dangerous and less scenic locales. Once the world cup was over and the haze of the party had worn off, the City found that the management company hired to book and run events and pay on-going operational and maintenance costs bailed out, leaving the City with a huge liability it couldn't afford and couldn't use because of its cost - what is known as a white elephant. Recent Olympics hosts have found themselves with the same problem - all hoping to recreate the "Barcelona Effect," they overspend their capital budgets only to find themselves with fond memories and a painful operational budget.

Cape Town: Service Delivery

As detailed in the last couple of posts, the constitutional mandate for housing has erupted into really difficult politics. Similarly, the politics of service delivery, based on a right to basic services like water, sewage, energy and waste removal have ignited rioting and anger toward government. As government intends grander investments in growing residential areas, there has been a major effort to provide these basic services in the meantime. Unequal, slow in coming, and often below expectations, these services have arrived, but people still feel angry. A Special Report in The Economist on South Africa last spring ended with an article that referenced Alexis de Tocqueville's quote from On Democracy, Revolution and Society, that "generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways....Patiently endured for so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds." In other words, revolution comes not when nothing is expected, but when something promised is not delivered to expectation.

Cape Town: The Politics of Free Housing (part II)

As the government has built homes, the politics of who gets homes, where and when have resulted in anger and even violence. The N2 gateway project, shown above, was built when settlers living in shacks on the edge of the black township of Langa, in an area called Joe Slovo, were removed in exchange for the promise of homes. When the homes were complete, those who had been displaced were told that the price of the homes would be far higher than promised - a price no shack-dwelling family could afford - and so they remained in the "temporary" settlement they had been removed to, 20 kilometers from friends and family, 20 kilometers further from potential jobs in Cape Town, and in the arid desert flats. When the remaining inhabitants of Joe Slovo protested by marching 30,000 people into the adjacent highway to stop traffic, they were repeatedly teargassed and shot with rubber bullets and their shacks were destroyed. But they stayed, and many court cases and 2 years later, the government has said these houses are for the people of Joe Slovo, but the bank who owns them, still gets to recoup its money - so there is a stalemate. People without adequate housing live around the edges of beautiful new homes they can't afford, but no one else is allowed, while the bank continues to lose money, and the government continues to lose credibility. How is this good for anyone?

Cape Town: The Politics of Free Housing (part I)

After Apartheid ended in 1994, people of all colors - previously restricted to only certain places where they were born, assigned or worked - were free to move about the country again. Many moved to the townships on the edges of cities from the arid "homelands" they had arbitrarily been assigned when removed from nicer areas over the preceding 50 years. The cities were where husbands were, job prospects existed, and where the government would presumably build the new homes that the poor were promised under the new constitution. Over 16 years, the national government has built over 2.6 million homes, but it is not nearly enough to account for all of the shacks that have spring up around cities. But tension rises with demand and expectations.

Cape Town: Working Waterfront

Cape Town's waterfront is extensive and is perhaps the City's foremost tourist destination, but what is really unique is how the working elements of the harbor, like the drydocks shown above, are seamlessly woven into the publicly accessible tourist areas. Three Leading Hotels of the World properties, at least three high-end shopping malls, and countless restaurants, souvenir shops, and tourist cruises are scattered throughout the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. Sitting at restaurants you watch barges and cranes come and go. Walking the piers you see fishing boats coming in to drop their daily catch. From $500+ per night hotel rooms and multimillion dollar apartments you have a gorgeous view of the ocean or Table Mountain, with a boat repair facility in the foreground. And this isn't just cutesy remnants of olden days; rather, gritty industrial business is still thriving in the middle of this high value real estate. In most other waterfront cities around the world, new residential and commercial construction displaces the industrial trades to faraway edges or more blue collar towns, but in Cape Town, there is a very intentional mix that creates a really fascinating place to walk around day after day.

Cape Town: Ecosystem Services - Environmental Resources, Threat, Protection and Priorities

Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region are home to an endemic plant kingdom - that is to say, the entirety of one of the world's six plant kingdom is wholly contained within this region. The are boasts the richest plant species biodiversity, in species per unit area, in the world, with roughly four times more species per square kilometer than even the Brazilian rain forest according to a sign on Table Mountain. However, in a region with intense pressures of housing development (to provide adequate shelter for the millions without as a result of historic structural violence described previously) and limited resources, preserving rare plant species is a tough investment to prioritize. UNESCO has designated the Cape Floral Region a world heritage site to help. Local planners have turned to the ecosystem services approach to build justification and a rationalized prioritization system for saving species. The logic of ecosystem services is that the function of the ecosystem, not just its individual components, provides services of immeasurable value. Individual plants and even species may be lost so long as overall diversity, health and function are maintained. Still, its a tough trade-off, but would be an even tougher loss.

Cape Town: The Good and Bad of Natural Factors

Cape Town's city center is a crescent shaped waterfront that climbs the gentle slopes at the bottom of table mountain, which creates a natural bowl, protected on all sides with extensive waterfront. That's about as ideal a natural location for a city as it gets: the mountain provides protection and natural beauty, springs provide natural fresh water from the mountain, development is protected from high seas (and sea level rise, for the most part) by the slope up to the mountain, and the waterfront seems disproportionately extensive - a huge economic boon. So while natural factors can provide so much, they can also be used for ill, as they long were in Cape Town during South Africa's Apartheid era. From 1946 to 1994, insidious laws separated people by skin color for the purpose of economic and educational opportunity, and natural factors were used to segregate people physically. White people got to live in the city center, black and colored were relegated to the low-lying flats on the far side of the mountain where they were far from jobs and in flood-prone lands. The implications of this kind of segregation - for economic opportunity, education, access to jobs and services - are a truly evil kind of structural violence that was perpetrated on people for nearly 50 years, and has deeply-ingrained repercussions today.

Detroit, Sao Paulo and Cape Town - Detail from the field

Detailed "Letters Home" that I've written from Detroit and Sao Paulo are online at http://ihp.edu/page/lettershome/#ct - the Cape Town letter will be online within the next week or two. In these letters I include a number of images from our travels, and detail on what the IHP student group that I am traveling with has been studying, exploring, learning and questioning as we go. If you'd like more detail on my travels and the IHP Cities in the 21st Century program and fellowship, check there! http://ihp.edu/page/lettershome/#ct

Sao Paulo: More reuse and sustainability

Plaza Victor Civitas is an educational project that demonstrates a number of urban sustainability strategies on the site of an old waste incinerator. A restored and reused building currently hosts a history and environmental museum - detailing the past and problems of waste incineration on the site - and will soon include a cafe and art gallery. The surrounding grounds have structures made of sustainably harvested wood, rainwater collection and treatment, solar and wind energy harvesting, a composting facility, and a range of gardens growing plants for phytormediation of the toxic grounds (plants that break-down the toxic remnants of the site's past stored in its soil) and biofuels. The signage throughout the plaza is incredibly well done, providing a basic overview of each issue and how it impacts the City on a larger scale, as well as how the various strategies work to address local, citywide, and global environmental problems.

Rio de Janeiro: Creative Adaptive Reuse

The bar Rio Scenarium in Rio de Janeiro's historic Lapa district is a combination of three historic structures and the contents of many others that create a unique creative clutter of antiques and an amazing atmosphere. The walls and ceilings are covered with thoughtful collections of antiques - a wall of teapots, a ceiling of parasol umbrellas, and an old apothecaries shop moved into the building in its entirety to serve as a cocktail bar. Its an amazing experience to wander from room to room and seamlessly from building to building pondering the collections while live music comes from various corners - a pretty happening way to look at history!

Curitiba: Efficient Reuse of Space

One of Curitiba's other widely replicated practices is its innovative creation and use of open space and brownfield (polluted former industrial site) reuse. The above image (courtesy of Ben Hejkal, www.benhejkal.com) is of UniLivre - the free university of the environment - which is an environmental education center and park in a former rock quarry. The site was reforested with native vegetation, and in the footprint of the quarry operations building a tower of treehouse-like classrooms was built, with a spiraling ramp encircling the classrooms to an amazing lookout point at the top of the quarry. The construction used old telephone poles from around the City, which the public utility was replacing with concrete, as structural elements. This iconic park is just one of many creative environmental spaces in Curitiba. Parks, including others in former quarries, floodplains, and other environmentally sensitive areas, throughout the City function as amphitheaters and play spaces while ensuring that sensitive areas are protected from development, and useful and attractive to the public.

Curitiba: Design for Pedestrians

Faced with auto traffic challenges, Jaime Lerner decided that the City could never (affordably and sustainably) continue to change to serve traffic. Instead he decided the City should be for people (see the TED Video about Lerner, in an earlier post, where he explains how the car is like a mother-in-law) and the solution to the problems of cars was to limit them to where they were appropriate rather than transform the entire City to accommodate them. In the 1970s, Curitiba turned the downtown Rua de los Flores into a pedestrian street over the course of a weekend: open to traffic friday, closed for construction over the weekend, and complete by Monday morning commute hour. To ensure cars wouldn't drive there Monday, hundreds of school kids were brought to the street to chalk and make art in the public space throughout the day, showing how seriously the City believed that it had transformed the street into a place for people. To this day, it remains a success, as a destination for tourists and locals, and a great location for any business.

Curitiba: Bus Rapid Transit

One of Curitiba's most replicated innovations is Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). BRT takes buses and gives them a few design advantages so that they operate like light rail, but at about 1/20th the construction cost. BRT uses dedicated center lanes to avoid traffic, has signal priority (signals turn green as buses approach to let the buses move faster than cars); at stops, passengers have already walked up a few steps and pre-paid in order to quickly board the bus so it can continue on its way. Finally, the buses look different, use different stations, and special branding, maps, and other information so people know they are different and people think of them as special and better than a normal bus, avoiding the stigma of common buses. In Curitiba, this has worked for the most part. Despite that a lot of the middle and upper class still think of BRT as a bus, and despite that Curitiba has the highest per capita rate of car ownership in Brazil (according to Ariagne dos Santos Reyes, Jaime Lerner Architects), there is still shockingly little congestion, traffic, and per capita VMT (the wonky measure of car use). The City moves smoothly, efficiently, and transportation planners around the world seek to replicate BRT.

Curitiba: Leadership

(From http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jaime_lerner_sings_of_the_city.html)

The first question in regards to many of the things we learned about Curitiba's innovation was, "how was this possible?" and the answer, frequently, began with mention of the visionary leadership of Jaime Lerner. Lerner is an architect and urban planner who was mayor of the City in the 1970s, and later governor of the state, under the military government of the 1970s and 80s. He not only saw problems in a multi-disciplinary way, but had the power to implement creative solutions quickly. The video above details some of the general approach. Most memorable are lines like "creativity begins when you take a 0 off your budget," his insistence that you have to work fast, and his focus on simple solutions. In the more democratic and process-based planning of the United States and of Brazil today, some of these solutions simply wouldn't be possible. We cannot, for example, decide on a Friday to close a major downtown street, repave it over the weekend, and have it open as a pedestrian mall, closed to vehicles forever, on Monday morning. But many of the challenges of slim budgets and the need for creative, simple and elegant solutions are familiar today. While I don't think anyone wants a military government, we can appreciate letting the experts do their job. As a result of his leadership and significant changes, Curitiba today has an astoundingly consistent rate of public approval of quality of life in the City, and a strong sense of pride in their government and place.

Curitiba: Model of sustainability

(graphic courtesy of Ariadne dos Santo Daher, Jaime Lerner Architecture)

Curitiba is a model of urban-scale sustainability in a number of regards. The photo and graphic illustrate the macro-scale planning that organizes the City around a series of "structural axes" where density and activity are concentrated. High frequency and relatively high speed busses travel these axes, stopping at transportation hubs and nodes of activity where City services are dispersed throughout the City to "citizenship centers." In subsequent posts, I will explore how innovations in areas like transport, waste management, governance, parks and infrastructure (especially stormwater management) are integrated with this network.

Sao Paulo: Security and Transportation

Sao Paulo has a shocking amount of helicopter traffic. According to numerous accounts by lecturers and a documentary called Manda Bala, it has the world's largest fleet of private helicopters. Robbery and kidnapping are considered major threats to the wealthy in a city with very high income disparity and close proximity of wealthy neighborhoods to poor. In their vehicles on public streets is when people consider themselves most exposed, as they can otherwise avoid public spaces. As such, industries like car bulletproofing, private security, and helicopter transport are thriving. Private helicopter transport is fascinating, because it allows those who can afford it to simply travel in their own space - still public space, mind you - entirely undisturbed by the threatening, and general, public. Throughout the city, the architecture of large office, industrial and residential buildings, as well as numerous small heliports, reflect this unique transportation security consideration in the urban landscape.

Sao Paulo: Historic Reuse and Public Benefit

The above images are of a former factory reused as a cultural center - SESQ Pompilias - that includes a library, exhibit space, indoor playfields and swimming pools. SESQ is a nationwide network of cultural spaces, funded by a small tax on service industries and intended for the use of service employees and their families, that in Sao Paulo has invested in rehabilitation of historic buildings for a number of their sites. The SESQ Pompilias is a beautiful space outside and in - featuring a historic alley connecting the various facilities and a stunning open space with water features in the floor and beautiful pane glass windows and some ceilings that provide warm natural light and open for ventilation on a nice day. Old buildings are often easier and cheaper to knock down and replace, but buildings like this remind me of the value of saving historic spaces, as this space has character, warmth, comfort and elegant simplicity that are hard to create in a modern building.

Sao Paulo: Consumer Culture and the Privatization of Public Space

Throughout past travels in Latin America I've found shopping malls are increasingly the most vibrant spaces in cities. Crowds of people young and old throng the aisles of malls while surrounding streets and old commercial districts are quiet. The price of goods in shopping malls is often shocking compared to stores selling comparable goods outside. Safety, air conditioning, and status are apparently worth it. But what does this mean for public space that people choose to promenade the escalators and aisles of malls as opposed to the stairs and plazas of the public city?

Sao Paulo: Video Surveillance and Security

(Translation: Sorry! You are being filmed)

Video surveillance is seemingly everywhere in Sao Paulo - in every building lobby, elevator, transit station, restaurant, etc - and abundant (apologetic) signs remind you of it. In 1996, Wired magazine ran an article entitled The Transparent Society (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html) that explored two cities of the future (2016 - no longer so far away) that relied on such video technology for security: one in which small cameras nested everywhere were controlled by the police, the other in which the same network of small cameras was accessible to the public. Sao Paulo, is yet a third scenario - where video feeds are only available to the private security or management of each particular organization or institution. In the US we fear "Big Brother" and the idea of other people watching us, but we don't mind at all the video surveillance in stores, restaurants, highways, etc so long as it is not centralized. But the Wired article brings up a good point - as long as so much is being filmed, wouldn't we be better off if something in the public interest was being done with it? Many Americans shudder at the idea of being watched, tracked, etc by a central authority or by the stranger around the corner, but why aren't we bothered by the private digital eyes? As long as so much is being filmed, as it is in Sao Paulo, where surveillance seems inescapable, shouldn't we embrace it (with appropriate regulation on transparency, etc) as a means to improve public safety? smooth traffic flow? collect better data?

Sao Paulo: Changing Attitudes Toward Transit

To begin to solve the traffic problem, the City decided it was time for a MAJOR investment in transit. In addition to more buses, dedicated bus lanes, a unified fare system with simple transfers between bus and metro, it was time to upgrade the aging metro system built in the 1970s.

In 1995, the Plan Integrado de Transporte Urbano (PITU) changed spending priorities and public perception. They City now splits transportation money 50/50 between transit and roads (compare to roughly 80/20 in the US for cars/other modes). The goal of PITU is to increase the subway network by 1000% over 25 years. This is achievable thanks to the relatively low cost conversion of freight rail lines, but the bigger challenge is that of changing public opinion. To that end, the City has launched major add campaigns aimed at changing habits and has seen enormous changes in public opinion each year according to surveys. Keeping trains clean, safe, running on time, and very easy to pay for and transfer between has been key to changing the public perception of transit so that the large middle class will choose to leave their cars at home.

Sao Paulo: TRAFFIC

By all accounts, traffic in Sao Paulo has gotten worse and worse as the population has grown both in number and in prosperity. From personal experience on a couple of trips, it is pretty painful. It is estimated that an average of 850 new cars are added to the roads of Sao Paulo every day. The number one complaint of many Paulistas is the traffic. While dedicated bus lanes, a growing metro system and constantly improving transit mean taking transit is typically faster, even commuting by transit still takes over an hour each way, every day, for most.

Sao Paulo: Lack of Urban Environmental Awareness

Sao Paulo is a bit of an unexpected city - it's not a port or at the confluence of major rivers, and grew only because businesses elsewhere had to move goods through it and immigrants had to pass through. As a result, its a city of 20 million people with a really diverse backgrounds and interests, who all ended up there for work and a home, and so urbanization at full speed and intensity was the norm - few parks, few trees, little open space. The rivers that existed were seen as nothing but good places to put sewage, trash, roads and freeways. As a result, the rivers are disgustingly polluted, can be smelled from far away, and are an absolute afterthought.

Detroit, Mi: Rightsizing

(image courtesy of Dan Pitera, Detroit Collaborative Design Center)

Detroit covers an immense area, but now at about 40% of its population of 60 years ago, some areas are still fairly full of people, while others are fairly empty. The concept of "right-sizing" the City - ending service delivery and investment in some areas to focus on those that are salvageable - permeates almost every conversation and is a key element of many people's solutions to various problems. But how can a city cut out huge areas of land, and what happens to those areas? Like ghost towns left behind a mining bust, will Detroit be left with ghost neighborhoods? Will these areas revert to open space or be turned over to big agriculture for corn and soy farming? What about the people and businesses in the areas left out of the right size? And most importantly, what new opportunities could this mean for both the areas in and outside the boundaries of the right size?

Detroit, Mi: Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink

(aka, the problem of capital versus operational funding)

The two buildings on the block are both Cass Technical High School - in the foreground the newly built school building, in the background the abandoned one with windows shattered and blinds and blackboards slowly falling from the walls where they were left. At the same time Detroit is shutting down schools and struggling to pay for critical programs because of major funding shortages, they are building many (roughly 20?) new schools. Similarly, they are laying out billions of dollars for a new light rail line while they are cutting bus service all over the City and only a year ago almost cut weekend bus service entirely, a lifeline service for many who work on the weekends. We too easily will outlay huge amounts for new things (capital funding) when we can barely afford (or can't) to keep up those we already have (operational funding). Interesting institutional/governmental parallel to our consumer spending habits?

Detroit, Mi: Entrepreneurship - Low Barriers to Entry

(the above image is of salvaged sinks turned into a fountain on the patio of a small restaurant in the quickly growing mid-town area, where many young people are starting businesses)

· We had a really inspiring panel on entrepreneurship in Detroit and came away with a sense of why young people were attracted to this City – there is so much opportunity to easily start a business or test an idea within the limits of a huge City but with few barriers to entry. A store or restaurant can be started with little start-up capital, a new business idea can have an office for almost nothing and immense institutional support, and social ideas can find armies of volunteers yet all the while the cost of rent, living and services are low, employees are plentiful, and opportunities for impact are immense.

Detroit, Mi: (Truly) Urban Design

Harmonie (sic) Park was recently completely redesigned and rebuilt in the center of Detroit's growing arts and entertainment district, with a uniquely modern and context-appropriate element: sound. The park has people eating, playing cards, chatting etc in it throughout the day, and frequently people playing music and reading poetry. What makes this little urban plaza really interesting is that it is wired with a nice PA system with 15 speakers stashed in the plants around the park (see detail, below), that when not in use by local musicians, is playing jazz - surprisingly unique and very appropriate amenity for an urban park at the center of an entertainment district!

Detroit, Mi: Hope in Downtown

In a City where the population has declined from 2+ million to (+/-)750,000, there are still a lot of people in the City - roughly as many as San Francisco or Boston - and over 3 million in the metro area who might work in the City. Though dispersed, that population offers an amazing opportunity to support a thriving city. The City, business community, philanthropy and non-profits are working on a wide ranging and long-term strategic framework for what happens next, but the last decade or two seem to have focused on downtown development. The downtown has a wealth of impressive historic buildings, an accessible waterfront, little traffic, and a lot of publicly-owned space. The Campus Martius, above, is a plaza at the literal heart of the City with cafe's, regular entertainment events, that was developed in tandem with new office buildings in the early 2000's, that turned a wide expanse of concrete in the middle of a massive intersection into a usable space for office workers and downtown residents.

Detroit, Mi: City Service Delivery (or not) and Collaborative Solutions

The human flight from Detroit exemplifies a collective action problem for those who remain: the (+/-)750,000 remaining residents in a City with scale and infrastructure for 2+ million can't sufficiently be served by police, fire, public lighting, trash collection and other such standard services because the scale of the infrastructure can't be sustained by the tax base. As a result neighborhood groups have to organize their own snow-plowing in winter, and, as shown in the image above, the residents on one side of the street have set up their own street lighting.

Detroit, Mi: Flight of capital - economic, human and otherwise

Detroit's hard times started more than half a century ago, when the City's population began to decline in the early 1950's. Not due to school segregation and race riots of the 1960's, as many believe, though those issues certainly sped the flight, but due to a variety of factors ranging from housing to industrial to national security policy that prioritized the regional dispersal of housing and industry. From its peak of over 2.2 million people, the City now has less than 800,000, not to mention an unemployment rate somewhere near 50%, in an area the size of San Francisco, Manhattan and Boston combined.

(the above image was created by Dan Pitera, University of Detroit Mercy/Detroit Collaborative Design Center)

It's hard, faced with such dire images and statistics, to remember that the City still has a significant population, wealth of buildings, land and resources, and as a result a lot of opportunities for creative solutions to find incredible resources. Examples will follow in subsequent posts.

Switzerland - multimodal transportation

The Swiss bike network is comprehensive, safe, and incredible. What's impressive is how they have mixed logging/fire/gravel/dirt roads with highways, small local roads, and even infrastructure rights-of-way to make a highly reliable network. As shown, a water pipe over a bridge makes a good reason to build a ped/bike bridge across the river gorge.

Switzerland - resource efficiency

The lochs from Thunersee (lake Thun) exemplify Swiss water management. Switzerland generates about 60% of its energy from hydroelectric sources, and realizes about 90% of their potential hydroelectric energy generation potential. Pretty incredible!

Switzerland - waste management

The garbage can says "for taxed garbage only" - the Swiss have the highest rate of composting and recycling as a nation, and charge for garbage collection by standardizing the cost of garbage bags, and charging a highly taxed rate for the bags. They also charge for plastic bags at the super market, thus creating incentives to decrease the amount of waste people generate.

Switzerland - Commitment to Environmental quality

The swiss load long haul trucks onto trains to decrease the environmental impact of goods movement. Fascinating how the equation changes when you consider scale!

The power of local activism (Boston, Ma)

In the late 1960s, the Federal Government, State of Massachusetts and City of Boston were planning to build a highway through Boston's South End, destroying historic homes and the community on either side. Local activists organized to fight the highway, and instead the 1970s and early '80s were spent building a 4.7 mile underground transit corridor with a continuous park corridor above. This image is of the sensory garden, an outdoor space at a school for disabled children. The corridor also includes bike paths, community gardens, playing courts, dog parks, and other community amenities.

Leaving (temporarily at first)

A few thoughts on first leaving San Francisco

Greatness is not in where we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but sail we must, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

-Sir Oliver Wendell Holmes

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am, a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your life for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still here. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

-Edward Abbey

Stay Tuned!

Hello friends and acquaintances!

Thanks for checking in. Until my travels begin, this space will largely remain empty, but stay tuned! While there will be some posts from Switzerland, starting in August I'll have regular updates with images and brief text vignettes from around the world.

In the meantime, here is my travel schedule:

June 12-16: Los Angeles

June 18-24: Boston for fellowship meetings

June 25-27: NYC for Manna Project Board Retreat

June 30-August 20: Switzerland

August 21-September 5: Detroit

September 5-October 10: Brazil

October 10-November 15: South Africa

November 16-December 18: Vietnam

I will also be posting my international phone numbers in each country once I have them.

Keep your eyes out for photos as they start to come in!

Greg

PS - Bonus points to those of you who caught the Steinbeck reference in the title.