Design Edition is Bloomberg CityLab's new weekly newsletter about architecture, development and design — and the people who make buildings happen.
Subscribe ➡️
A universal basic income experiment in Stockton, California, is nearly halfway over.
How has $500 a month affected the lives of 125 random residents?
@sarahsholder
reports:
Anyone who has seen Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule Tower will remember it.
Studded with gray cubes, the striking building carries an obvious architectural message: This is a modular habitat.
It will now be demolished 🧵
1/ Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has unveiled legislation that offers billions in federal dollars for cities willing to demolish urban highways that razed or divided neighborhoods decades ago.
1/ After a local campaign pressured Airbnb to take aggressive action for the week of inauguration and FBI intelligence warned of armed demonstrations in 50 states and D.C., Airbnb announced a new policy Wednesday
“To say that a rule that requires cities to analyze segregation would ‘destroy the suburbs’ is as close as you can get to an endorsement of racial segregation without actually saying the words," said
@ShamusRoller
, executive director of the
@NHLP
We only know many of the lurid details about the massive tragedy in Tulsa because of a Black woman named Mary E. Jones Parrish.
Her book, "Events of the Tulsa Disaster," published in 1922, tells her own story along with eyewitness accounts
This election is like no other — and cities are preparing for the worst.
A number of major U.S. cities are taking steps to avoid widespread voter intimidation and civil unrest ahead of Election Day.
Almost immediately, lawmakers responded. Amendments introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would work to defund the pair of new federal regulations designed to roll back housing desegregation.
Architect Kisho Kurokawa conceived Nakagin as a prime example of Metabolism, a postwar movement that saw buildings as megastructures that could evolve and change, like an organism
2/ The financial cost of the announcement will largely fall on Airbnb, not individual hosts losing business: The company will reimburse hosts for the money they would have earned through canceled reservations.
Using cameras to monitor people looking at artwork, researchers hope that the data can help define "attraction value" for specific works of art, leading to changes in museum and gallery layout and exhibit scheduling
A phenomenon known as "white fortressing" is driving movements to form new cities and secede from majority-nonwhite regions in the US South, write
@Luisa_Godinez_P
and
@BrianDSmedley
Black neighborhoods in Chicago see more poverty, air pollution, extreme heat and flood damage, and less access to health care and food — all factors that make residents more vulnerable to the coronavirus.
Seoul is the first major city to announce that it will enter the metaverse, with plans to establish a platform for "contactless communication" by the end of 2022
A Chicago program that dispatches mental health clinicians to some 911 calls has responded to several hundred emergencies without a single use of force or arrest
A phenomenal $2.2 billion will be invested into Berlin's public transit system every year until 2035. This financial commitment should make the American public transit official weep with envy.
#citylabarchive
Last week, the Trump administration introduced a new fair housing rule that winds back desegregation requirements — and flouts the review process, setting up a legal challenge.
This has been in the works for months.
3/ "Thousands of people traveled to D.C. to attempt a violent insurrection," reads a letter to Airbnb officials from Shutdown D.C., an activist group.
"Many of the individuals involved in this attack stayed at Airbnbs and made our communities their home base for violence."
The single biggest group of Americans who bike to work live in households that earn less than $10,000 yearly, notes research scientist Anne Lusk. (from February 2019)
2/ After much speculation about emptied downtowns and the prospect of remote work, a year of
@USPS
data gives the clearest picture yet of how people moved.
Built half a century ago during Japan's dizzying ascent as an economic power, the 140-unit complex has been left behind by the times, overshadowed by taller and sleeker skyscrapers.
Once demolition officially starts April 12, the capsules will be plucked off one by one
"The fact is, the game is rigged. And it takes leadership to call that out and figure out how to un-rig this game, and hold these mega-corporations accountable." —
@rontkim
2/ President-elect Joe Biden's proposed cabinet includes at least six officials who have led municipalities or states, like Pete Buttigieg and Gina Raimondo.
That's in sharp contrast to President Trump, whose cabinet relied heavily on corporate and industry insiders.
Protests against police brutality and racism in the U.S. have sparked calls to defund police departments
Yet our analysis found that many of the largest cities are actually boosting police spending.
3/ There is no urban exodus — perhaps it's more of an urban shuffle.
Despite talk of mass moves to Florida and Texas, data shows most people who did move stayed close to where they came from.
1/ Flooding is a rising threat across the United States, with homeowners facing as much as $19 billion in damages every year.
What puts a neighborhood at high risk? Geography is key, but new data reveal another factor, too: race.
Read the report:
Most people saw him as a chronicler of food and culture. But Richard Florida writes, "I always saw him as a chronicler of cities, and a truly great urbanist."
On
#BourdainDay
, revisit
@Richard_Florida
's essay from the
#citylabarchive
:
"With the twin pandemics of racism and Covid-19, it's time for us to extend the social safety net," says Mayor
@MichaelDTubbs
, who is leading one of the first major U.S. basic income experiments in Stockton, California
Demands for police accountability, criminal justice reform and racial justice have been translated from rallying cries and protest signs into initiatives on state and local ballots.
Take any major U.S. city and you're likely to find a historically Black neighborhood demolished or cut off from the rest of the city by a highway.
The legacy of this racist transportation policy continues to define urban landscapes. [THREAD]
These new federal regulations would weaken enforcement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which requires communities that receive federal funds to undo their patterns of residential segregation.
When they were built, the capsules weren't meant to be permanent residences, but small apartments for salarymen during the country's rapid economic expansion — an affordable way to avoid hotels and long weekday commutes into the city
Major cities that have rolled out plans to protect voters include:
➡️ NYC
➡️ Chicago
➡️ Philadelphia
But questions about how smaller communities are preparing remain.
Think about that: staying quiet to avoid becoming targets.
“It says something about America right now that we have to have these conversations,” says
@BrooksRainwater
Smaller communities have seen some of the most intense violence by armed vigilantes in response to racial justice protests.
Unfounded assertions of fraud by President Donald Trump have raised the specter of such unrest.
"Something positive will come out of it," says Tatsuyuki Maeda, who owns more than 12 capsule units and spent years trying to save the building.
He plans to build a mini capsule tower by relocating the units he owns.
Read the full story by
@algebrista
:
In New Jersey, Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla has worked to redesign city intersections, install bike lanes and slow traffic. The result? Six-plus years of no pedestrian fatalities
More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, a number that is expected to rise in the aftermath of Covid-19. How did this happen?
We investigate America's urgent problem — and what can be done about it.
For more, read this essential primer on homelessness:
Georgetown isn’t the biggest or bluest city in Texas. But last year, it became the first one to convert to 100 percent renewable energy, as well as the largest U.S. city so far. Mayor Dale Ross spoke to
@ptsarahdactyl
after this week's
#ClimateTownHall
:
Despite their Metabolist form, none of the Capsule Tower's cubes were ever removed or replaced.
That's because each one was connected to the tower at two hook points plus a few bolts.
Detaching a lower box would require unhooking all the units above, a critical design flaw
In Trump’s ongoing campaign to paint racial desegregation as a bid to “abolish the suburbs,” the president is pushing a vision of suburban voters based on a dated demographic reality.
The survey registers the deepest uncertainty across the South, where in some states, more than one-third of renters and homeowners said they missed their last rent or mortgage payment. They also said they would struggle to meet their payments for August.
Amsterdam plans to systematically strip its center of parking spaces in the coming years, making way for bike lanes, sidewalks, and more trees,
@FeargusOSull
reports.
2/ The Economic Justice Act, a spending package worth over $435 billion, includes a $10 billion pilot program that would provide funds for communities to examine transit infrastructure that has divided them along racial and economic lines and potentially alter or remove them.
Copenhagen has lowered emissions by a dramatic 61 percent.
"Copenhagen shows that it is possible to rapidly decarbonize over a short period of time," says Michael Doust of
@c40cities
. "And the innovations they are applying are applicable globally."
The single biggest group of Americans who bike to work live in households that earn less than $10,000 yearly, notes research scientist Anne Lusk. (from February 2019)
But stark racial disparities still remain.
Between the end of May & the end of August, 47% of traffic stops recorded were of people identified as Black and 7% as East African.
For Mexico City's feminist activists, physical marks on public spaces are a direct confrontation with the city about what it considers more worthy of defending: city landmarks or a woman's life
9/ In the New York City region, many people who moved during the pandemic migrated to as close as the next block or the next borough over.
More Manhattanites moved to Brooklyn than moved to the entire state of Florida.
Follow this map from New York to California to learn about 12 infrastructure projects with the potential to help make cities more livable and equitable:
This thread provides a snapshot of these projects ⬇️
Why are some cities reluctant to speak about their preparations?
Perhaps because they haven’t done any, or to avoid any anti-government schemes such as the FBI-thwarted plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
3/ With the release of Biden's proposed economic stimulus package, local leaders got a glimpse of what an ally in the White House will mean.
The plan would provide $350 billion in aid to municipal governments. Such help was a major roadblock in stimulus negotiations in 2020.
Among renters alone, just over one-third said in a late-July survey that they had little to no confidence that they could make their August rent payment.
Since Floyd was killed, average rates of these stops across census tracts have plummeted below pandemic levels: an average of 70 a week from May 25 to the end of August, compared with a weekly average of 351 prior.
San Jose Mayor
@sliccardo
's proposal would require all firearm retailers in the city to record sales transactions, using audio and video, as evidence if the gun later falls into the hands of someone other than the buyer.
For Citylab,
@Richard_Florida
analyzed how metro areas voted in 2020:
🗳️ Republicans drew support from White, working-class regions of the country
🗳️ Democrats drew from smaller and denser, more affluent, highly-educated coastal metros and college towns
5/ Short-term rental operators such as Airbnb face new scrutiny in an era of pandemic parties and riot tourism. Airbnb's announcement is the latest in a series of steps it has taken since the Jan. 6 insurrection to adjust its policies.
Over 650 city planning professionals have called to reallocate some of the funds from “hyper-militarized police departments" to anti-racist planning efforts.
The vaccine is here.
With Pfizer’s expected FDA approval, shipments of the first doses to U.S. cities could begin as soon as next week.
But local authorities still have to overcome “vaccine hesitancy” among many residents
We wanted to show the relationships between these disparities, so we mapped them.
These maps are a stark illustration of the same patterns repeated over and over.
Paris’ push to replace car lanes with sidewalks, bike paths and greenery steps up a gear with plans to remodel one of the city’s busiest, most polluted thoroughfares
These disparities have long characterized Minneapolis traffic enforcement: The city is about 64% white and 19% Black or African American.
And yet year after year, more Black Minneapolitans are pulled over than white residents.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo set an audacious new benchmark in her ongoing campaign to reduce car use: a ban on most vehicle traffic crossing the city center in 2022