Free Thinking : The world
From New Delhi, writer Rana Dasgupta
All entries in this category: Future Cities
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Is The Boom In The Smaller Cities?
Look at from Newsweek earlier this year, which basically states that current growth - in population and productivity - is coming not from the established cities of the world, but from more flexible secondary cities.
Great cities like London, New York and Tokyo loom large in our imaginations. They are the places people still associate with fortune, fame and the future. They can dominate national economies, and politics. The last half century has been their era, as the number of cities with more than 10 million people grew from two to 20, as now famous names like Rio, Mexico City and Mumbai joined the list. But with all respect to the many science-fiction novelists who have envisioned a future of increasingly dominant urban giants, their day is over. The typical growth rate of the population within a megacity has slowed from more than 8 percent in the '80s to less than half that over the last five years, and their number is expected to stagnate in the next quarter century. Instead, the coming years will belong to a smaller, far humbler relation—the Second City.
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City-States And The Complexity Of The World
While I was in the Caucasus, researching my current novel, I had a number of conversations about Chechnya, and the idea of a future Chechen state. Chechen intellectuals were wondering what model would be appropriate for their country, if and when it ever found independence, peace and justice. The , this week, of , reminds us again of how far we are from such a situation. But the conversations were theoretical, and the dismal reality did not detract from them.
These thinkers were not convinced that the European idea of the nation state would be the best one for . The ways of life in the country were too varied. There were tribal communities in the country, whose legal system was based on the blood feud. The Sunni Muslim majority had elements that supported law, and others that imagined a system of liberal laws. There was no way of bringing these things together.
The only solution, therefore, was to imagine a system of local, provisional legal systems. The nation would be imagined not as a single legal zone, but one with several overlapping legal modes. This was to some extent the idea behind a .
Continue reading "City-States And The Complexity Of The World"
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The City Is Blind But It Will Not Slow Down
's video for ‘Flyover,’ the lead track on
Tank:
gives an interesting picture of London as a machinic, over-accelerated zone.
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The Architecture Of Impregnability (2)
I am indebted to Mrinalini Rajagopalan, PhD Candidate, Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, for adding the following to my earlier discussion of American architect Yamasaki.
The architecture of Yamasaki and its unfortunate dance with death has one more crucial piece that you forgot to add in your notes. He was also the well-intentioned (as always) designer of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis Missouiri, built in the late 50s. A modernist dream dedicated to social engineering, the housing project was to be the bromide that would solve racial segregation, urban poverty, lead to a brave new world...
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Images Of The Global City From China
The images that capture most interestingly the uncanny, amnesiac intensity of the contemporary global city come usually, for me, from China. Here I'll just mention two artists in this regard, but there are many others who spring to mind. One place to check out more such people is an interesting recent book, .
The image above is taken from Jia Zhangke's ("The World", 2004). The film depicts the lives of workers in a theme park outside Beijing where the world's great monuments are spectacularly recreated and where, as the park's slogan goes, you can therefore "See the world without leaving Beijing".
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Mike Davis: Planet Of Slums
One of the most important thinkers about contemporary cities is , a radical urbanist who teaches at the University of California in Irvine.
His recent book, , is essential reading for anyone who wants to get a deep sense of what the future of the global city looks like. Essentially: it is crowded, it is built by hand out of corrugated iron and other such materials, it is dominated ideologically by radical Christianity and Islam, and it is a "warehouse" for the immense labour resources of the global economy.
I've posted a detailed summary of the book's argument by Mike Davis himself . Here is an extract:
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Are We Approaching The End Of The World?
I've been struck by the almost unbroken pessimism of comments on these Free Thinking blogs. In response to John McGuirk's poignant speculations about the distant future, for instance, "Carole" wrote:
"The wheels of ignorance and evil are turning fast. And the whole world is embroiled in wars and "rumours of wars". Within our own environment, behaviour and attitudes have descended to a moral low. Unless people wake up to the fact that kindness, grace, selflessness, and moral values are the only way to create a decent society, then one can forget utopia. How very sad."
And many readers were anxious about my own descriptions of rapid modernisation in Delhi, expressing a desire that this part of the world at least be protected from the ravages of corporations and developers.
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Living With The Commonwealth Games
The Commonwealth Games will come to Delhi in 2010. This date provides a convenient target for the various authorities in charge of the city to complete major development projects.
The vast Akshardham temple has already opened on the banks of the Yamuna River, near to the site of the future Commonwealth Games Village. 100 acres of shanty housing and small-scale industrial and agricultural land were progressively taken over by the temple developers over the last decade. The pristine complex that now stands there is much better propaganda for the new India. Built to the most exacting standards by 7000 craftspeople from all over the country, the temple is huge and impossible to dismiss. If the architecture is not enough to impress the tens of thousands of visitors who arrive in 2010, its three exhibition halls offer hi-tech presentations (in several languages) of some of the highlights of Indian culture and religion.The temple is a symbol of the new city: hygienic and emptied of the organic past, monumentally modern, bristling with surveillance cameras and security, and inspired by a steely, expansionary, highly distilled ideal of Indian culture that can provide the logic and momentum for India's imagined global supremacy.
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I Have Seen The Future
Yesterday I went to Gurgaon for a day. Gurgaon is the town to the south of Delhi that has absorbed most of its overflow corporate energy. It is a new town, built for corporations and middle-classes to escape the chaotic memories of the city, and to provide enclosed modern living for the newly affluent.
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How Does It Feel To Live In A Rising Place?
Today The Guardian had a about a bungalow in Delhi selling for ?17 million.
To live in Delhi now is to be subject to the pornography of numbers. People talk about rising property prices with awe, as if they gave an objective index of their feelings.
Continue reading "How Does It Feel To Live In A Rising Place?"
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