Status Updates From Metropolis. Город как велич...

“ Faced with a future of superstorms, the vast impermeable concrete layering of modern cities and suburbs has made them unable to absorb excess water. Chicago, Berlin and Shanghai are learning (or relearning) how to mimic natural hydrology as an urgent flood-prevention tactic. Trees are vital because they are capable of absorbing large amounts of water.”

“ Animals behave very differently in cities. Those species that can adapt to a totally different environment thrive. These are known as synanthropic species—ones that benefit from association with human populations.”

“… despite the increase in mammalian hunters and avian raptors, the populations of small animals and birds they prey upon also increase. This is known as the urban “predation paradox.” Enjoying a superabundance of food left by humans, they turn their attention away from small mammals and birds’ nests towards picnic sites, bins and roadkill.”

“ Low-density urban sprawl, automobile-centric cities and the everyday lifestyles that go with it are the product of cheap oil, and utterly dependent upon it. It is therefore a finite metropolitan form. But in the meantime, car-dependence has made the modern city an engine of poisoning smog, environmental fragmentation and climate change.”

“ In Britain, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere the picture was similar: the decaying inner city became the home of immigrant communities as their middle- and working-class communities trekked out to more salubrious suburbs, satellite towns and planned new towns.”

“ The American suburbs, with their distinctive look and feel, were not the manifestation of national taste or individual choices; they were largely the creation of the state. Founded in the wake of the Great Depression, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) provided billions of dollars insuring the mortgage market.”

“… real-estate agents and mortgage brokers directed them towards the ideal FHA home, which was typically in a new out-of-town development. The reason suburbia exploded in the 1950s was because the government wanted it to, and subsidised it with billions of dollars.”

“ The British and Americans have never taken to cities in the way that people in Asia or continental Europe did. The tendency has been to seek to escape from the city as soon as one could, pushing instinctively for the rural fringe. The ability to do so depended on wealth.”

“High-rise housing and multi-lane roads tore out the best defence against inner-city poverty—the street-based community…these concrete slabs in the Bronx became infested with crime gangs and drug-dealing. Already scarred by housing projects, poverty and unemployment, the Bronx was hit by a wave of arson in the 1970s as landlords burnt their low-value tenements in order to claim the insurance money.”

“ The Germans entered and occupied Warsaw on 1 October. On the 15th the city was handed over to the Nazi colonial administration, headed by Heinrich Himmler.[7] In a war against urban life, the Nazis tore the heart out of the city, systematically stripping it of its cultural, political and economic significance and suppressing ordinary citizens in a campaign of terror.”

“ Long before the German invasion of Poland, plans had been drawn up for converting Warsaw into a Nazi model city for 130,000 Aryan Germans. It would have wooden-framed medieval houses and narrow streets, set in extensive parkland. Relegated to a suburb on the east bank of the Vistula would be the only Poles allowed, 80,000 slaves to minister to their German overlords.”

“ What had happened to Shanghai in 1937 was the fulfilment of fears that had been building up since the end of the First World War. Novels, films, defence reports, military strategists, academic theses and urban planners had become obsessed with the fate of cities in the next war.”

“ The people of Warsaw were deliberately reduced to a slave population in preparation for the eventual demolition of their city.”

“ Aspirations and financial power—not to say virility—are firmly connected to skyscrapers, to offices and luxury apartments with expansive views, to the photogenic qualities of a city.”

“ The hijacking of the city by speculative finance turned New York into a volatile zone. Skyscrapers built in the 1880s and ’90s were already being torn down by the 1900s and 1910s to make way for bigger, better and more profitable versions.”

“ In December 1852, Napoleon declared himself emperor. Now, with absolute power, he could put his vision into motion without political constraint. Within days of Haussmann’s appointment the emperor showed him a map of Paris, with wide, straight new boulevards marked over the medieval street plan, the arteries that would pump life into decaying Paris.”

“ The true glory of Paris was not its physical appearance, but the use its human population made of it; the theatricality of the streets—a “landscape built of sheer life”—made it the most seductive city on the planet and the holy grail for tourists. “

“ Only when they walked the Rue de Rivoli, the Tuileries, the Boulevard des Italiens and the Place de la Révolution did tourists discover, wedged into the ugly, congested, ramshackle medieval city, “a new world of ultra-civilised” urban living unobtainable anywhere else on the planet.”

“ Inhospitable and lacking infrastructure, slums call upon their inhabitants to be among the most resourceful and toughest people on the planet. As a result, they are places of startling energy and entrepreneurialism. One of Asia’s largest slums—Dharavi in Mumbai, home to nearly 1 million people squeezed into 520 acres of land—has an internal economy of $1 billion a year.”

“ Manchester and Chicago were the “shock cities” of the nineteenth century. They heralded, it appeared, not only the Industrial but the Urban Revolution. As such, they were avidly studied to divine humanity’s future.”

“ Like Manchester, Chicago’s cityscape, with its ribbons of railroad tracks radiating from the city and tangle of telegraph lines, its monumental grain elevators and lumberyards, its noisome stockyards, steel mills and factory chimneys, was nineteenth-century industrialism made manifest.”

“ Whereas bourgeois Parisians and other urbanites in dense European cities lived in apartments in the city centre, their London peers were suburbanites. Continental cafés were part of the social life of compact European cities. During the nineteenth century London re-formed around modern transport. Railways, horse-buses, trams and the underground allowed people to settle farther from the centre.”

“ As Henry James astutely noted, the absence of pavement cafés in London in the 1880s was the telltale sign of a society with a rigid class system. Gentlemen drank coffee; but they did so in the comfortable and secluded environs of their clubs. The poor drank the black stuff from barrows and stalls on the way to work.”

“ Destroyed by fire in 1666, the City of London that rose from the ashes was unlike any city that had been before. Densely populated and inordinately wealthy, it was Babylon reborn, a bewildering monster of a place beset by swarms of people and incessant traffic.”

“Amsterdam was an imperial metropolis, built on the wealth streaming in from Asia, Africa and the Americas….There are few great squares, bombastic statues, grand boulevards, palaces or imposing buildings on the scale of, say, a Rome or a Lisbon. Amsterdamers preferred a liveable and planned city—one of regular, neat streets, elegant bridges, advanced street lighting and convenient canals.”

“… the revolution occurring in Amsterdam was truly mind-blowing. Contemporary visitors puzzled why a small waterlogged city could become so rich and powerful so quickly. The answer had a lot to do with the city itself. The ethos of the city was moneymaking and the removal of obstacles to its fulfilment. Religious persecution was bad for business; free discussion and political liberties were good for it.”

“…at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the flow of goods transformed Amsterdam into a leviathan. Exiles from Antwerp brought with them large amounts of capital, but also sophisticated financial techniques…The Amsterdamsche Wisselbank (Amsterdam Exchange Bank), founded in 1609, invented many of the things we take for granted in modern banking…”