Cuba is such a tragedy – a prosperous and basically decent society, wrecked. The old buildings are like ancient ruins that provide hints of the accomplishment and promise that used to be.
(via Babalu)
Havana’s Deco Ruins
(via Babalu)
Urban Issues
(via Babalu)
The Trolley–A View From 1902
Jonathan’s urban planning post, and comments by Tatyana and others, reminded me of an interesting passage in Visions of Technology, by Richard Rhodes. Writing in 1902, at the dawn of the electric trolley era, Charles M Skinner recorded his impressions of that technology in an essay titled The American Will Not Live Near His Work. Some excerpts:
A Fascinating Travel/Urban Planning Website
Via Maimon Schwarzschild comes this site that offers thoughtful perspectives on important cities, without the pro-central-planning and anti-automobile biases that are often present in both travelogues and discussions of urban design:
Urban Tours by Rental Car offers perspectives on urban development obtained by automobile tours through urban areas. Rental cars are not the favored method for visiting cities, especially those outside one’s own country. Instead, tourists and urban planners favor packaged tours or local public transport systems. Both are splendid ways for seeing the city as it used to be — the very reason for most tourist visits. The historical core areas contain monuments, prime government and religious edifices and quaint neighborhoods that are often centuries old. This is particularly important to tourists from the newer urban areas of the American, Canadian or Australian West, where history extends not far before World War II. It is further understandable that few tourists travel thousands of miles to see the newer suburban areas that look very much like home. But most tourists do not profess to be students of the urban area.
For the urban planner interested in understanding the whole urban area, it is not enough to study the core alone, regardless of its architectural attractiveness, romanticism, history or affirmation of an individually preferred life style. No one, regardless of the depth of their education can develop reliable conceptions from an unrepresentative sample, and urban cores are the very essence of unrepresentative samples. Both public transport and packaged tours miss the larger part — the expanse of sprawling residential and business development that rings virtually all major urban areas. They may be of little interest to many urban planners, but they should be.
This is refreshing stuff for those of us who don’t think that automobiles are necessarily bad or that high-density living and socialized mass-transit are necessarily good. Check it out.