When animals become an urban problem

Reuters. Feral cat in Beijing. From theatlanticcities.com

I´ve been writing about animals in the city, specially about our pigeons´ plague in Buenos Aires, a nightmare because of the diseases they carry with them. And they are really lovely....

Seven years ago, I was reading at L.A. Times on the squirrels in California mountains, one of the journalists was declaring himself a killer of squirrels, given they ate his subterranean cables, ate the trash, ate everything they could find at his home. They are beautiful, but they are a kind of rat, right?

At the same time, I was reading about ravens in southern CA. I see them everywhere here, being friends with seagulls. Main reason for all these animals reproduction: food, in the alleys, lots of food.

Another animal in SoCal which wasn´t urban but now is ¨friendly¨ with humans: the coyote. ¨Friendly¨ at a certain point, because they eat pets. People call the Sanitary department, whichever, City Hall, Health Department, Pest control, Animal control, ....and the answer is always the same: if the animal is not dangerous for humans, what can they do? Of course, you´d never leave your baby or kid outdoor, alone, in danger of meeting a coyote.

Today, I was reading about feral cats in Beijing. And please, note the difference. Feral is not a synonymous of ¨stray¨. A stray one could be an abandoned or lost domestic cat. Feral means ¨wild¨ with all the implications of the word.

A popular and brazen coyote that was frequently seen cavorting and hunting in close proximity to people at Huntington Beach's Central Park was euthanized on June 21. This photo was taken by Dawn Macheca of Huntington Beach about two weeks before the animal was darted and then put down by O.C. Animal Control.

From http://www.ocregister.com/news/coyotes-234973-coyote-city.html

Can people live with so many animals around? It was a problem of consideration in Medieval Times: ¨In the twelfth century, half the householders of Paris kept pigs which roamed the streets in search of provender. As unofficial refuse collectors, they were invaluable, tut they tended to trip up pedestrians and tangle up traffic. After the heir to the throne had fractured his skull when a pig ran between his horse´s legs, an edict was issued that there should be no more pig-rearing in towns.¨

http://myriammahiques.blogspot.com/2011/01/animals-in-mediaeval-streets-of-london.html

Believe it or not, we still have this animal issue, let´s see what happens in Beijing with (thousands, millions???) feral cats:

Beijing has never been overly sympathetic to the plight of stray cats, famously rounding up thousands of the creatures – both feral and abandoned – in preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics (it also shut down factories, shipped homeless people away, and limited the number of cars driving into the city). It’s still not clear whether those cats were euthanized or simply died from disease in shelters, but they were gone.

Four years later, the cats are back. The Chinese are deep into a love affair with domestic animals, creatures that they are reluctant to spay or neuter, says Mary Peng, co-founder of the International Center for Veterinary Services in Beijing. Perhaps it’s a small act of resistance in a country that limits the reproductive rights of its human population, but China does not have the tradition of neutering pets that pet owners in the United States take for granted. And just one female cat can have as many as three or four litters a year, ultimately adding another 100 cats to the feral population in its lifetime.

Peng, a Chinese-American native New Yorker who has lived in Beijing for the last 20 years, has taken on the mission of convincing Beijing’s residents that the best solution to the feral cat population is a program called “trap, neuter, release,” or TNR. The philosophy behind the program is that trapping the animals, fixing them so that they can’t reproduce, and then returning them to their established colony is a better solution than exterminating cats or trying to find them domestic homes.

But the program is controversial. Some ecologists argue that feral cats are so terrible for urban ecosystems, capable of killing off whole species of native wildlife, that they really ought to be euthanized. And groups like the Audubon Society claim that TNR has not proven to be effective in eliminating the population of feral cats anywhere.

Read the article in full:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/02/beijings-feral-cat-problem-comes-back-vengeance/1328/

Grants Open Spaces Sacred Places: The Healing Power of Nature

The TKF Foundation announces the final phase of the Open Spaces Sacred Places (OSSP) National Awards Program. The program was enacted in 2 phases, a Planning Grant Phase, now closed, and an open call for proposals. Final Awards will fund development of significant new sacred public green spaces in urban settings that demonstrate a combination of high quality design-build and rigorous research about user impacts. The total remaining funding pool is $4 million. Funding will be provided to cross-disciplinary teams that are able to 1) conceptualize, plan, design and implement an open and sacred green space, 2) conduct associated research study(ies), and 3) communicate scientific findings. TKF seeks to identify projects replicable in their intent. Projects should also be generalizable in the challenges they address to serve as potential archetypes for urban areas across the U.S.

Read more:

http://www.opensacred.org/grants

Cubans hit on real estate market

A house in Cuba. Picture by Jose Goitia. NYTimes

A few years ago, I asked a Cuban lady (friend of a friend) how was the real estate market in Cuba and which was the process to sell a house. And she said, you don´t sell a house, there is a system of interchange, you live in a house and then you agree with another person to trade his house for yours, of course the value has to match, but there are another ways, something else you can offer as a bonus, maybe it becomes an interesting deal. Nevertheless, private investments for tourists were increasing.

Today, I´ve read about the new possibilities of buying, selling and remodeling properties, it sounds as good news for me.

From the New York Times on line:

¨All over the capital and in many provincial towns, Cubans are beginning to inject money into the island’s ragged real estate, spurred by government measures to stimulate construction and a new law that allows them to trade property for the first time in 50 years.

The measures are President Raúl Castro’s biggest maneuver yet as he strives to get capital flowing on the island, encourage private enterprise and take pressure off the economically crippled state.

For decades, the government banned real estate sales and kept a jealous grip on construction. Materials were scarce, red tape endless and inspectors meddlesome. Black marketeers would deliver cinder blocks by cover of darkness, and purchasing a bag of sand was a furtive process akin to buying drugs.

But during the past two months the state has reduced paperwork, stocked construction stores, legalized private contractors and begun offering homeowners subsidies and credits.

On many streets, the chip of hammers and gritty slosh of cement mixing rises above the sparse traffic as Cubans paint facades, build extensions or gut old houses. Still, it is generally small-scale stuff (....) Behind scruffy porticos and walls of bougainvillea, the wheels of the property trade are turning. Unofficial brokers — who are still outlawed in Cuba — say they have never been so busy, trawling the streets and the Internet for leads and fielding calls from prospective buyers.

Cubisima, an online classified service, said the number of hits on its real estate page tripled to an average of 900 per day after the new property law took effect on Nov. 10. The law allows Cubans to buy and sell their houses, and even own a second home outside the cities, though it still bars most foreigners from buying.

It is a crude market, where househunters rely on word of mouth and prices are based as much on excitement as on any clear sense of property values, according to interviews with homeowners, brokers and experts.¨

Read the article in full:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/world/americas/real-estate-fever-spreads-in-cuba.html?_r=1

Looking at the ribbed vault of a Gothic Cathedral. Mirando la bóveda de nervaduras de una catedral gótica

It´s an artistic representation, of course this is not structurally exactly like a ribbed vault. 

¨The intersection of two or three barrel vaults produces a rib vault or ribbed vault when they are edged with an armature of piped masonry often carved in decorative patterns; compare groin vault, an older form of vault construction. While the mechanics of the weight of a groin vault and its transmission outwards to the supporting pillars remained as it had been, the new use of rib vaults demonstrates the skill of the masons and the grandeur of the new ideas circulating at the introduction of Gothic architecture in the end of the eleventh century.¨

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rib_vault

Looking at the ribbed vault of a Gothic Cathedral by Myriam B. Mahiques is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

" Culture, mind and brain.Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" Interdisciplinary conference

Katherine Sherwood, Vesalius' Pump, 2006.

UCLA Los Angeles. October 19-20 2012

Highlights emerging concepts, methods, and applications in the study of culture, mind, brain, with attention to cutting-edge research, the context in which methods are used, and the collaborations that advance interdisciplinary training.

Organized by: The Foundation for Psychocultural Research

Read more:

http://www.thefpr.org/conference2012/index.php

Fractal urban tissue. A simulation

Order and chaos in a digital simulation. Woods and parks mixed in the fractal urban tissue.

Fractal urban tissue. A simulation by Myriam B. Mahiques is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Metabolism, the City of the Future. The exhibition at the Mori Art Museum

Kenzo Tange´s Yamanashi Culture Hall

From NYTimes magazine on line:

“Metabolism, the City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan” (September 17, 2011 – January 15, 2012) was a sprawling introduction to the Metabolism architecture movement of the 1960s and ’70s. It was the first exhibition organized at the Mori Art Museum (one of Tokyo’s two most prominent contemporary art institutions) since the March 2011 disaster, and as such illustrated an avant-garde yet pervasive facet of the country’s long history of building and rebuilding. The Metabolism Group was founded in 1960 (some of its members are still at work today) on the belief that architecture should emulate organic life and allow for continual growth and change. Sustainability and scale were paramount and they channeled these values not through a lens of austerity but of sci-fi dreams.

The projects chronicled in the exhibition attempted to express harmony with much more rhetorical purity. Many of the most fantastic plans were drafted in the 1960s and never realized. Kenzo Tange’s “A Plan for Tokyo” (1960) proposed an entire city be erected over Tokyo Bay. Another project suggested building contiguously between Tokyo and Osaka so that the two cities would become an uninterrupted megalopolis: the island of Japan imagined as a body and the new mega-city as its essential hub. Arata Isozaki’s “Shinjuku Project: City in the Air” (1961) and “Shibuya Project: City in the Air” (1962) used the Metabolist trope of vertical, cylindrical, central “cores” to access a complex of units built high in the air. It’s likely that many of the projects that were indeed built during this time, like Kiyonori Kikutake’s Hotel Tokoen (1965) and Miyakonojo Civic Center (1966), were funded because they somewhat inverted outsize Metabolist ambitions by collapsing the logic of an entire city into the design of a single building. Metabolism reached a fever pitch around the Expo ’70 in Osaka, where Tange masterminded a model city showcasing all the movement’s most colorful dynamics for a worldwide audience that extended far beyond connoisseurs of architecture.¨

Installation of a kitchen at the Mori Art Museum.

Arata Isozaki´s city in the air (Shibuya Project)

Read the review in full:

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/out-there-metabolic-pathways/?scp=4&sq=urban%20planning&st=cse

All pictures downloaded from the article at the NYTimes magazine.

A grid analysis by Fanis Grammenos

The turning radius of a team of four oxen pulling a four-wheel cart determined the width of the streets in Salt Lake City. (Image source: Wikipedia)

I´ve been reading the article by Fanis Grammenos at Planetizen.com, which I´ve found highly interesting, specially for me that have been living in Buenos Aires´ grid for so many years.

He writes about the pros and cons of the grid, first of all, he shows two charts of developable land compared to right of way (ROW) and size of block for some cities in USA.

Then, he gives us examples of critics from urbanists, beginning from those who defend urban fractal morphology. At this point, I should make a separate note. As an example ¨in between¨, Buenos Aires is a strict grid but seen in 3D or seen by a pedestrian, it is highly fractal; I wrote many articles about it. So, articulations and scaling are not lost.

A sampling of 3 simple grids and their corresponding percentage of land used for ROWs.

¨Olmstead in the 1800s abandoned orthogonal planning and introduced curvilinear streets that were to become the model for innumerable subdivisions. Camillo Sitte portrays the grid as unimaginative and unworthy of consideration for new towns. Raymond Unwin in his writings and works rejects the simple, open grid, succeeds in ushering the cul-de-sac through the British parliament and lays out plans free of the rigidity and repetitiveness of the simple grid.

As contemporary theory embraces the city as an organism that obeys fractal laws (seen in the works of Alexander, Salingaros, Mehaffy, Mashall and Salat), more fundamental weaknesses of the uniform grid emerged. For example we read that: “Making a line straight, or regularizing a street, as 19th century urbanism has often done, eliminated intermediary scales and hence the possibility of geometric interaction and coupling of smaller scales. In other words it killed life. For thousands of years, historical cities avoided straight lines, creating multiply connected rich structures by way of slight discontinuities in relation to straight lines.”(Salat)¨

Then, Grammenos explains that some blocks length are the product of the need for a team of four oxen pulling a cart to turn around within the street; and of course, a modern adaptation is needed.

We cannot copy good examples from another countries, to prioritize pedestrians; what is good for Middle East, is not good for fast avenues in California, right?

Finally, he proposes a middle-term solution, which I like very much, it´s a block with partitions as needed for vehicles and pedestrians.

Savannah´s composite

Grammenos´conclusion:

Breaking the convenient, but outdated, uniformity of the 18th and 19th Century American grids would be a first step in recovering the land efficiency mandated by current ecological and economic imperatives. Pointing in that direction, Savannah’s composite, cellular grid includes variable size streets and blocks for private, civic and religious functions. A second step would be to include block sizes that can accommodate building types and sizes unknown in the 1800s, again defying block uniformity. A third step would be to adapt its streets for the now universal motorized mobility, of cars, buses, trucks, trams and motorcycles, that is radically different from when oxen, equine and legs shared the transport of goods and people.

In summary, examining the simple grids in this set serves as an introduction to optimizing land use, people circulation and the movement of goods. The resulting challenge is to use these insights to develop patterns that accommodate contemporary urban land economics, transportation, environmental priorities and citizen aspirations as these patterns may have done in their time.

Read the article in full:

http://www.planetizen.com/node/54477