http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jpN8kI0-pY
We saw this film at the weekend. Very good and worth tracking down a copy: examples and exemplars talking about European cities (why they "work") and (mainly) American cities (why they suck). the key seems to be that if you design your cities for cars, then your city sucks. If you design them for people (a concept called "prospect/refuge" where the spaces are people sized: example is a city square should be no more than 100sq m because thats the human scale) then they win. Key issues there are infrastructure, planning and thinking about how people will use the spaces. Oh, Portland OR is another example of urban planning gone well. One of the most interesting was Bogota Colombia: massive extremes of wealth and poverty. Also Brasilia in Brazil which was a planned city (like Canberra) which looks beautiful from the air but is a nightmare if you live there (like those Mrkn cities where you can't walk anywhere).
Detroit too: used to be 135miles square and had 2M people. Now has <700000 people. think about what that does to service provision, infrastructure, who left, who is stillthere etc.
Sorry, told you it would be incoherent.
I thought elections were decided by angry posts on social media. - F5 Dave
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