Sitting at the end of 24th Street in San Francisco is a small waterfront park called Warmwater Cove. Neglected, polluted, and isolated from nearby areas, this patch of scruffy land is known by many as Toxic Tire Beach. It’s surrounded by a Muni rail yard, a crane storage facility, the future site of a peaker power plant, an active power plant, and two historic sugar warehouses (featured above). It’s not exactly the most inviting of parks, but it has an overwhelming redeeming value: spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay. [more…]
The New American Dictionary: Interactive Security/Fear Edition is a new book by the Boston performance group, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things. The dictionary is a humorous, provocative way of asking its readers to pay attention to the ways in which terminology of fear, security and war have permeated American English post-9/11. Terms in the dictionary include: Islamofascist, Freedom Fries, Friendly Fire, Regime Change, Smart Bomb, Surge, and 62 more.
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The thriving metropolis by the Bay, San Francisco is a spectacular city. If you’re in the right place at the right time, you never know when you’ll be rewarded with a spectacular view, of the mountains, the morning fog, the Bay or the Ocean. But the city isn’t as perfect as the tour
This semester, I’m taking a class with Peter Bosselman on research methods in urban design. The main point of the class is straightforward: by rigorously and methodically observing people’s behavior in public spaces, designers can make better public spaces. This is our chance as designers to look at how successful, however defined, existing public spaces are. While I could have done a study on just how well used Dolores Park is on sunny Sunday afternoons, or a survey of the city’s best coffee shops, I foolishly chose to work on a project examining failed public spaces. These are the places in San Francisco where the views aren’t as spectacular, where you probably wouldn’t sit and read the paper or have coffee with a friend. These are the places that are neglected, isolated, and often dangerous. [more…]
The traditional urban form in Beijing is the hutong. These long, mostly very narrow and densely packed streets have existed for hundreds of years, some much longer. Historically, they are lined with siheyuan homes, which have four main sections looking inward into a central courtyard. The siheyuan houses were divided roughly into four, with each of cardinal direction housing a different generation of a family. The rooms looked out into a central courtyard, a place of respite and solitude in the city.
After the Communist takeover of China in the mid-20th century, urban development was deemphasized under the state ideology of narrowing the urban/rural divide with the stated goal of creating a more egalitarian society. Hutong homes where a single wealthy family had lived were occupied by several — sometimes dozens — of families. The central courtyards were divided and subdivided into smaller family units. While many hutongs today have running water and electricity, even internet access in the case of my homestay (pictured above), facilities are still limited. Most do not have private toilets, with residents instead using communal bathrooms. Space — for cooking, for sleeping, for having guests over, for spending time with family members, for living — is extremely limited.
These conditions shed some light on the why in the current government’s push for development and modernization, massive high rise development have been favored over historic housing forms. Beijing’s skyline is filled with cranes, teaming with workers night and day constructing enormous residential developments. The buildings they create are huge, housing hundreds of families in a building. Where the dense urban life once existed are now broad boulevards lined with housing and commercial towers. Entire neighborhoods of hutongs have been cleared to be replaced by new development, their residents relocated elsewhere in the city. While displaced residents are given the option of cash or the equivalent square footage in the new high-rises, the long-term societal impact of this dramatic is urban communities have yet to be realized. [more…]
China’s dramatic economic growth has been well documented in Western media. Receiving less attention is China’s up-and-coming contemporary art scene. The center of the artistic community in China is Factory 798, located between the fourth and fifth ring roads in Beijing. There, a group of artists have managed to transform a derelict factory into a burgeoning arts colony. Exposed brick walls, miles of pipes and tubes, and dramatic high ceilings house dozens of artists’ studios and galleries.
Factory 798 once was used to manufactured electronic parts for weapons during the Cold War. After falling demand led to the decline of the manufacturing plant, the only people attracted to the space were artists, who appreciated the cheap rent and spacious rooms. As the artists transformed the space into a desirable place to live and work, the area have faced a good deal of pressure to develop. In the past few years, the artists of Factory 79 have successfully fought plans to transform the area into either high-rise apartments and a power plant. Since 2002, the area has been formally incorporated by the government as an artistic development zone, officially making artists the economic drivers for the area. The plan has been resoundingly successful, attracting international attention. Artists routinely sell their work for tens of thousands of dollars. But their own success has made the space unaffordable to many of the artists that made it desirable it the first place. As such, the area faces a unique Chinese form of gentrification. [more…]
