Redesigning Cities Could Solve Our Biggest Problems. But We’re Hardly Talking About Them.

Cities are the biggest thing we create. But when we talk about sustainability, there is still surprisingly little discussion about how our cities are designed as a whole.
This is a clip from 2012: Time For Change (2010). Watch the full film for free online here or via Hulu. You can buy the DVD here.

For more info on eco-cities, we highly recommend checking out Richard Register’s website: http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/

Jordan Heller ~ One Of America’s Poorest Cities Has A Radical Plan To Remake Itself

Rebecca Dalzell ~ A City To Grow Into

“It sounds utopian, I know,” says Daniel Haime, standing over the map of Serena del Mar, the city he is building on the Caribbean Sea. He plans to transform a 2,500-acre site outside Cartagena, Colombia – which his family bought in 1968 – into a lively metropolis. There will be a world-class hospital, low-income housing and state-run schools, a marina and bike trails, a luxury hotel and waterfront dining. One day, vaporetti on the lagoon could connect Serena del Mar to downtown Cartagena.

It seems like an auspicious time to build a new city in Colombia. In 2016, the government and theFARC rebel group signed a peace deal ending 50 years of conflict. A cautious optimism buoys the economy. Bogotá and Medellín, the country’s largest cities, have become models for smart urban design. But not Cartagena. It may be one of the fastest-growing cities in Colombia but, according to Nicolás Galarza Sanchez, a research scholar at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, it is also a case study in how not to expand. It has spread in a fashion typical of South America: high-rise condominiums for the rich have sprouted along the waterfront while poor settlements made up of squalid, informal dwellings have grown in areas prone to flooding. Galarza and his colleagues are working with the Colombian government to help manage growth in 100 cities across the country.

Read more: https://www.1843magazine.com/a-city-to-grow-into

Susan Parnell ~ Urban Planet

Urban Planet, a new open-access edited volume on sustainable urban development, is launched. The book is a collaborative project within Future Earth and emphasises the need for a new knowledge generation agenda, given the urgency of understanding the sustainability challenges and options for a rapidly urbanising planet.

The urban future is a critical determinant of the viability and vitality of the human endeavour towards a global sustainable future. This centrality of cities to the sustainability of people, planet, and prosperity points to the need for continuous investments in an expanded and flexible urban science and practical knowledge generation that is forged out of innovative interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral understandings of the complex systems that both drive and derive from the prevalence of urban ways of being. Greater understanding of urbanisation processes and the multi-scale interactions and feedbacks with the earth system is required for addressing the complex issues related to urbanization and sustainability, and for aiding in the solutions.

The book aims, therefore, not only to provide a synthesis of existing knowledge across the different disciplines, but also to showcase new ways of producing and integrating knowledge, extending the frontier of urban research, and providing new directions in research and practice that will help us achieve the cities we want now and in the future.

ACC’s Susan Parnell is co-editor of the volume believes the book will be a great resource for ecologists and urbanists, practitioners and policy-maker alike.

Read more (incl. Download the ebook free of charge) – https://www.africancentreforcities.net/urban-planet/

Al Jazeera Witness ~ Clifford Bestall ~ Hillbrow: Between Heaven And Hell

Filmmaker Clifford Bestall takes a personal journey to the heart of one of South Africa’s most dangerous neighbourhoods and through the stories of some of its residents reveals a rich seam of today’s urban South African experience.

One Carefree Night

A short documentary shot in South Africa. We follow four teenagers growing up in Manenberg, a suburb of Cape Town, where gangsters roam and drug use is rampant. Lauren-Lee, Ryaad, Cameron and Cohen are among the few teens who still attend school. They hope a high-school diploma will get them out of Manenberg. But there’s another promise that keeps them attending: senior prom. They save up all year to rent a fancy car and to buy ball gowns and tuxedos. The post-exam prom is their Cinderella moment: one magical evening when the dream of escaping their bleak reality seems like it just might come true.