Srinath Perur ~ Story Of Cities #11: The Reclamation Of Mumbai – From The Sea, And Its People?

Of all the ways in which Mumbai has been called a city of dreams, at least one is literal. It is sometime in the late 18th century, and the engineers of the East India Company in Bombay are losing a battle against the sea. They’re dumping boatloads of stone into Worli creek to build an embankment, but it has collapsed once and it collapses again.

That’s when an engineer named Ramji Shivji Prabhu has a dream: the goddess Mahalakshmi and two others inform him their stone idols lie submerged in the creek. Can some space be made for them on land? Prabhu has them fished out and installed in a shrine built nearby on land gifted by the administration. The wall holds.

This story was found in a bakhar, a Marathi literary form that recounts colourful histories, and may seem a little fanciful for our times. But that embankment – the Hornby Vellard, completed in 1784 – was very real and can be said to have given shape to the modern city of Mumbai (the official name since 1995). It was built at the initiative of William Hornby, then governor of Bombay, and over the next few decades was followed by the construction of causeways to link the seven islets separated by sea and swamp.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/mumbai

Yaminay Chaudhri ~ Anxious Public Space (A Preface)

What is the city but the people?” asks the opening sentence of the Capital Development Authority’s (CDA) website. The sentence – originally from Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus – expresses a sentiment appropriate for this government-owned public benefit corporation, tasked with running and maintaining the master plan of the capital city of Pakistan. Upon researching the CDA’s establishment, I discovered a lineage of military leadership starting with General Ayub Khan and the organisation’s first chairman, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, who defined the charter of this organisation and its role in building Islamabad. This essay provides a preface to a longer discussion about public space in Pakistan by analysing perceptions of the ideal city, in popular and official discourse.

On a sweltering July day in Islamabad this year, images of bulldozers, riot gear, and protesting men, women and children dragged from their homes in a katchi abadi,poured into news circuits and social media. The CDA announced a successful removal of all illegal occupants from sector I-11, who posed (among other things) security threats and sanitation risks to the city. It is almost tragic that a government institution tasked with representing the ‘people’ of a city, could be responsible for the eviction of thousands of them from their homes, with no alternatives for resettlement.

Read more: http://herald.dawn.com/news/

Ann Seltman Smart ~ A Is For Architecture

A vintage film (mid-1960’s) on the importance of architecture in everyday life. Produced by Ann Seltman Smart, formerly of WPTF-AM in Raleigh, North Carolina. Narrated by Ted Daniel.

Jamie Doward ~ Shelter And The Slums: Capturing Bleak Britain 50 Years Ago

A mother takes her baby inside her condemned tenement block Gorbals 1970. Photograph: Nick Hedges for Shelter

From 1968 to 1972, photographer Nick Hedges toured the country for Shelter. His work galvanised politicians – and now the charity wants to find out what happened to those he portrayed.

At first glance they seem to be the survivors of a besieged city. Standing in front of decrepit buildings that tower over streets absent of cars, they cut abject figures. Children in ragged clothes play on wasteland; a mother and her teenage daughter huddle in their home, a cellar lit by just one light bulb; a father in a dank living room festooned with broken furniture holds his toddler son close to his chest.

But these people have not been bombed into submission. They are not experiencing the horrors of the second world war. They are living in Britain in the swinging 60s, an era that the then prime minister, Harold Wilson, famously promised would deliver material improvements for all, thanks to the “white heat of technology”.

They are the inhabitants of Britain’s slums whose desperate plight, captured by the photographer, Nick Hedges, for the housing charity Shelter, helped alert the public to the woeful living conditions many people were enduring in the country’s neglected inner cities.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/homeless-shelter-charity?

Lasse Wamsler, Sune Gudmundsson & Sven Johannesen ~ Drowning Megacities ~ Aljazeera

The world is getting warmer, the rain is growing heavier and the oceans are rising. At the same time, the world’s rural inhabitants are migrating to its cities on a massive scale.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the part of the world most affected by the dual pressure of climate change and the rapid, uncontrolled transformation of its cities into megacities.
The extreme speed and scale of urbanisation has swallowed up many former peasants, incorporating them into the vast slums of sprawling megacities.

In these unplanned, hostile urban environments, where infrastructure is at a minimum, they are exposed to the dangers posed by rising seas and heavy rains – forces that wreak havoc and cause deaths every year.
But, from Lagos in the west to Dar es Salaam in the east, slum-dwellers, the middle class, and the elite alike are fighting back against the waters.
This is a visit to the front line of their battle: to Africa’s drowning megacities.

Go to: http://interactive.aljazeera.com/drowning_megacities/

Sean Coughlan ~ Are Cities The New Countries?

Photo: thinkstock

Do big cities have more in common with each other than with the rest of their own countries?

Are there meaningful comparisons between cities such as New York, London and Shanghai, rather than between nation states?
That is the suggestion of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Such mega-conurbations have bigger populations and economies than many individual countries – and the think tank argues that they face many similar challenges, whether it is in transport, housing, security, jobs, migration or education.

In a report on global trends shaping education, the OECD says cities could learn from each other’s experiences, in a way that would be impossible at the level of national politics.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/education