Coming back

So, in the past two weeks, I participated in the world's largest scavenger hunt, took the GRE, and got some sort of horrible plague, the combination of which has detracted somewhat from my ability and volition to write. The Scavenger Hunt, incidentally, is run by the University of Chicago and is amazing. This year's list had 286 items, including makeshift elephant polo (teams built a litter that looked like an elephant; 4 people supported it, while a rider hit balls with a polo stick) and a miniature steam engine. My favorite item was the Job globe, a snowglobe that, when shaken, causes disasters of biblical proportions.

To cities: I don't really have any really solid topic to write about tonight. The biggest news is the new Brookings report: "State of Metropolitan America." There is so much data here, it's hard to comprehend. It focuses on, and classifies cities accordingly, on education, diversity, and population growth, but also has reams of data on topics like commute times, age demographics, and family and household breakdowns. It's huge and intimidating, and I will almost certainly revisit it.

Some other things:

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a sort of magical realist elaboration on the Odyssey where the author crafts 44 episodes that imagine the main characters in different circumstances with different emotions. BLDBLOG has a post on a chapter where Agamemnon creates a vast fortress on the plains of Troy dug into the sands of Troy. The post discusses the feasibility of such a palace, and other details of the architecture of sand, (which is really, really pretty.)

But later in that chapter, Agamemnon tasks Odysseus with a book comprising all the knowledge in the world. Part of the book describes the “hidden language of cities”

“A lexicon of the hidden language of cities, in which buildings are nouns, the inhabitants verbs, and empty spaces adjectives in an endlessly changing narrative.”

This is a fantastic image of the vitality of urban life, conjuring the idea of a city map as a conversation, or hundreds of conversations. I tried to do more with the idea, but the only significant insight I had was that such a description of cities reminds urban planners that we can only put the skeleton of a sentence in place; we can't force the actions around it.

And finally, I found some more new buildings that look like the buildings I described earlier. I didn't take pictures, but there are two new apartment buildings by UT and a new place at 12th and Lamar that look substantially like the triangle, the domain et al. Disturbing indeed.

I intend a series of short posts over the next few days to let my thoughts catch up with my output. Regular posting, hopefully, resumes next week.

Jane Jacobs was right

The van in Times Square was initially pointed out by two street vendors. This, Slate.com argues, vindicates Jacob's assertion that street traffic keeps streets safe by keeping extra eyes on the situation.

Short, late, not particularly insightful, post tonight. I'm in Michigan; I saw Obama speak at the University of Michigan commencement. Which was awesome, but the whole trip has involved a great deal of sleep deprivation and so I've read little and have little to say. Alas.

But I've been reading a book about ancient cities, "From Mycenae to Constantinople". It's a welcome change of pace from Edge City. Edge City, like its subject, is sprawling and thinly populated, but From Mycenae ... is written in a dense academic style. And I majored in Classics in college, so dense academic books about the ancients kind of feel like home. On the other hand, the conjunction of what appear to be my two main interests, cities and Classics never really overlapped. This is my first direct study, as opposed to allusion and asides in other classes.

Anyway, I haven't extracted a whole lot to

put here, cause I was reading it on three hours of sleep, and the book is not much concerned with city life as such. That is, there is little direct discussion of things like infrastructure, traffic, economic development and daily life, in part because those things are so hard to establish, and in part because it's not the author's main goal. But there is a tie in to Edge City in the case of Rome.

The best way to avoid Edge City is to have marauding bands of Gauls running around your countryside. As late as the 3rd century AD (when the army could no longer keep the barbarians at

the frontiers) Rome could be encircled with a 19km wall. A similar wall for Los Angeles would be 300km or so, relying on the coast to cover the other half. Additionally, Rome had great mixed use: shops, industry and housing was all intermixed in tight-knit districts. Indeed, such was the diffusion of uses that there is an entire page where the author wonders what the point of the forum, in the empire, was. (In the Republic, political discourse and argument was conducted there, but that was unnecessary in the autocratic Empire.) Official government business was done in the vast complexes of the Emperors which were elsewhere in the city. This is mixed use too, since the emperor and presumably his bureaucrats also lived there. Additionally, Most fora had basilicae where legal business was done, but the Imperial fora did not have one. And commercial activity was spread out. He concludes that it is wrong to view the forum as 'utilitarian' and that it was mostly just a large embellishment to make the city look good. As an urban form I'm not sure there's an equivalent in a modern American city; a compact city with no substantial downtown. Any thoughts?

(Image Source: Romeartlover.it)