48. Editor's Choice Edition: What Makes a Vibrant City?

This week, we kick off our summer long Editor's Choice series as we re-visit our conversations with Jeff Hou and Manish Chalana as well as Rahul Mehrotra to see if we can start to unpack what it is that makes a city vibrant!

Timestamp Outline

1:42 Book: Messy Urbanism: Understanding “Other” Cities of Asia
2:54 Bangkok Maekong express market: “What appears to be messy is actually extremely organized.”
4:22 “Choreography has a temporal dimension that is often lacking in a formally planned urban space. It can change. It can evolve. It adapts to things that are happening and changing from time to time. - There are multiple layers of order in this system.”
6:04 Time in architecture: Bernard Tschumi’s concept of Event City; Rahul Mehrotra’s concept of Kinetic City
7:23 The difference between “accidental” events and “choreographed” events, time, agency and attention in the street [parallel conversation about Eastern Islamic city streets in Episode 6]
9:29 “Intense negotiation of space”: what Western cities can learn from Asian cities
11:02 Central Park and the eviction of Seneca Village and Seattle’s racist property covenants: racial and cultural segregation history in the planned American city
15:34 Romanticizing the Mess (slum porn) vs Cleaning Up the Mess (Colonial Modernism)
19:05 Seattle homelessness, income disparity and big tech money moving into the city: What is an alternate future for Seattle?
20:11 Self-organized rather than top-down alternative living arrangements; 80% of Seattle land zoned for single-family housing = very little choreographed messiness
25:32 Q: How do you semi-choreograph space?     A: Start by acknowledging the story of messiness already happening.
27:21 Neighborhoods suing HALA: “Not in my backyard”
28:19 Palimpsest as theory for a city: Layers, looseness, flexibility and a quality of openness to allow for adaptation and resilience

30:45  Ephemeral Urbanism, the Kinetic City and Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral MEGACITY
31:34  On the illusion of the static city
33:38  Kumbh Mela
35:52  Book: Everyday Urbanism by Margaret Crawford
36:00  “The ephemeral is that aspect of the city that is temporary in nature...not only with the presence of other human beings, but also with shifting meaning. And then it recedes, it fades, it leaves no trace. It’s an enacted process.”
38:05 All architecture is ephemeral? Walter Benjamin on civilizations and ruin
40:08 Landscape architecture and the ephemeral
42:02 JB Jackson, Gilles Clément and the Third Landscape
42:20 The traveling circus disrupts the strict static city! Fantasy played out in a tent!
43:21 Farmers’ market as a rhythm and productive disruption
44:40 Time and architects and urban designers
46:12 Conservation vs compostability
49:38 Kaleidoscopic identities
52:41 Urban conservation work in Mumbai
54:02       “What societies invest in us [as architects] is to imagine better spatial possibilities in which lives can be lived!”