How Amsterdam became the bicycle capital of the world

ee the power of civil society son? This is what the power of individuals and groups can do. I love cycling and hope you are also enjoying yourself in oxford on the bike.

We will need to do more cycling. This car and oil based economy and human  civilisation cannot last. It will require improvements. And it's getting much much better now. More to be done son. Hoping to go riding this weekend :) go make peace while the legs are pumping and the wind is in my hair and face. Extraordinary feeling of peace and quiet.

Love

Baba

How Amsterdam became the bicycle capital of the world
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord
(via Instapaper)

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Anyone who has ever tried to make their way through the centre of Amsterdamin a car knows it: the city is owned by cyclists. They hurry in swarms through the streets, unbothered by traffic rules, taking precedence whenever they want, rendering motorists powerless by their sheer numbers.

Cyclists rule in Amsterdam and great pains have been taken to accommodate them: the city is equipped with an elaborate network of cycle-paths and lanes, so safe and comfortable that even toddlers and elderly people use bikes as the easiest mode of transport. It’s not only Amsterdam which boasts a network of cycle-paths, of course; you’ll find them in all Dutch cities.

The Dutch take this for granted; they even tend to believe these cycle-paths have existed since the beginning of time. But that is certainly not the case. There was a time, in the 1950s and 60s, when cyclists were under severe threat of being expelled from Dutch cities by the growing number of cars. Only thanks to fierce activism and a number of decisive events would Amsterdam succeed in becoming what it is, unquestionably, now: the bicycle capital of the world.

At the start of the 20th century, bikes far outnumbered cars in Dutch cities and the bicycle was considered a respectable mode of transport for men and women. But when the Dutch economy began to boom in the post-war era, more and more people were able to afford cars, and urban policymakers came to view the car as the travel mode of the future. Entire Amsterdam neighbourhoods were destroyed to make way for motorised traffic. The use of bikes decreased by 6% every year, and the general idea was that bicycles would eventually disappear altogether.

The streets no longer belonged to the people who lived there, but to huge traffic flows

Maartje van Putten, former MEP

A History of Future Cities: The Rise of New Shanghai

Shanghai is very impressive son. It was very cold when I was there late last year. But it's a Potemkin village in some ways (look this up), its a facade. Almost farcically it's a great example of history repeating itself. In this case, Shanghai was exactly here just about 80 years back and then it all fell to ruins. You will see it when you visit china later this year. 

But you have to think of cities as a layered cake. Tens of hundreds of thousands of layers. Cities have very long histories. The trick is to surf between these layers and that's the fun of it. These layers can be historical. They can be social. They can be economic. They can be geographical. They can be cultural. Various kinds of layers. Fascinating to delve and dig around. 

Given that now more people in the world live in cities, one phenomena which you should remember. And cities are hugely resilient. They recover from huge disasters and still live on. 

Love

Baba

A History of Future Cities: The Rise of New Shanghai: Places: Design Observer
http://places.designobserver.com/feature/the-rise-of-new-shanghai/37674/

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Essay: Daniel Brook

Pudong New Area and the Huangpu River, Shanghai. [Photo by wecand]

Shanghai, 1989
Two decades ago, when Shanghai’s leaders looked out over the new New China born of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, it seemed history had gone off the rails. It wasn’t Shanghai, the city that invented Chinese capitalism, but Deng’s new experimental instant metropolis, Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong, that was brimming with factories and drawing thousands of ambitious young people from across the country. It was as if Deng had held a great national casting call for China’s next business hub and upstart Shenzhen had gotten the part Shanghai assumed she was destined to play. Hoping to set things right, Shanghai officials lobbied their superiors in Beijing, urging them to reopen to the world China’s historic global gateway city and financial center.

Back then even Deng’s pro-market political allies were wary of Shanghai. Some officials worried that unleashing China’s cradle of cosmopolitanism and revolution could upend their rule. Others fretted that the symbolism alone would aid their ideological enemies. Deng was already beset by anti-market factions within the Party who warned that his new Special Economic Zones for international investment would become “foreign concession zones” reborn. Though Deng had been able to overrule them in creating Shenzhen, the symbolism of their critique would be much more salient in Shanghai, a city that had actually been a grouping of foreign concessions during China’s “Century of Humiliation,” from the Opium War through World War II.

But the Shanghai city government kept pushing. In the 1980s, “when we prepared the master plan,” Zhang Rufei, a former Shanghai city planning official, explained, “we had the idea to build the [Pudong] side of the river [and] we tried to sell [the central government on] this idea.” The ambitious plans for Pudong were seemingly the perfect antidote to the charge that the new Shanghai would be a revival of the foreign concessions of the old. Shanghai planners called for building a sparkling new downtown directly across the Huangpu River from the Jazz Age skyline that the British and American Shanghailanders had erected on the Bund. By towering over the edifices of foreign-dominated Shanghai, the new development would symbolize the rise of a powerful, independent China. And beyond just dwarfing the foreign-built city, the new downtown would literally rise above Old Shanghai’s shame. The skyscrapers would sprout from the mud of Pudong, the notorious district of foreign-owned factories and Chinese workers’ shacks, where the Chinese had toiled for a pittance to enrich Western companies like British American Tobacco and Standard Oil.

Mosques and Urban Development

Religious places are interesting urban and human development artefacts. By and large, religious places are one of the biggest things one can see in human history. One only needs to see the seven ancient wonders of the world to see what I mean:

1. Great Pyramid of Giza
2. Hanging Gardens of Babylon
3. Statue of Zeus at Olympia
4. Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
5. Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus
6. Colossus of Rhodes
7. Lighthouse of Alexandria

With the exclusion of the last one and perhaps one can argue the 6th one, rest are religious buildings. How about the medieval wonders?

1. Stonehenge
2. Colosseum
3. Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa
4. Great Wall of China
5. Porcelain Tower of Nanjing
6. Hagia Sophia
7. Leaning Tower of Pisa
8. Taj Mahal
9. Cairo Citadel
10. Ely Cathedral
11. Cluny Abbey

Again, mostly religious in nature. Walk around in any city in any country and you will find religious buildings as one of the key urban infrastructure artefacts. Religious buildings also play a huge part in the social dynamics of cities. The second point is that from this year onwards, there are more people in urban areas rather than in rural areas. So its important to know how religious buildings interact with urban development. You need to know this for a variety of reasons, for town planning, for security, for urban warfare, for traffic, to determine the value of your home, etc. etc. So how do you do it? Well, these chaps seem to have done a good job in doing this. I quote:

Explaining historical urban development using the locations of mosques: A GIS/spatial statistics-based approach, Irem Ayhana and K. Mert Cubukcu, City and Regional Planning, Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey

Abstract

Religious buildings, including temples, churches, synagogues and mosques have always been one of the integral components of the urban layout. This paper aims to answer the question whether the historical spatial development of a large-size city can be approximated using historical geographical and categorical data pertaining to its places of worship. We use data for 525 mosques built in Izmir, Turkey, over the years 1550–2008 and maps of built-up areas for the same period. Based on the results of GIS/spatial statistics-based analyses using the three basic measures of spatial statistics (mean center, weighted mean center and standard deviational ellipse), we conclude that the spatial distribution of mosques is a close proxy of urban development. Thus, location data for places of worship, often available and accessible, can be used to derive historical urban development over a given period.

Here’s the relevant image of the city.

 

this is how the mosques were constructed by time period:

And immediately you can see the differences between the construction period and how the city grew. In terms of going into statistical measures, this image now shows how the mean centres of the city changed by time:

As you can imagine, various things like land values to traffic patterns will change dramatically based upon this kind of data. Very interesting stuff.

Ken Livingstone explains his defeat

Quite an interesting story, and some things I completely agree with. Now where was this reasonable man? All we ended up seeing was a megalomaniac, anti semitic, dour, boring man who was stupid in his foreign policy orientation towards the end.

But, Boris should read this article, specially about what Londoners need and want, leave the personalities aside, think of the city.

Technorati Tags: London,Elections,Urbanisation

50% of the world's population will live in the cities from 2008

Some good articles on urbanisation in the latest edition of Finance and Development. Too much to comment in here but read and worry about how to handle the urban jungle.

 

The Urban Revolution
David E. Bloom and Tarun Khanna
The year 2008 marks a watershed in the complex and ongoing urban revolution. For the first time, more than 50 percent of the world's people will live in urban areas. Rapid urbanization may prove a blessing, provided the world takes notice and plans accordingly.

Urban Poverty
Martin Ravallion
The poor are gravitating to towns and cities, but maybe not quickly enough. A faster pace of urbanization could induce more rapid poverty reduction. Development policymakers should facilitate this process, not hinder it.

Big, or Too Big?
Ehtisham Ahmad
Megacities create special issues of governance, funding, and provision of services. Both national governments and megacities can secure potential benefits by exploring the devolution of clearly defined responsibilities and revenue-raising capacity that provide incentives for good governance.

What Is the Biggest Challenge in Managing Large Cities
Matthew Maury, Kishore Mahbubani, and Ramesh Ramanathan and Swati Ramanathan
Three points of view on different ways to manage the expansion of cities well .

Technorati Tags: Urbanisation,IMF

Trade and the structure of cities

Now this is a very interesting take on how cities develop and grow based upon the interplay between trade costs, commuting costs and communication costs. I quote:

Our starting point is that firms’ performances are affected by the level of housing and commuting costs, which we call “urban costs”. This occurs through the land rent they pay to occupy central urban locations, and through the higher wages they have to pay to their workers to compensate them for their longer commutes and/or higher land rents. Hence, high urban costs render firms less competitive on local and foreign markets alike. As a result, despite scale economies arising from urban agglomeration (Duranton and Puga [5]), increasing urban costs could shift employment from large monocentric cities either to their suburbs or to distant and smaller cities, where these costs are lower, at least once trade costs have sufficiently declined to permit largescale exports to distant markets. In other words, economic integration could well challenge the supremacy of large cities in favor of small cities. The main point we wish to stress in this paper is that the emergence of subcenters within cities is a powerful strategy for large cities to maintain their attractiveness.

They develop load of mathematical models, which I am seriously not going to review, if you wish, I can send the paper to you for you to mathematically masticate over, but the results are very interesting. And the final para:

Finally, our analysis also has an important policy implication. It is well known that quite a few American and European cities have lost employment and population for a few decades. This state of affair has led city managers to seek local policies that would prevent the decentralization of industrial activities toward small and/or remote places. However, most of them did fail. This paper suggests that urban decision-makers would have been better inspired to foster the development of SBDs, endowed with high-quality business-to-business services and consumption amenities that attract both firms and workers.

Technorati Tags: Urbanisation

Are immigrants good for cities?

Are immigrants good for cities? Well yes, broadly speaking is the result. Life is much more complicated than blanket statements such as immigration is bad or good, but this study of the US cities is worth exploring.

Mind you, it wont be as such applicable in a country like UK which is far more densely populated. In this place, the line between the country and urban area is very blurred, specially with huge public transport networks. For example, now with the launch of the high speed Eurostar service, you can live in France and commute into work into UK. So be warned, but still, very interesting short essay on how immigrants impact natives in terms of their incomes and rents.

Paint buildings white to save global warming!

Very interesting argument: I just quote one bit:

Consider Los Angeles. Reroofing most of the city's five million homes in lighter colours, painting a quarter of the roads and planting 11m trees would have a one-time cost of about $1bn. Each year after that, this would lower air conditioning costs by about $170m and provide $360m in smog-reduction benefits. And it would lower LA temperatures by about 3C - or about the temperature increase envisioned for the rest of this century. Compare that to the $180bn cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol, which will have virtually no effect.

Well, there is much to this argument, but would you want LA

to look like this (Mykonos, Greece)?

 

Technorati Tags: Urbanisation , Climate Change

Urban Challenges in India

Very interesting statistics released by the World Bank here. I quote:

Urbanization in India is not a side effect of recent economic growth; it is an integral part of the process. As in most countries, India’s urban areas make a major contribution to the country’s economy. Although less than a third of India’s people live in cities and towns, these areas generate over 2/3 of the country’s GDP and account for 90% of government revenues.
India’s towns and cities have expanded rapidly as increasing numbers migrate to towns and cities in search of economic opportunity. Slums now account for 1/4 of all urban housing. In Mumbai, more than half the population lives in slums, many of which are situated near employment centers in the heart of town, unlike in most other cities in developing countries.

Urbanization in India

Urbanization is not a side effect of economic growth; it is an integral part of the process. As in most countries, India’s urban areas make a major contribution to the country’s economy. Although less than 1/3 of India’s people live in cities and towns, these areas generate over 2/3 of the country’s GDP and account for 90% of government revenues.
India’s towns and cities have expanded rapidly as increasing numbers migrate to towns and cities in search of economic opportunity. Slums now account for 1/4 of all urban housing. In Mumbai, more than half the population lives in slums, many of which are situated near employment centers in the heart of town, unlike in most other cities in developing countries.
Meeting the needs of India’s soaring urban populations is and will continue to be a strategic policy matter. Critical issues that need to be addressed are:
• Poor local governance
• Weak finances
• Inappropriate planning that leads to high costs of housing and office space; in some Indian cities costs are among the highest in the world
• Critical infrastructure shortages and major service deficiencies that include erratic water and power supply, and woefully inadequate transportation systems
• Rapidly deteriorating environment

Urban Challenges

Planning:
• Many urban governments lack a modern planning framework
• The multiplicity of local bodies obstructs efficient planning and land use
• Rigid master plans and restrictive zoning regulations limit the land available for building, constricting cities’ abilities to grow in accordance with changing needs.
Housing:
• Building regulations that limit urban density - such as floor space indexes – reduce the number of houses available, thereby pushing up property prices
• Outdated rent control regulations reduce the number of houses available on rent – a critical option for the poor
• Poor access to micro finance and mortgage finance limit the ability of low income groups to buy or improve their homes
• Policy, planning, and regulation deficiencies lead to a proliferation of slums
• Weak finances of urban local bodies and service providers leave them unable to expand the trunk infrastructure that housing developers need to develop new sites.
Service delivery:
• Most services are delivered by city governments with unclear lines of accountability
• There is a strong bias towards adding physical infrastructure rather than providing financially and environmentally sustainable services
• Service providers are unable to recover operations and maintenance costs and depend on the government for finance
• Independent regulatory authorities that set tariffs, decide on subsidies, and enforce service quality are generally absent.
Infrastructure:
• Most urban bodies do not generate the revenues needed to renew infrastructure, nor do they have the creditworthiness to access capital markets for funds
• Urban transport planning needs to be more holistic – there is a focus on moving vehicles rather than meeting the needs of the large numbers of people who walk or ride bicycles in India’s towns and cities.
Environment:
• The deteriorating urban environment is taking a toll on people’s health and productivity and diminishing their quality of life.

Fast Facts:

Most Urbanized States: Tamil Nadu 43.9%; Maharashtra 42.4%; Gujarat 37.4%

3 out of world's 21 mega cities, in millions: Mumbai (19); Delhi (15); Kolkata (14)

Large Cities: 23 in 1991; 40 in 2001

Urban Population: 25% of 850 million in 1992; 28% of 1,030 million in 2002.

Estimated Urban Population by 2017: 500 million

Percentage of Urban Poor Residents: About 25%

Slum Population: About 41 million in 2001

Estimated Slum Population by 2017: 69 million

Technorati Tags: Urbanisation , India

Difference between rural-urban education attainment

A rather interesting paper came to my attention. The authors use the UNESCO yearbooks for 1964 to 1999 and use the ratio of rural to urban average schooling years to study rural–urban educational inequality, and they also investigate cross-country variation in the levels of rural and urban educational attainment. Quite a good literature review and a rather interesting empirical approach here.

I will quote their conclusions later on, but the fact that they find that the rural educational quality is heavily dependent upon the colonial history (you are better off if you had the Brits compared to the French!), type of legal system, degree of political stability as well as geographical characteristics, such as landlockedness and a country's surface area.

If there is too much inequality, then upwardly mobile and ambitious people will move to urban areas so if you wanted to manage the migration to urban areas, you might want to consider these issues as well.

I quote their conclusions at length:

In this paper, we have studied differences between rural and urban educational attainment across a diverse group of 56 countries. Using the ratio of rural to urban average years of schooling as our measure of rural–urban educational inequality, we find that countries with greater resources and those with more effective channels to allocate these resources have lower RUEI. Such distributional channels seem to be influenced by institutional characteristics, such as the type of legal system, colonial history, degree of political stability as well as geographical characteristics, such as landlockedness and a country's surface area.

Some of the most significant results we find are about the impact of colonial histories on RUEI. We find that countries with colonial pasts in general, and those that gained their independence in the post-war period in particular, have greater RUEI. We also find that in countries with legal systems of French origin, the educational inequality between rural and urban citizens is much wider than in other countries, implying greater RUEI. This may be associated with the bureaucracy of French legal systems and urban bias identified in the literature; see La Porta et al. (1999) for the former and Henderson (2005) for the latter. Conversely, countries with legal systems of British origin exhibit lower RUEI, which may be due to the types of colonies settled by the British. British colonies were less likely to be extractive and more likely to involve a high degree of settlement, with colonists demanding the rights and privileges afforded to citizens in the colonizing country (see Acemoglu et al., 2001). We also identified an interaction effect between the level of economic development and some of the factors already mentioned. Most important were the interactions with legal systems and colonial histories. We found the French (British) legal system variable to have a positive (negative) interaction with economic development. That is, developing economies exhibit more (less) rural–urban educational inequality if they have a legal system of French (British) origin, while the reverse is true of developed economies. On the other hand, countries with colonial pasts and those with post-war independence have higher RUEI, regardless of development.

In addition, we find that riskier human capital investment, less credit availability and landlockedness of nations are all associated with relatively lower rural educational levels and greater RUEI. Conversely, larger formal labor markets and better infrastructure are associated with lower RUEI.

In light of the impact of human capital on economic growth (see for example, Doppelhofer et al., 2004), our results suggest that colonial history and the types of legal systems in place (British versus French) have long run implications for countries. Overall, rural–urban differences in human capital accumulation seem to have been considerably influenced by the historical, and in many cases, colonially-imposed institutional structure within a country.

Mehmet A. Ulubasoglu and Buly A. Cardak, International comparisons of rural-urban educational attainment: Data and determinants, European Economic Review, Volume 51, Issue 7, , October 2007, Pages 1828-1857. Abstract: We study cross-country differences in rural and urban educational attainment by using a data set comprising 56 countries. We focus on the determinants of rural-urban educational inequality, which is measured by the ratio of rural to urban average years of schooling within each country. We find that riskier human capital investment, less credit availability, a colonial heritage, a legal system of French origin and landlockedness of nations are all associated with relatively lower rural educational levels and greater rural-urban educational inequality. Conversely, larger formal labor markets, better infrastructure and a legal system of British origin are associated with relatively higher rural educational levels and lower rural-urban educational inequality. We also identify an interaction effect between economic development level and some of these factors. In particular, we find that as development level increases, the negative (positive) relationship between French (British) legal systems and rural-urban educational inequality is reversed and becomes positive (negative). Keywords: Human capital; Economic geography; Education; Rural and urban educational inequality

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A City Leader Speaks - worthwhile to read

Here is an interview of Sheila Dikshit, the Chief Minister of Delhi. Delhi is a very very old city, has 13 million people currently living there with 500,000 moving in every year! you can imagine the challenges of managing and administering that city!. Ken Livingstone or his successors think they have a problem, HA!, they should try this city.

Anyway, here are some extracts if you do not want to register to read the full interview.

Delhi is straining under the weight of a vast and growing population. More than 13 million¹ people live there, and half a million more move in every year. Decision making can be excruciatingly slow, especially since her administration shares authority in the city with elected municipal leaders and a lieutenant governor appointed by India’s president.

We have people with outstanding and very innovative minds. This country is not short of wealth. This country is not short of skills. This country is not short of brains. What we lack, and I think what we always have lacked in this country, is effective management in the government.

I can give you a very interesting example. Government schools in Delhi were performing very badly. The pass percentage on standardized tests was 35 to 37 percent. We looked into it and found that the government spent 900 rupees per child per month, while nongovernment schools, which were performing better, were spending a maximum of 700 to 800 rupees per child. We brought the teachers together and asked, “Obviously, you are the best paid, so why are you not delivering? What do we need to do to motivate you?” And when the teachers got motivated, children performed better. Today the pass percentage has risen to 82 percent, half a percentage point more than nongovernment schools.

I can give you another example concerning the problem of exporting. There were 17 different forms that had to be filled out to export something. So we had a talk with the relevant authorities and said, “Please, let’s reduce this.” Other countries have 2 or 3 forms, and it’s done with. So they set up this committee, and when they came back with a solution, instead of 17 forms, 25 forms had to be filled out. So you see it’s the mind-set, especially in administration, that needs to be changed. We are addressing it, but I don’t think we are addressing it seriously enough.

I was in Himachal³ just about four weeks ago. One panchayat,⁴ which is the lowest level of government, told me that several years ago they were poverty stricken. They couldn’t get even two square meals a day. In the past three years they made nine crores⁵ exporting flowers. So they’re beginning to learn. Where the income of 60 to 80 families was virtually zero it came up to nine crores. They’ve tasted it. And there’s going to be no stopping them from becoming role models for the rest of the panchayat—year round.

The Quarterly: Has infrastructure been able to keep pace with growth in the city?

Sheila Dikshit: It is keeping pace now, but we should be ahead. The fact that we have been able to cater to the half million people coming into the city each year in everything except housing is the good point. The bad point is that it’s slow. For me, it’s not fast enough. With the technologies we have today, we should be able to build infrastructure much faster.

Archaic systems and a great multiplicity of authorities in Delhi are slowing us down. You have the federal government. You have my government. You have the municipality. We are a state government without, for instance, the power of owning land. It’s a great problem. We have a lieutenant governor here representing the government of India, which no other state has. We work with our hands tied. It’s very unique.

AND THIS IS CRUCIAL!

The Quarterly: How can other Indian cities follow Delhi’s example?

Sheila Dikshit: They should be made into city-states,¹¹ and we should start with five cities: Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, and so on. I am sure politically no one would agree with this, but I think administratively it would be good for the country’s development. Create city-states and give them the power to undertake development. They should not be under the state governments but rather under their own chief minister or chief administrator or whatever you want to call the position. They would collect their own revenues, maybe sharing a percentage with the other states. You have to develop your cities, especially if you’re envisaging that in the next 20 years 55 to 60 percent of India’s population will be urban. You just can’t do it with the same old administration where you’re dependent on various constituents for every penny.

 

Technorati Tags: Cities , development , urbanisation , democracy , employment , India