As GM steps up to the federal bailout trough, it seems to have emboldened a number of municipal governments to belly up too:

Three major American cities buffeted by the global financial crisis are requesting at least $50 billion in federal funds to help pay for infrastructure improvements, pensions and short-term borrowing.

Philadelphia, Phoenix and Atlanta are asking U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to release funds from the $700 billion financial bailout authorized by Congress last month.

Full Article: Yahoo! News via Reuters

John Thackara, organizer of the far-thinking Doors of Perception and Designs of The Times (DoTT) conferences, is pulling together a new expo that will take place later this month in Saint-Etienne in the south of France.

City Eco Lab will feature a variety of projects that provoke discussion about sustainable design:

What are the approaches taken by design in order to bring about much needed changes in our lifestyles, with a view to creating a sustainable world?

City Eco Lab is an event, a market of travelling projects that bears witness to experiments carried out around the country. For this reason, the 2008 biennial, will organise workshops, encounters and exchanges centred around daily life themes: foodstuffs, water, energy, mobility etc.  Visitors will be encouraged to think about how they might use these commodities in a more sustainable world.  

Not to be missed, though I think John would prefer you don't go unless you're already there. As he writes on the Doors of Perception blog:

If you know of another event about city-regions and design that includes permaculture, mushrooms, spin-farming, fritzing, open money, peak protein,alternative trade networks, dry toilets, sustainable urban drainage, alternate reality games, watershed planning, seed banks, de-motorisation, and VeloWalas - go to it. That way I won't suffer remorce for my encouragement of long-distance travel. 

Mitchell Moss is one of the most interesting and insightful commentators on New York City's politics and economy. He wrote an op-ed for the New York Post recently that explains why the city's ability to constantly re-invent itself means that the sky is not falling:

New Yorkers worried about the long-term impact of the global financial crisis should cheer up: The city will emerge all the stronger.

Clearly, the collapse of major investment banks headquartered here has harmed the city economy and tax revenues - and will also strain local nonprofits. But these are short-term effects; longer-term trends are to our advantage.

London, New York's chief rival for "world financial capital," is now declining rapidly: The British economy is simply too small to sustain the financial services it had attracted, and its finance jobs are moving to the Middle East.

And the world is evolving from a handful of financial centers (London, New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo) to a chain of them that includes Dubai, Shanghai, Singapore, Mumbai, Johannesburg and Abu Dhabi. Among these, New York will have a strong appeal to many investors - the intense regulation and transparency that the United States will impose.

Read the full editorial

John Geraci, a former colleague from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program has just launched DIYcity.org:

DIYcity is a site dedicated to finding ways people can make their cities work better with the use of emerging web technologies. 

What do I mean 'making cities work better'?  I mean making them more efficient, more effective, more sustainable, better able to respond to problems, friendlier and generally more accessible to the individual user.   DIYcity aims to accomplish these goals with user-built applications created on top of existing web technologies.  It is a site where problems are posed and solutions are offered in the form of functioning apps, submitted by anyone and for use by all.

This is an exciting time to be launching this project for two reasons: 

One, we are increasingly aware of the need for our cities to be efficient, effective and sustainable, and yet at the same time cities' abilities to respond to these needs are collapsing, as city budgets get cut due to the current financial crisis.

Two, virtually every day there are new applications and technologies on hand for organizing people, sharing information, plugging into central data pools, aggregating individual input, and doing all of this aggregating/accessing/organizing faster and more easily.

These two factors taken together make me think that cities, as systems, are on the verge of an intense and exciting period of reinvention. 

DIYcity aims to be at the center of that reinvention.
 
The site, you will find, is very raw.  I am announcing it now in its raw state because I need you all to help get it to the next stage, that of a thriving, diffuse place of discussion and ideas.

Please take a minute and check out the site.  If you like it and are interested in the idea here are some ways you could help out:

- if you live in the NYC area, join the DIY New York City group.  That group will be holding a meetup some time in the near future.

- if you live elsewhere and want, you can join DIYcity, log in and create a group for your local area.

- if you use twitter, please tweet about this.

- if you happen to blog, feel free to blog about it.

- finally, and if nothing else, sign up and join the DIYcity main group and contribute to the thought process whenever you feel the urge.

Feel free to forward this email.  I welcome all feedback, and look forward to seeing you on DIYcity.

John

The Comparative Urban Studies Project at the Wilson Center puts together an ongoing series of excellent talks that are worth participating in, if you find yourself in DC.

The latest:

Culture Meets Development in the “New” India—Book Launch: The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai 

November 06 2008, 4:00 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.

Event Details

Speaker:
Mary E. Hancock

Mary E. Hancock is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she holds a joint appointment in the anthropology and history departments. Previously, she taught at the University of Chicago and at the University of Texas in Austin. 

Her new book, The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai, analyzes the expressions of collective memory and nostalgia that have shaped Chennai’s public spaces. It considers how new modes of class formation and cultural and religious nationalisms intersect in debates around the representation of local pasts. 

The New York Times has a good op-ed today, arguing that by ignoring the concerns of educated, metropolitan voters, the Republican party is becoming the party of the past, and the Democrats are engaging the future.

Two years ago, a list of the nation’s brainiest cities was put together from Census Bureau reports — that is, cities with the highest percentage of college graduates, which is not the same as smart, of course.

These are vibrant, prosperous places where a knowledge economy and cool things to do after hours attract people from all over the country. Among the top 10, only two of those metro areas — Raleigh, N.C., and Lexington, Ky. — voted Republican in the 2004 presidential election.

This year, all 10 are likely to go Democratic. What’s more, with Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia now trending blue, Republicans stand to lose the nation’s 10 best-educated states as well.

Full article: "The Party of Yesterday"

Drive around the acres of vacant new luxury housing estates in Shanghai's Lu Jia Zui section of Pudong New Area like I did last March, and this won't come as any suprise: China is in for a housing bubble burst potentially worse than what's hit the US, UK, Spain and elsewhere in the last 6 months.

As BusinessWeek Asia Online reports:

Across China, property sales fell 15% in August over the previous year. They're off more than 55% in Beijing and by 39% in Shanghai, reports the National Bureau of Statistics. Prices across the country registered a slight decline in August, the first time in years they haven't increased. In the south, where the downturn began last year, prices are off by 30% in the past 12 months. "There is a big likelihood that next year will be even lower," says Li Yong, general manager of real estate brokerage Century 21 China in Changsha, an industrial city located 700 miles west of Shanghai.

Full article: The Housing Crisis Spreads to China

This exciting multimedia site lays out a very ambitious program of research, workshops and multi-media publishing, though its not at all clear how it will be funded, or even whether it is an academic research project, NGO-type effort, or a consulting business.  "19" stands for the number of cities, with more than "20" million people in the "21"st century

But the graphics sure are pretty, and they seem to have framed the issues and challenges well.

http://www.192021.org/

There have been a number of efforts like this over the last few years, to create and collect massive data books about the changing urban face of the planet. Dutch publisher 010's Metropolitan World Atlas is one, and Deyan Sudjic's The Endless City a bit more recent. You might even put Rem Koolhaas's Mutations in the same category that I like to call "aging Western planners and architects expressing their awe at the Rising East and the Sinking South".

Not that these books are not well-researched or completely lacking analytical depth, but they are to a large degree, coffee-table books. What irritates me most, beyond their consistent tone of "discovering" the energy of these places, is that they are obscuring so much good work by scholars and journalists who are observing and participating in the urban revolution over much longer periods of time and more initimately that the st-architects who drop in for conferences and meetings with clients and politicians.

Two that come to mind are Thomas Campanella's Concrete Dragon, which has to be the best urban planning book of 2008, and traces China's current urban reconstruction back through the city plans of that nation's imperial middle ages and beyond. My favorite passage is where he describes the ironic experience of taking a bus to Beijing's first drive-in movie theater in the late 1990s. He then proceded to rent a car for the movie, along with many others, from the car rental shop across the street from the drive-in.

The other, Shadow Cities, is by journalist Robert Neuwirth who lived for 6-9 months in four urban squatter communities around the world - in Kenya, Turkey, India, and Brazil. I had the luck of seeing Neuwirth speak about this work at the Wilson Institute in Washington shortly after its publication. His 2005 talk at TED is simply breathtaking.

So to put it briefly, I hope that 19.20.21 isn't going to be another "here are a bunch of big cities, aren't they scary?" projects. There are a sufficient number of people doing long-term, intensive research on the challenges these cities face, and translating some of the conversations going on about the future of these communities, that its time to take our investigations of what this means for the rest of the world to the next level.

You know an idea is gaining ground when you see multiple smart people come up with it more or less independently. Today, I'm talking about is a growing realization of the opportunity to use of Web 2.0 technologies to enable do-it-yourself smart city app-building.

Eric Paulos, formerly the most vocal proponent of urban computing while at Intel Research Berkeley, and now director of the Living Environments Lab at Carnegie Mellon University is holding a panel at next year's SIGCHI (Human-computer interaction) meeting called "DIY for CHI: Methods, Communities and Values of Reuse and Customization".

John Geraci, alumni of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and founding staff member at neighborhood blog aggregator outside.in, is launching DIYcity, a network of open collaboration taht seeks to create social apps that make cities work smarter, more efficiently, and more sustainably.

The City of Seoul, South Korea has morphed its webzine promotion campaigns into something that is starting to look like a multi-media blog about expat life in Seoul.

"The Seoulites" features user-submitted photos and videos about life in what, depending on how you measure it, is the world's fourth largest metropolis.

Link