I finally got my Bangkok photos together.
Tag Archive for 'Cities'
I’m back in “The States,” so now’s a good time for July 06-June 07’s One Year of Cities!
Anaheim, CA, USA
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Singapore, Singapore
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Jakarta, Indonesia
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (*visted w/o staying)
Klang, Malaysia
Bangkok, Thailand
Melbourne, Australia
Auckland, New Zealand
Rotorua, New Zealand
So, the grand tour’s over and I have an empty headache from sleeping 13 hours last night/morning/afternoon. For the rest of today, I’m going to allow myself the luxury of doing jack-crap guilt-free. Starting tomorrow, in the next month-and-a-half I need to: get a new driver’s license, go over to LA, start on Robert’s website, help out Adora, look for apartments in New Haven, unpack and sort my stuff, and work at DKP. Also, I need to sort and upload my photos, answer emails, write up my travels, and read all the books I bought without reading. I’m going to try to update this blog at least three times a week, because it won’t be long before life starts up again.
It’s been brought to my attention that gasoline’s glancing four bucks back in the States. At $70 a tank, owning a car goes from “expensive” to “batshit loco.” Say you’re thirty miles from your job, go to work five times a week, and drive a 22-mpg Honda Accord—that’s $245 a month, not including the cost of insurance, depreciation, or actually having a life. Compared to $52 for a LA Metro or $45 for a SF Muni Monthly Pass, and catching a bus starts to look pretty good.
On a personal level it’s a pain, but I think expensive gas could be great for America. It was the combo of cars, cheap gas, cheap land, and the Federal Highway Act of 1956 that lead to the rise of suburbs, the rise of commuter culture, the rise of apathy and modern conservatism, the rise of the “new” Republican Party, smog-soaked skies, ailing civic society, and the blanding of America. Isolated, bored, chained to routine, Americans forgot what it meant to care about anything besides themselves and their TVs.
Discouraging driving, encouraging public transit, building real cities—putting people into daily contact with each other, diversifying daily life, raising the empathy essential to a healthy society—it can all start with cars being too damn expensive to drive.
I know it sounds like a bit much, we are how we live.
*Take a look my Irvine v. Paris comparison. Irvine’s made up of super-low-density, one-storey houses around cul-de-sacs, which is incredibly inefficient: cul-de-sacs force you to drive, and drive a lot, because you have to navigate a maze of streets before you can go anywhere. Paris, in comparison, is a smushed grid of 4-to-8 storey flats, which is good because you have comfortably high density—high density means that first floor shops and restaurants have enough customers to stay in business, meaning your daily needs are right there, and mass transit has enough riders to be practical, meaning you don’t need a car. And gee, you might actually know your neighbors.
Oh dayamn, some hot shit’s going up in The City!
Apparently, Renzo Piano’s swooped in and created proposals for five new towers to compliment the proposed Transbay Transit Center tower: 1200, 1200, 900, 900, 600 and 1200+ feet tall. The towers will be mixed-use, including condos, hotels, and office space. Hells yeah. The idea is to generate tax revenue for the Transbay Station project, which is set to go from slightly scary pigeon roost to the Grand Central Station of the West Coast. Indeed, thirteen towers are being proposed, of which Renzo’s are only the tallest.
Please please please let this happen.
High-rise construction in SF stalled after the 1980s because of 1) hippies against “Manhattanization” and 2) the later dot-com bust. Of these, it’s the damn hippies that fill me with dread—in SF, hippies have a lot of power, and they could easily derail the whole project if their smokey desires saw fit. They have a lot of practice choking San Francisco’s future. The following is a typical hippie response, from the enjoyable but flaming liberal SF Bay Guardian:
All the new high-rises the Planning Department is reviewing will contain what’s known as market-rate housing. That translates to condos selling for prices far beyond the reach of most San Franciscans. (…) The new neighborhoods are going to be nothing but very wealthy enclaves, the equivalent of vertical gated communities. Families who are being driven out of San Francisco by high housing costs won’t find refuge here; the housing is designed for singles, childless couples, retired people — and world travelers who want a nice San Francisco pied-à-terre.
Oh noes, rich people are going to live there! Ugh. See, here’s the thing: everyone wants SF to be cheaper, particularly in terms of housing. Housing prices are so high partiall
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