U R B A N
S T A R S
let’s twinkle our city
S A F E T Y research book
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C O N V I E N C E S T O R I E S, TAIWAN Boasting over 9,200 convenience stores in an area of 35,980 km² and a population of 22.9 million, Taiwan has the Asia Pacific’s and perhaps the world’s highest density of convenience stores per person: one store per 2,500 people or .0004 stores per person. As of 1 January 2009, Taiwan also has 4,800 7-Eleven stores, and thus the world’s highest density of 7-Elevens per person: one store per 4,786 people or .000210 stores per person. In Taipei, it is not unusual to see two 7-Elevens across the street from or several of them within a few hundred meters of each other. Because they are found everywhere, convenience stores in Taiwan provide services on behalf of financial institutions or government agencies such as collection of the city parking fee, utility bills, traffic violation fines, and credit card payments. Eightyone percent of urban household shoppers in Taiwan visit a convenience store each week.
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The idea of being able to purchase food items, drink, fast food, magazines, videos, computer games, and so on 24 hours a day and at any corner of a street makes life easier for Taiwan’s extremely busy and rushed population.
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HIGH LINE, NEW YORK CIT Y
The High Line is a public park built on an historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side. It is owned by the City of New York, and maintained and operated by Friends of the High Line. Founded in 1999 by community residents, Friends of the High Line fought for the High Line’s preservation and transformation at a time when the historic structure was under the threat of demolition. It is now the non-profit conservancy working with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to make sure the High Line is maintained as an extraordinary public space for all visitors to enjoy. In addition to overseeing maintenance, operations, and public programming for the park, Friends of the High Line works to raise the essential private funds to support more than 90 percent of the park’s annual operating budget, and to advocate for the preservation and transformation of the High Line at the Rail Yards, the third and final section of the historic structure, which runs between West 30th and West 34th Streets.
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Impact The recycling of the railway into an urban park has spurred real estate development in the neighborhoods that lie along the line. Mayor Bloomberg noted that the High Line project has helped usher in something of a renaissance in the neighborhood: by 2009, more than 30 projects were planned or under construction nearby. On the other hand, the real estate boom has its victims as well: many well-established businesses in West Chelsea have closed due to loss of neighborhood customer base or rent increases. Crime has been extraordinarily low in the park. Shortly after the second section opened, The New York Times reported that there have been no reports of major crimes such as assaults or robberies since it opened. Parks Enforcement Patrols had written summonses for various infractions of park rules, such as walking dogs or bicycles on the walkway, but at a rate lower than Central Park. Park advocates attributed that to the high visibility of the High Line from the surrounding buildings, a design feature inspired by the writings of urbanist Jane Jacobs. "Empty parks are dangerous", David told the newspaper. "Busy parks are much less so. You’re virtually never alone on the High Line." Residents who have bought apartments next to the High Line have adapted to its presence in varying ways. For the most part though, their responses are positive. A New Yorker columnist was of the opinion, when reviewing the diner renamed for the High Line, that "the new Chelsea that is emerging on weekends as visitors flood the elevated park ... [is] touristy, overpriced, and shiny."
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O N E L O VE CI T Y Co penha g en , Denmark
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Grand but empty public squares and free but intimidating art galleries are an issue in many contemporary cities. But for 10 days in the summer of 2009, one of Copenhagen’s biggest new squares was transformed into a lively cultural marketplace, a platform for participation and a social meeting space. One Love City was the result of a collaborative effort between the public sector, private businesses and a broad coalition of community organisations.
RECOGNISING OPEN ENDED APPROACH EXPERIENCE
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KOWLOON WA L L E D C I T Y,
Hong Kong
Kowloon Walled City was a densely populated, largely ungoverned settlement in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Originally a Chinese military fort, the Walled City became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898. Its population increased dramatically following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. In 1987, the Walled City contained 33,000 residents within its 6.5-acre (0.026 km2; 0.0102 sq mi) borders. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was controlled by Triads and had high rates of prostitution, gambling, and drug use. In January 1987, the Hong Kong government announced plans to demolish the Walled City. After an arduous eviction process, demolition began in March 1993 and was completed in April 1994. Kowloon Walled City Park opened in December 1995 and occupies the area of the former Walled City. Some historical artifacts from the Walled City, including its yamen building and remnants of its South Gate, have been preserved there..
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Ida Shum a 62-year-old former resident now living in Hung Hom, agreed that the some of the worst and poorest people in Hong Kong lived there. She said it was a haven for triad groups such as the 14K and Sun Yee On, who jealously controlled their territory. But she also said there was much more to the Walled City than that. She remembered how when it was raining, the street was nearly always flooded. Water would rise to people's knees with trash floating around, but the residents just walked through it in their bare feet. No problem, no matter how difficult, could be overcome.
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Shum described how her neighbour always helped her take care of her children and they cooked for each other. This allowed her to focus on her work and earn money to feed her family. "We all had very good relationships in very bad conditions. "Even now, many people stay in touch with each other even though some old friends are overseas," Shum said. "People who lived there were always loyal to each other. In the Walled City, the sunshine always followed the rain."
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P RUI TT I GO E M Y T H ,
St. Louis, Missouri, US
Pruitt窶的goe was a large urban housing project first occupied in 1954 in the U.S. city of St. Louis, Missouri. Living conditions in Pruitt窶的goe began to decline soon after its completion in 1956. By the late 1960s, the complex had become internationally infamous for its poverty, crime, and segregation. Its 33 buildings were torn down in the mid-1970s, and the project has become an icon of urban renewal and public-policy planning failure. The complex was designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the World Trade Center towers and the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport main terminal.
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It isn’t an architecture issue at all – it’s a neighborhood issue and an inner city issue. “By the 1970s, it had imploded on itself with vacancy,” he says. What had started out as a Le Corbusier-inspired solution to 19th-century slums had itself been transformed into much more of the same problem. “The slums weren’t the symptoms, but the cause,” he says. “Pruitt-Igoe was viewed as a solution but it wasn’t, either. The reality is that the buildings don’t matter all that much – there were the same problems in the older buildings across Jefferson Street. It isn’t an architecture issue at all – it’s a neighborhood issue and an inner city issue.” The St. Louis Housing Authority spent $5 million in vain trying to cure the problems at Pruitt-Igoe. On March 16, 1972, a day that postmodernist architecture historian Charles Jencks hailed as “the day Modernism died,” three of the high-rise buildings were demolished. A year later, the rest came down. Now, 40 years later, on March 16, 2012, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” will open to multiple screenings, coast-to-coast. It’s a painful, informative treatise on the decline of a post-war American city, viewed through the lens of one hard-hit housing project.
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E L D ER S A H R E T H E AR T S ,
Brookly, NY
Elders Share the Arts (ESTA) affirms the creative potential of older adults and upholds their time-honored role as bearers of history and culture by using the power of the arts to transmit their stories and life experiences for the benefit of all generations.
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ounded in 1979 by Susan Perlstein, Elders Share the Arts (ESTA) has worked with older adults in community-based sites throughout New York City to empower them to find and give creative voice to their stories and life experiences. Starting in 1979 with a single living history theater workshop at the Hodson Senior Center (the nation's first senior center located in the heart of the South Bronx), ESTA soon grew to work in five other senior centers in the Bronx. The performing groups that emerged, all working with material drawn from their own lives, laid the basis for the formation of the Pearls of Wisdom, an acclaimed ensemble of elder storytellers that continue to tour New York City to this day. Soon after, ESTA began to explore the use of other art forms such as writing, dance, and the visual arts so that living history theater quickly became living history arts. ESTA's beginning coincided with and responded to major developments in the fields of gerontology and oral history. In gerontology, the psychiatrist Robert Butler, in his provocative book, Why Survive? Growing Old
in America (1975), challenged the long-held medical belief that reminiscence was an early sign of senility and, as such, should be vigorously discouraged. Instead, he argued that reminiscence, an activity engaged in by people of all ages but in a heightened way by older adults, is an essential part of healthy aging. Telling stories, and repeating those that hold particular significance, is vital to the creative process of achieving psychological integration - a process rooted in the discovery and passing on of one's legacy. Concurrently, the field of oral history, initially revived in the 1960's, had gained new respect and attention as a method of recovering and validating the lives of ordinary people and, in particular, the lives of ethnically diverse people, women, and those lacking official power or status. Over the years, ESTA's programs have continued to evolve. In addition to programs for well elders, ESTA works with people who have early-stage dementia. Intergenerational programming began in 1991, in the Bronx, and was cited for excellence by the
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United States Committee for the Observance of the United Nations International Year of Older Persons in 1999. In 2001, ESTA was selected to be one of four participating sites nationwide in the groundbreaking research study, "Creativity and Aging" conducted by Dr. Gene Cohen, Director of the Institute on Health, Humanities, and Aging at George Washington University. The first longitudinal study of its kind, findings point to the direct impact of creative engagement on overall physical, mental, and emotional health. Furthermore, Cohen believes that creativity in older adults can flourish with greater depth and richness given their vast knowledge and experiences that inform their creative efforts. This belief inspired and continues to be reflected in every program at Elders Share the Arts.
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CL ONDAL K I N T R AVE L L E R’S D EV E L OPME N T GRO U P, Dublin
The community was not safe, not clean and poor. A group of ten women make a organization to held events like making model,drama, pottery, quilting, photography, video, literacy and other series of event, make a strong sense of beloning
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D E EPA L AYA , India
A inspire way for children in slum to make school more interesting, and it’s the chance to change their life.
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The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators Charles Landry The relationship between activity level and degree of safety on a street. If there a re many people on the street, there is considerable mutual protection, and if it is lively, many people survey the street from their windows because it is meaningful and entertaining to keep up with events. The natural surveillance of public areas is one factor in this context. Equally important are the natural intrest and feeling of responsibility created when residents themselves have outdoor areas they can use comfortably and when access roads and open areas are clearly connected to the individual residences or groups of residences in the form of precisely defined common areas, rather than as undefined and underused tracts of no-man’s land.
PLAY GROUND Ground-up City, Play as a design tool The playgrounds is as the smallest stitch in the urban fabric, one that would ensure its cohesion. Playground have a specific strength in connecting people to a places. This social connection gives identity to public space.
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Defensible Space “ A person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers ‘... the streets of a city must do most of the job of handling strangers, for this is where strangers, they must protect the many, many peaceable and well-meaning strangers who use them ensuring their safety too as they pass through.’ (Jacobs 1961:45) ‘... so that they can again become livable and controlled not bu police but by a community of people sharing a common terrain.’ Defensible Space relies on selfhelp rather than on government intervention, and so it is not vulnerable to government’s withdrawal of support. It depends on resident involvement to reduce crime and remove the presence of criminals. It has the ability to bring people of different incomes and race together in a mutually beneficial union. For low-income people, Defensible Space can provide an introduction to the benefits of mainstream life and an opportunity to see how their own actions can better the world around them and lead to upward mobility.
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“TRUST IS KEY IN SOCIAL ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS " — Elinor Ostrom, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences