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The best city stories from around the web this week discover the sociable alleyways and food stalls in Chengdu, New York City’s most accessible ruins, the transformation of Birmingham’s streets and the “immorality” of Portland in 1913.
We’d love to hear your responses to these stories and any others you’ve read recently, both at Guardian Cities and elsewhere: share your thoughts in the comments below.
Collisions in Chengdu
As our socialising increasingly happens online, is it crucial to design urban spaces that facilitate meetings between people in real life? Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and MeetUp CEO Scott Heifermann think so. They call these meetings “collisions”, and argue we should encourage them in our cities. Next City explores the way this happens in the Chinese city of Chengdu, where food stalls fill every available space at night: on street corners, alleyways and beneath overpasses.
As food unites the city’s residents, so social divisions break down. Unfortunately, the new districts of the city are planned in a way that don’t enable these interstitial hubs of activity – dominated by wide boulevards instead of winding streets and alleyways.
The ruins of New York
Atlas Obscura takes us through 11 of New York City’s most “explorer-friendly ruins”: the Rockaway Beach Branch rail line; the Gothic-style smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island; deserted military forts; and New York’s first airport, Floyd Bennett Field. Some might call it ruin porn, but these urban remnants tell a powerful story of the city’s past.
N’awlins and the Family Creole
New Orleans’ relationship to its Creole “family” of cities in the Latin Caribbean sphere is explored in a new exhibition from the Historic New Orleans Collection, with nearly four decades’ worth of photographs by Richard Sexton. Architizer presents a selection of Sexton’s images in a captivating gallery that teases out the architectural and historical ties between the Big Easy and the cities of Havana, Quito, Cartagena and Cap-Haïtien – as well as the inequality that is expressed visually through the cityscape.
Park(ing)
Parking spaces into actual parks: it’s a bona fide trend worldwide, most notably through the Park(ing) Day scheme. This month, the sustainable transport charity Sustrans set out to reclaim Birmingham’s city centre, transforming parking spaces into places for people to sit, play and relax.
They also closed half a dozen streets to cars for one afternoon, and painted them in bright colours to invite children to play there, another example of the growing ‘playable city’ movement. It raises the question (again!): what if we got rid of cars from city centres permanently?
Moral maps
Now, here’s a map you don’t see every day. We’re used to ones that show property prices, green space, walkability ... but what about immorality? Big Think reveals a map of Portland from 1913 that shows no streets, houses or parks. Instead, it is entirely made up of dots that assess the “moral standing” of the city’s hotels and rentable rooms. Places range from perfectly wholesome to “wholly given up to immorality” – which, in this context, historians believe applies to the practice of prostitution. One house is labelled: “Outwardly respectable, but immorality is permitted if done in a quiet way.”
How do we encourage more meetings between strangers in our cities? Will we see the slow death of parking spaces in city centres? Share your thoughts in the comments below
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