The New Yorker writer David Owen has shown the way in his book Green Metropolis. He argues, far from being an ecological nightmare, densely populated New York presents a model of an environmental utopia. New Yorkers consume less oil, electricity and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, consume less, discard less and spend far less time in cars. Manhattan residents rank first in public transport and last in per capita greenhouse gases. Its wealth, dynamism and talent bank combine to make it one of the buzziest places on the planet.

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Gus: sure but most of the concentrated entombed Manhataners produce nothing much that does not use massive import of goods and the shifting of money... It's a very noisy place day and night.

Green Metropolis? Sydney was a Greener Metropolis by design way before any other large cities in the world. Many parks, nature strips, reserves, national parks within its confine and on its outskirts make this city unique.

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letters

I have never said we should shrink our population (''How Sydney can get its groove back'', September 14). What I have said is we need a plan before we continue our world-leading population growth.

Maxine McKew says Asians will laugh at us if we seek to manage the growth of our cities within environmental constraints. Then why are so many queuing up to come here? And why does the most respected measure of ''best cities'' - the Mercer guide - rank Sydney behind nine cities, all with a smaller population?

She repeats the myth that New York City (ranked 40 places below Sydney) is an environmental paradise. Obviously she hasn't spent too much time in the sprawling boroughs beyond expensive Manhattan. Less than 1 per cent of the city's energy is produced by anything other than fossil fuels. Little wonder that it doesn't feature in the top 50 eco-city rankings.

I agree with Ms McKew that we need smarter, better planned cities and less sloganeering - such as the ''shrink Australia crowd'' tag she dismisses me with. But I don't see how increasing our population at unsustainable rates will help us achieve any of that.

Dick Smith Terrey Hills

It looks as though Maxine McKew, having blown her chance at a second term, has started a new gig as a big business and developer lobbyist. Her failure to address any larger practical concern of creating a ''big Sydney'' is breathtaking.

South-east Queensland, including Brisbane, is a world recognised disaster area of global drying, using water far faster than it can ever be replaced. New Yorkers individually average lower consumption, but the city's footprint is hugely destructive outside its boundaries. Manila, Shanghai and Jakarta are home to some of the most irresponsible and rapacious corporations on the planet. Co-operative planning based on something other than greedy self-interest would be a novelty in Sydney as well. I can't see it happening soon.

Is Ms McKew moving into one of those massive, shiny, soulless new tenements lining the airport highways in one of these model cities sometime soon? I think not. Somewhere spacious and leafy for her, I suspect.

Alan Gannaway Thirroul

Maxine McKew says Sydney has lost its groove. Might this have something to do with state Labor's inability to plan, as demonstrated by cancelled transport projects?

She also defines Sydney too narrowly. Judging by its relentless advertising campaign, the Victorian government understands a big city extends well into its province or state. Retreating to a ''well designed'' city is not something London, New York and Shanghai are doing by building high-speed rail links into their regions.

Peter Egan Artarmon

Maxine McKew says Sydney has to have a bigger population to be beautiful, well planned and well designed. Why? She says we should aspire to be like Mumbai and Shanghai. Why? They aren't beautiful, well planned or well designed. Did the Herald edit out the parts of her speech that made sense?

Eric Claus Kings Langley

A transport lobbyist who said pensioners were "clogging up" public transport during peak hours has been slapped on the wrist - by his mum.

The Tourism and Transport Forum (TTF) has issued a report recommending scrapping concession fares for pensioners travelling on public transport during peak hours.

"You can't sustain a system where concession pensioner rates are clogging up peak-hour transport," the Forum's Chris Brown said.

But Mr Brown's mother, Jan Murray, says her son needs to "go and stand in the naughty corner" and think about what he said.

"I think it's a report he's reading from. I'm sure he doesn't believe it," she said.

"So this is a smack over the wrist publicly for him to go and stand in the naughty corner and think about it.

"You don't throw Granny off the train just to make way for a German backpacker or something."

The suggestion has also been condemned by the Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association and Unions NSW.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/23/3019890.htm?section=justin

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When I was in a restaurant in Hollywood, the actress playing momma (Throw Momma from the Train), Anne Ramsey, had taken "our table"... And there was no way we were going to get it back. Who in their right mind — including my iron-pumping gay hollywoodian figure-friends — would tackle her and throw her out of her seat, even POLITELY?

Thus we ate in the other corner, away from "our" window...

The choice is simple: do Sydneysiders want to continue moving towards a Los Angeles model of city or change the way we develop land and move towards a New York model?

Tony Recsei wants to ''save our suburbs'' from increased density (''Should Sydney have more high-rise apartments?'', October 30-31). But as someone too young to have been among the baby boomers as they took advantage of Sydney's previously affordable property market, I can't help but feel the suburbs he speaks of don't belong to my generation. And his suggestion that higher density developments are less sustainable and make housing less affordable is plainly wrong.

Denser models of development are the only way to create lively, diverse and accessible areas in Sydney. As the city's economy relies more and more on a creative and educated young workforce, higher-density housing is the best opportunity to cater for it - and allow my generation a foot on Tony's generation's property ladder.

Richard Mullane Enmore

Good services, amenities and infrastructure require economies of scale (Letters, November 1). We are already at a disadvantage due to our unfortunate geography. Yes, I mean Sydney Harbour. We need to crowd more people together to make transport options cheaper - as close to the centre as possible.

People can live very happily in high densities if we have good design. As a bonus, our cultural life will improve and my children may be able to afford somewhere to live.

Stephen Westgarth Enmore

http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/the-next-train-destination-21st-century-is-late-20101102-17c6w.html

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Gus: CRAP. I have lived in many places, many cities, I have visited lots... And lived in the bush of Africa... And spent lots of time in Europe's fabulous OLD preserved cities... All these talk of characters, of small shadows, of specific culture and style, and of relationship with people and space and nature. Go live in Firenze for starters...

High rise in places like Newtown, Enmore and Stanmore would be a disaster — a living cancer on an atmosphere that is cherished and shared by most. Cancer, if you don't know, is what it is because it lives "forever", even beyond the times it killed the host... If YOU want to live in high rise, go live in Burwood or Strathfield... (good public transport from there too... Even Chatswood, I have bagged here is not bad for horizontal living... it's only the shopping, office centres, public transport that are ghastly — as well as the traffic management. My opinion). Build high rise in Penrith, Parrammatta and West Mead if you must. But Enmore, Newtown, Marrickville and Stanmore have already acquired their heritage pension. There is beauty in the uninterrupted vistas and the old buildings (though a few new ones — out of character, mind you — have not yet disgraced the overall feeling. There is a tipping point in stylistic unity, at which the mix becomes crap).

Plonk a Horizon-scratcher (a misnomer — it should have been called Vertigalo, a mix between vertigo and vertical) anywhere in these areas an instantly one destroys the look of the place, with dark shadows and looming pressure from above... And I suppose, both of you "young lads" live in Enmore because you like the feel of the cafés, the restaurants and the vistas beyond. Plonk high rise there and you'ld kill the place... There is no room for tall building or even medium density in these inner suburbs of Sydney. In their own way, these suburbs are already "medium density"...

As I said before, go live somewhere else... and by the way, the flight paths of the planes that stream low in the sky above, place a necessary height restriction. But beyond that if you want New York living go live in New York for a while. And lock your doors with the tripple-latch deadlocks...

see pic at top...

An urban planning expert says town planners can learn a lot from the slums of Rio de Janeiro when it comes to building our future cities.

John Norquist, the president of the United States Congress for New Urbanism, is in Brisbane for the City of the Future Conference.

The former mayor of Milwaukee says population growth means high-density living will be the way of the future in Australian cities like Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

Mr Norquist points to Rio's favalas as examples of functional communities and says the informal arrangements made in slums are a good model for how councils can improve zoning laws.

"To give you an example of where you have a very strict plan like the capital of Brazil, Brasilia, where most of the streets are grade separated and everything is use separated and it's planned on the utopian model that was predominant in the 1950s," he said.

"The capital of Brazil is one of the most lifeless places on earth. The restaurants and the nightclubs and so forth that you find in Rio you don't find that in Brasilia - you find it in the slums around Brasilia.

"So planners need to learn from the way human beings arrange their lives informally when there's not a plan."

Mr Norquist says planning cities with transportation and sustainability in mind is the "convenient remedy, the inconvenient truth".

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Now, remind me where does Mr Norquist live again?

Instead of “going troppo” people should engage in discussion about a proposed update to Sydney’s Botanic Gardens and the Domain, a NSW government minister has suggested after former prime minister Paul Keating attacked the plans as an “atrocity”.

The Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust on Sunday revealed a draft master plan for the parkland on the edge of Sydney harbour – the first in almost 200 years.

The plans include a five-star hotel, a new ferry terminal and train station, “themed entry gardens”, a new cultural hub connected to other points in the garden by pathways, a plaza in front of the existing NSW Art Gallery and expansion of the gallery site. The plans also include a defined entry gate to the garden, new ferry terminal and “landscape restoration.”

Keating took particular umbrage with a proposed viewing platform at Mrs Macquarie’s Point.

"It is the nearest thing to a sacred site in Sydney – held sacred by the non-Aboriginal community as well as the Aboriginal community," he told the Sydney Morning Herald. "You do not need a construction on a natural point."

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/07/nsw-minister-says-critics-are-going-troppo-over-botanic-gardens-plan

Why not place a cable-car going from the garden right to the top of the Westfield tower? And a permanent Roma fair with dodgem cars for the kids who are so bored with the views. And a ferris wheel behind the Art gallery of New South Wales to echo that of Luna Park on the other side of the bay...?  I would also fancy a doggy salon for pampering obese pets after they went and pooed around the parkland? Anyway the viewing platform at Mrs Macquarie's point sounds too boring. It should include a massive Niagara style waterfall and a couple of brick shithouses plus a giant arrow with flashing lights pointing to were to look to see the view of the Opera House. I can see it, like art by the sea, a permanent blight on the near spiritual space in which the locals come to enjoy their city quietly. Piss off locals! This is for the benefit of PAYING tourists!.. Cash is the grand vision of everything...

See toon at top and read article...

Global city? Everything about the term makes me mad. Of course, there's bulls--t everywhere these days – so much that the University of Washington offers an analytical course titled Calling Bulls--t. Global city-ism should occupy an entire lecture. Global city-ism is not just bulls--t. It's retrograde, boring, environment-trashing, last-century bulls--t; dull, demeaning and reductivist. Worse, it undermines the Sydney we love.

Most of us think cities are too dull and technical to engage with. This suits the global corporates very well, much as, a century ago, it suited the local corporates to quarantine a "central business district" and send the women and children – the "fluffy slippers" – scurrying to the burbs. It suits the suits because it leaves them in charge.

read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/turnbulls-plan-for-sydney-is-yet-more-blan...

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Read also:

and:

la stinka utopia...

Around the world, from Canada to France, there is an insane density of intent to add more and more people in little boxes on top of each others. We all know of Hong Kong's inhabitable habitations. In Moscow, they are demolishing the old crumbling Kroutchev housing estates where people have to line up to go to the toilet, to replace them with more modern apartments. On this one we can not object. But on the other projects, we have to be far more objectionably savvy. In London we have fires in Grenfell. So we get enticements:

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The developer promises a “vibrant, integrated community atmosphere” at the soon to emerge South Village on the Princes Highway at Kirrawee.

Deicorp even hired the Sharks captain Paul Gallen to spruik the high-density development.

“South Village, Kirrawee will have a real community feel, the type of place you’re going to like to live …” he said in a brochure.

Read more: 

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/ugly-ducklings-or-swans-debate-rages...

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Vancouver, British Columbia: Between multimillion-dollar teardowns, blocks full of backyard cottages and towering condominiums that are sold and resold several times before they are even built, there is no shortage of anecdotes about this city's housing frenzy.

Here is a new one: Vancouver is so expensive that politicians want to tax its real estate market into submission, and many homeowners — who will lose money if home prices fall — think it's the best idea they've heard in years.

Read more: 

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/in-vancouver-a-housing-frenzy...

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MEANWHILE:

An abandoned skyscraper in the center of Caracas has become a haven for many people who have nowhere to go. RT introduced itself inside this famous tower to meet its inhabitants who created a real state in the State.

The construction of the "Tower of David" began in 1990 by billionaire David Brillembourg. But because of a financial crisis and the untimely death of his benefactor in 1993, work was suspended.

In 2007, people began to occupy the abandoned skyscraper. These residents have created a kind of state in the fully functional state, with a representative government and even an elected president. Families pay taxes on water and electricity and work together once a week to clear their territory of accumulated garbage.

Caracas has a high crime rate, and residents of the "Tower of David", often seen as the criminals of a disadvantaged neighborhood, face prejudice and discrimination. However, the families who live there stubbornly deny being malefactors.

The tower even houses a church, where RT's film crew attended the wedding of two residents.

In order to provide clean and decent housing for the inhabitants of this shanty skyscraper, the government has launched a resettlement program. But residents have mixed feelings when they leave this unique place they consider their home for so long ...

In July 2015, the last residents of the "Tower of David" were relocated.

Read more:

https://francais.rt.com/documentaires/49467-gratte-ciel-bidonville

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BUT:

The Elan (forward) Housing Bill has been under consideration in the Assembly since 30 May. Concrete and more concrete, decline in quality, threat on the coast ... His amendments are challenged by architects or associations, interviewed by RT France.

Architects and associations mobilized for several months, rabid against the Elan bill, on the evolution of housing, development and digital, under discussion in the National Assembly since May 30. "It exposes the France of tomorrow that Macron is drawing, wanting to make concrete everywhere", criticizes Christine Leconte, president of the Council of the Order of Architects in Ile-de-France, interviewed by RT France.

The State saying that we must build faster: it is a beautiful marketing speech.

The Elan bill, with its 3000 amendments, promises to "build more, better and cheaper." Would construction be a sector in difficulty, unable to build at a good pace? In Ile-de-France alone, however, construction targets reached 70,000 in 2016 and 2017, reaching 80,000. "When the state says that we must build quickly, it is a communication discourse. We never speak of quality, whereas it is a subject at the heart of the intimacy and the life of the French ", observes Christine Leconte.

Read more:

https://francais.rt.com/france/51238-macron-va-t-il-saccager-les-paysage...

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AND:

Clogged with traffic, noisy, poorly planned and struggling to cope with WestConnex and other construction.

Few would dispute NSW treasurer Dominic Perrottet's comment last year that Parramatta Road had to be "one of Australia's ugliest road corridors".

The occasion was the State Government announcing work would commence this financial year on the first of 32 projects to revitalise a 22-kilometre-long swathe of the city between the main western railway line and Parramatta River.

Read more:

RUBBISH. I AM ONE OF THE MANY: Parramatta road IS NOT UGLY (if you really want to find an ugly road: Military Road, already revamped, from Neutral Bay to Mosman, North-Shore Sydney). There are some fine buildings along Parramatta Road and where "new Buildings" are constructed, they need to be in harmony with the old ones which should be heritage listed. All we see on the plans from the State Government is tall buildings that will destroy the sky-line and add RUBBISH. All this "ugly" business of construction is designed to make us accept more streamlined cleaned ugliness on Parramatta Road. Even places like Summer Hill have succumbed to the high-rise disease in the middle of a lovely leafy suburb. The mix is creating an uneasy ugliness, despite the "architecturally well-designed" high rise with hubcaps. They are not "ugly" but incongruous. The mixing is unfortunate and will lead to the eventual destruction of the great and pleasant "leafy suburb"... 

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BY Gabriel Gavin

It’s easy to forget that cities like Penza, near Russia’s Volga river, even exist at all. More than 400 miles southeast of Moscow, it is best known for its singing cuckoo clock and the country’s first ever Stalin Centre, complete with a golden bust of the communist dictator.

And yet half a million people call the city home, around the same number as Atlanta or Sacramento. Neighbors chat with each other, newlyweds search for apartments, kids play together in the street, and families head out to the woods on the weekends to pick mushrooms and swim in the lakes. Out of the eye of much of the world, whole lives are lived here.

Penza’s once thriving high street has fallen into a chasm—just a literal chasm, with municipal authorities digging a colossal trench through the middle of the road as a precursor to pedestrianizing it altogether.

The businesses have stayed open: a Japanese-themed bookshop, independent shoe stores, even an English-language tuition agency. Customers skirt haphazardly around the unfenced abyss. “What if someone falls in?” I asked one local. “Better not to,” was the reply. Russia is not, it must be said, a nation of lawsuits and health and safety appraisals.

Not every city has been as resilient. In Europe and across the Atlantic, many towns have seen their central streets and local enterprises fall off the precipice in recent years over far less obvious challenges. Community after community has watched as its usual string of hardware stores, groceries, butchers, and other small businesses were replaced by bookmakers, vape shops, or, more likely, nothing at all.

The phenomenon is so familiar that, in the U.S., it has come to be known as the death of Main Street. The most quintessential part of American small town life, the family-run businesses and the quirky local characters behind their tills, has packed up and rolled down its shutters in recent years. With it went the heart of more than a few communities, now almost indistinguishable from each other.

Even in larger cities, where you might hope passing trade would save the mom-and-pop store, small shops have struggled to escape the same fate. Emily Talen, a professor of urbanism at the University of Chicago, conducted a survey of each and every one of 46,311 blocks in the northwestern city, in search of the classic American Main Street. Looking for a walkable district with independent retailers and cafes, she found depressingly few spots that fit the bill. “Are we suddenly just going to wake up to cities that don’t have these things anymore?” Talen asked. “Are we ok with that?”

It appears the answer is yes. Covid-19 has only intensified the pressures on those kinds of companies. Research shows that nearly 7.5 million small businesses across the U.S. have shut their doors since the start of the pandemic, and data from review site Yelp showed that 60 percent of those that suspended work during lockdowns will never reopen. These figures are catastrophic, but they represent merely the acceleration of a problem that was already getting out of hand.

The coronavirus hasn’t been tough on everyone. At the beginning of the year, online retailer Amazon posted profit increases of a colossal 200 percent, with hundreds of billions of dollars moving through its platform as more people than ever decided to spend their cash online. While some companies depend on customers turning up to take a table or spotting something in the window as they walk past, Amazon does best when you are sitting on your sofa. They’re betting those habits won’t change when the pandemic is finally consigned to the history books, anticipating that the golden age for home delivery and online streaming is only just beginning.

Other firms have found a niche during the pandemic, but few have found one as wide as Amazon. The lure of the brown cardboard package, it seems, is too much to resist. The tech giant’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has described the company’s mission as “to sell everything” to almost everyone.

Almost everyone, however, doesn’t seem to include the residents of Penza.

Amazon operates in 14 of the 20 largest global economies, but the world’s largest country by area is effectively off limits to the online retailer. While there have been mooted launches in Russia for many years, the business has always stopped short of actually announcing an entry into the market. Some analysts have chalked this up to Russia’s “authoritarian, nationalist regime” and “tensions with the U.S.” 

This seems at best an incomplete diagnosis, given that McDonald’s, the golden arches that signal American cultural dominance across the world, just announced it would break ground on its 800th Russian branch. Even with the omnipresent threat of nuclear war between the two nations, you can buy the same hamburger in Moscow as you can in Michigan. Russia even has its own unique selection of local menu items, ranging from battered prawns to “village fries” topped with barbecue sauce and bacon bits. The bread lines and anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Cold War are long gone, it’s safe to say.

If Russians will stump up for Big Macs, why not home delivery? Well, many already are placing orders online. WildBerries, owned by Russian entrepreneur Tatyana Bakalchuk, is often billed as the country’s own Amazon. It is getting more and more popular all the time. In 2019 alone, the platform’s turnover grew by 88 percent, bringing its revenue up to $3 billion. Customers are said to have made an average of 750,000 daily transactions, more than twice the total in the previous year. Rivalling Western alternatives, the service is able to dispatch everything from school equipment to sports gear and home furnishings within hours.

Other companies, virtually unknown outside Russia, include, Ozon, market capitalization $13 billion, and Lamoda, a Moscow-headquartered fashion seller that has financial backing from a German conglomerate. But those waiting in for deliveries will be in for a shock—by and large, these companies don’t deliver to the doorstep. In the vast expanse of Russia, with its notoriously bad postal service and confusing layouts, finding Apartment 4, Building 36, Door 7, 28 Lenin Street, would be a logistical nightmare for even the most committed mail worker.

Instead, firms like WildBerries and Ozon maintain a network of branded stores and pickup points in cities and towns across the country. Collecting a package is, therefore, not significantly easier than running into a small business. There’s little point placing an order for anything you can already buy locally. Convenience may not be king, but there’s still a role for Main Street. 

Likewise, despite being the biggest e-commerce site in the country, Wildberries’ market share is only around 14 percent of all online shopping. Amazon, by contrast, dominates the U.S. landscape with close to 40 percent of all transactions made through its service. As a result, no one giant has a stranglehold on all transactions, and internet retailers are just one part of a competitive marketplace, both online and off.

Amazon’s scale has allowed it to lock out its competitors. The company’s Prime service, offering fast, free delivery for a low price, means subscribers are effectively wasting the money they’ve already paid each and every time they buy something elsewhere. The idea, it seems, is to get the hooks into customers and yank them away from the competitors.

The decline isn’t yet irreversible. In some places, like the well-heeled London suburb of Maida Vale, the rise in working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic saw local businesses undergo a renaissance. Instead of spending big bucks in chain stores near their offices and train stations, or ordering things online to be delivered straight to the office, workers with disposable cash and more time on their hands turned to independent retailers. 

“It sounds bad to say, but this has been the best thing for us,” the manager of a boutique butcher shop told me through his mask and visor. Keeping people in their neighborhoods and communities for longer, it seems, creates a demand for interesting and unique things to pop up and thrive. If remote working, at least in some form, persists, local shopping may, too. 

Likewise, retailers in Russia may not always be able to depend on a steady stream of business. The country’s domestic online giant, Yandex, which fills the role of everything from Google to Spotify to Uber, has made its entry into the home delivery market, focusing on things that can be dispatched almost immediately. Only available in Moscow at present, couriers in bright yellow jackets can turn up at your door in minutes with fruit, hot lattes, and a phone charger cable.

For the time being, though, despite all the advances in technology and the pressure to cut costs and bolster convenience, people in places like Penza will keep going to the store to buy dinner, checking out shoes in shop windows, and spending their money with small businesses. Hole in the road or no hole in the road.

Gabriel Gavin is a journalist based in Russia.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/saving-the-russian-main...

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