Posts tagged 'liveability is'

David Nichols concludes his series on urban liveability with a visit to Baltimore.

Liveability is a lot about perspective. Melbourne may well be a terribly liveable city from some points of view; a glib reading might even suggest it’s a better place to be homeless than, say, Anchorage. The biggest problem with ‘liveability’ is, of course, the failure of imagination of the majority of people who it.

Of all the cities I visited in the USA, Baltimore is the one which most intrigued me; if the rest of the world outside the US fell into the sea (which, for a large percentage of Americans, may as well have already happened) there’d be worse places to live than Baltimore. But that of course is me, middle-class and riddled with assumptions about what a life I can expect to lead in the west should consist of. Baltimore would be amazingly liveable – if you had a good job, lived near the light rail for your commute, had a car to get out to other places, and knew where ‘not to go.’

Baltimore is, like a good many similar American cities, racially divided. I stayed in a neighbourhood whose inhabitants seemed simultaneously relieved and embarrassed that it remains a ‘white enclave’. That this is a city in rather acute crisis is evidenced by the many inner city streets (such as Broadway) on which block after block of elegant row houses stand, but maybe only one or two are occupied.

Row houses in Baltimore via Finin/WikiCommons

Randy Newman, on probably his least impressive 1970s album Little Criminals, sang a fairly humdrum song called ‘Baltimore’. He sang of a place where it was “hard … just to live”. Baltimoreans have probably long ago gotten over that well-meaning slur, although they’ll be dealing with The Wire for some time to come. There is a pervasive ambience of difficulty in Baltimore. Its surface is tough, barely scratchable. To live here, no doubt, you need the long view.

I did hear testimony – credible testimony – that many find compensation for the poverty and other tribulations of Baltimore in its community life. I also saw some of the humble delights of a city which has kept some of its institutions from long ago: for instance, I visited one of the most delightful, run down, deco cinemas I’ve seen since the 70s, still functioning as a single-screen, apparently fairly unrenovated cinema. It’s called the Senator, and it features remarkable painted foyer decorations, including an extraordinary image of a young man in medieval garb using a large film camera to record a stationary owl. It also boasts despondent teenage staff who – when we turned up to see J Edgar on time to find it had already started – had no special advice to offer other than we had better go in. In a high sheen nation full of obsequious courtesy and replicated, predictable experiences, this was refreshing. And I was lucky enough to visit The Book Thing, a huge (three room?) book redistribution centre. It distributes free second-hand books on Saturdays and Sundays for anyone who wants them, and plenty do.

Later, I chanced upon a downtown church book sale and picked up a remarkable tome from the early 20th century on the growing and marketing of celery, as well as a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. I was blessed to have a guide keen to show me some of the city’s various delights, such as a vegan soul-food restaurant, the Goldstein’s bagel house in Pikeville; additionally, a museum of ‘outsider’ art. Which only goes to show the dangers of popping into a city for a few days with one’s curiosity intact and a still-not-quite-yet-maxed credit card.

Baltimore’s Peabody Library, courtesy Friends of the Johns Hopkins University Libraries

But there’s more to Baltimore than the doldrums. The city has held onto – even despite a little bit of pomo eye-rolling – many of its pop culture icons and sumptuous facilities from its industrial glory days. The opulent Peabody Library is by any measure one of the world’s finest.

What Baltimore actually suffers from the most is that it’s in the United States of America, a nation where out of sight is out of mind, and movement of capital is so heartless it’s hard to believe it’s controlled by actual humans. Piecemeal solutions to problems abound: the city’s crushing difficulties are, however, so extensive as to be insurmountable. Liveability? In Baltimore the emphasis is more on staying alive.

On the liveability trail, our intrepid scout David Nichols finds himself nestled amongst dogs, babies and bagels in the biggest smoke of all.

New York

New York is like some kind of enormous share house, with 2.3 degrees of separation and no way of getting away from other people. Step into Central Park and the elegant, arcane setting is riddled with exercisers, cyclists, infants with nannies or nanas, strollers, joggers, runners. Two women pushing baby carriages are urged by a third woman – their trainer, presumably paid for this bollocks – to stretch their arms and twirl their hands as they push their hapless toddlers down a small hill: “Take advantage!” she cries. “Take advantage!”

Joggers taking advantage of Central Park with a view to the Upper West Side, via Patrick Grubans/WikiCommons

There is no privacy in New York anyway, so New Yorkers have essentially persuaded themselves that privacy is a kink, overrated and unnecessary. They have loud and involved conversations loudly on the streets with each other in person or on mobile telephone devices. “I was essential to that company, I mean, empirically!” asserts one twentysomething dude on his cell.

Middle-class Australians reared on Woody Allen films no doubt have their own picture of the city (or at least of Manhattan), perhaps not realising that (1) Allen amplifies certain elements of the place for satirical affect and (2) Allen is of a generation soon to pass and (2[a]) a rarified class. But there are some elements of the city that do undoubtedly work and have done so for a century or so. The subways are quick, although they demand a little mental exertion (particularly the assumption that you know which line you’re on at all times, so that every other possible connection will be mentioned on the overhead boards when you alight at a station, but not the one you’re connecting from). Street food is often a joy, and I hold to that despite one particular morning’s disastrous hot, stale, cardboard pretzel. Thankfully bagels are everywhere.

We are often told that New York is not really America (this is, of course, a snob’s whimsy). Anyone who tries the standard coffee will know that, of course, it’s totally America: the coffee right across the USA invariably invokes the sensation of drinking a cup of hot water from a vessel that once contained coffee. That is, unless you can find a place that does espresso, in which case, you can pay top dollar for a teaspoon’s worth of actual coffee.

As we’ve found all week, however, the dog index is the one that seems most pertinent to judging New York’s liveability. Manhattanites love their dogs, and dogs big, small, huge and tiny can be found – always accompanied by doting human – on the streets at all times. They are often pampered like dollies, or perhaps – can this be true? almost certainly! – have been sculpted by a hairdresser to give them coquettish, Disneyesque faces. Where the humans – mostly – recognise they must abide one another, the dogs will occasionally have severe responses to each other. At such times, the owners don’t acknowledge each other. They just tug their errant charges away.

I have a bad feeling that there are many (new) urbanists who look at New York’s über-built-up apartment lifestyle as the ideal way to live. There are – quite clearly and undeniably – some who relish the place. Even I was settled in within just a couple of days: I was peeved just like a local when the Wholefoods near where my wife and I were staying in Upper East Side didn’t open its automatic doors with joy when I came by at 7:40am (it opens at 8, stays open ‘til 9).

But the point about a place like New York is obviously that there’s no place like New York. Nice place to visit. Surely no-one – aside from those 8 million self-selecting antpeople who already do – could possibly live there?

David Nichols' liveability series ends Monday with a look at Baltimore.

David Nichols continues his series investigating what makes a city liveable with a visit to a town dubbed one of Britain’s ‘funkiest’, and a city built on reclaimed land in the Netherlands.

Hebden Bridge

Though not a city, Hebden Bridge – in England’s north (Yorkshire with a frisson of Lancashire) – nevertheless has many of those attributes often associated with successful cities. And yes, it does actually feature on some important lists: it was named in the British Airways magazine as the fourth ‘funkiest’ town in the world (Daylesford outside Melbourne was the funkiest). It also has, since the 70s, had the highest concentration of lesbians in Britain.

Naturally the combination of funk (translated, in some accounts, to ‘quirkiness’) and gayness has seen the town’s profile increase amongst yuppies espousing ‘tolerance’ (perhaps even of each other) and house prices rise accordingly.

It’s not only the price of real esate that rises. Imagine if, instead of dropping into the doldrums of a quasi-‘ghost town’, little Walhalla in Gippsland had thrived due to some obscure industrial specialisation (in Hebden Bridge it was knee-high clogs, apparently). The two places have the same kind of gully trap focus: a village in a valley, straddling a waterway. In Hebden Bridge’s case – just to emphasise its bridginess – there are two waterways: a sleepy canal riddled with picturesque boats and a wide but shallow stream. The houses seem to sit on top of each other like a mediaeval painting from before perspective was discovered.

Image courtesy of the author

The populace – well, you know what the funksters are like – are clearly shopaholics, and the village has much to recommend it in the realm of charity shops, antique shops, book shops and a boutique rather amusingly called ‘Home… Oh!’ which my guide – from nearby Accrington – pointed out to me, then apologised for. The place drips with Doing the Right Thing: within minutes of arrival I saw a woman wipe her dog’s arse with a plastic bag and go searching for a turd while two friends tried to help by pointing.

When in doubt about what kind of society you might be encountering in a town, look to their gig guide. The last few months in Hebden Bridge have been humming with the obscure hits of rockers whose rise to semi-prominence 30 years ago rarely saw them top the pops. These include Lloyd Cole, Julian Cope and the redoubtable Spizzenergi, whose ‘Where’s Captain Kirk?’ was described by DJ John Peel as the best Star Trek-related single on its release in 1979. They also have burlesque. Of course they have burlesque.

I scoff, but of course if you put a gun to my head and said I had to live in England, this is precisely the kind of place I’d want to live. Good coffee, charity shops and always the possibility Spizzenergi might play again.

Almere

If I may draw from folk wisdom (i.e. what I was told by my Dutch hosts), the two new Dutch lands created decades either side of World War II were the idea of a man named Lely. He died in the knowledge that the dyke-pumping-draining scheme that he designed in his younger years, and for which he had been scorned, would earn him eternal fame (except for the fishermen of the Zuider Zee).

Not only were the two large open areas in the former Zee (now a more or less freshwater lake) available for farming; they were also now available for the building of new towns. Hence, Almere – not yet 30 years old and an experiment in creating a city at once livable and affordable.

Image of row houses in Almere via dysturb.net/Flickr

In Australia there’s enough bollocks spoken about the redolent history of streetscapes just over a century old. Imagine then the Netherlands, where a town hall might be half a millennium old and passed by with nary a glance. It would seem that there are plenty of Dutch people who shun a place like Almere for being cultureless, in the ‘if those walls could speak they might tell tales of being sacked by the Spanish or burnt by the French’ sense, or at the very least, occupied by the Germans. The only tale Almerean walls can tell is that of Dutch ingenuity and the fine spirit of a progressive nation willing to look for new solutions to old problems. I’m told housing in Almere’s clean and distinctive suburbs can be a third cheaper than similar housing in older towns or cities in the enormous, patchwork agglomeration of the Netherlands and beyond.

Although the city is still being built, it’s already the eighth-largest in the Netherlands. There are dedicated busways at key points on the edge of suburbs. The suburbs themselves are unashamedly experimental, though all seem to adhere to the conventional regional pattern of attached two- (or three-) storey homes. Some experiments are more successful than others, but encouragingly, newer developments are less car-centric and adhere more closely to the classic template of the community hub.

The centre itself is a cross between Canberra’s Civic and Melbourne’s Federation Square: it’s a carless series of open-air malls with carparking underneath. An enormous lake at one edge of the centre reinforces the Canberra-ness of the affair, as does the ostentatious embrace of cultural consumption mixed in with the material acquisitiveness. But this is not to deride Almere. The city is proactive. Whereas early campaigners for the Federal Capital – 110 years ago, in Melbourne, a gaggle of distinguished and semi-professionals and experts – considered the possibility of pumping hot water throughout the new best-practice Australian city, Almere has actually done it. While it may at present be for many not much more than an affordable dormitory town for those Amsterdam commuters, it is nonetheless both of those things in spades.

There are so many Dutch people in such a small space – they can’t get away from each other. So, they create solutions. It makes perfect sense, but it’s something Australians aren’t used to seeing that often in urban planning, where there’s no true sense of a broader communality. A plus for effort, Almere.

And the coffee is good. And the poffertjes rockin’.

In the third in his series on urban liveability, David Nichols finds a Dublin in uncharacteristically gloomy mood.

The ancient Greeks used to build cities to be confusing: the idea was that enemy invaders had to be met by surprising twists and turns which would pose no problem to locals fleeing and/or plotting ambush. Dublinites of 2011 have no particular control over the wackiness of their prehistoric city, shaped by waterways natural and unnatural, topography and the whims of their ancient forebears. But due to some current whims, they make very certain that their streets are their own: unsignposted and with few directions given. It might be that there is a Dublinite belief that to not know one’s way around is itself a little wicked, or that if one needs to ask how to get somewhere one has no particular business trying to go there. (Or maybe they think everyone has a GPS – not if they ordered one with their Thrifty hire car, they don’t.)

Dubliners in the post-Celtic Tiger world are perhaps tossing up whether to go back to their crappy old ways of the 80s, where at least no-one had expectations or aspirations. Once again, coffee serves as a useful example: they have coffee machines in their cafes but they’ll chuck together a cup of instant if they think you won’t notice. The central city is full of people milling about (European tourists mainly), whom the locals entertain and disturb in turn by demonstrating a dysfunctionality of epic proportions. For instance, I pass a man with a mobile phone to his ear, yelling incomprehensibly to his girlfriend, who stands a mere half a block away, bent double and yelling, ‘I! Can’t! Hear! You!’.

I’m not telling you anything new here, but it nonetheless bears bearing in mind: the Irish are distinctly and undoubtedly in enormous trouble, and things are unlikely to improve very soon. It would be nice to say their philosophical outlook and resilience will pull them through. But many of them have tasted prosperity and even come to accept it as the norm. And, as if specifically intended to rub it in, everywhere around is evidence of Euro-crumbling: the demise of the empire that only recently was an Ireland that had never had it so good. It doesn’t help that, even before the crash, polls indicated Dublinites were unhappier than people in the rest of Ireland.

A real estate ad sells a fading dream in the Dublin suburb of Clongriffin; image courtesy of the author.

Emblematic of Dublin’s afflictions is the suburb of Clongriffin. In close proximity to pre-boom suburbia, Colgriffen consists of icon buildings and rows of apartment blocks above retail space, separated by long stretches of fencing, behind which lie vacant sites. The retail space is almost completely empty, its capacious windows covered in advertising suggesting here might one day be a take-away or grocer no yuppie can do without. In one section of housing between Colgriffen and Balgriffin – detached two storey houses all the same – a street may feature two dozen homes with manicured front hedges, the plastic still on the windows, and maybe a single one of them occupied.

At the end of some streets, houses are left half-built, the concrete and other construction materials strewn or stacked around the block (as if the builders had been spirited away, although the more likely story is that they got a call telling them don’t come come back to work). Clongriffin has a glorious new station; on one side, apartment blocks tower, and the other side looks like a bomb hit it.

Dublin’s liveability, then, is a curate’s egg – which is to say, unpalatable. As it happens, I don’t like eggs anyway.

Our liveability ambassador David Nichols continues his highly unscientific international survey of liveability with this look at Tel Aviv.

Not only liveable but also lovable, Tel Aviv strikes a midpoint between Hong Kong and Melbourne for density, scores a little higher on the pet scale, much lower on the tofu tally, and slays ‘em in coffee.

Israel is, in both the nicest and nastiest possible ways, an insane country of people seemingly perennially at each others' throats (when not at other people’s). It is both dazzling and perverse. It is also cosmopolitan, primitive, supercilious and eccentric. Tel Aviv not only encompasses all of the above, but adds a certain Tel Avivness (Tel Avividness, Tel Avivity?) to the whole.

The benignly mad Scot Patrick Geddes designed Tel Aviv in the 1920s as a model garden city attachment to the old city of Jaffa. Though its administrative district is still known as Tel Aviv-Yafo, the original settlement has become no more than a tiny tail to Geddes’ guinea pig: a peculiarly successful city of squares, neighbourhoods and boulevards.

Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, minus pedigree dogs and prams

All are charming, though the boulevards in particular are impressive. A small number of long, wide roads serve as city spines (although, strictly speaking, while the ideal city might be like an organism – a guinea pig, say – no organism has multiple spines). Tel Aviv is famous for its Bauhaus buildings, and most of them – and most of the residential buildings generally, in central Tel Aviv – are three- to five-storey apartment blocks set in small gardens. Since seemingly everyone not only owns but also dotes on some kind of pedigree dog, each with its own bemused or otherwise quirky expression suitable for an animated creature voiced by a beloved comedian, boulevards like Rothschild are full of hounds, terriers and their owners, often simultaneously pushing ubiquitous baby strollers.

The cats of Tel Aviv are a world unto themselves. Often unowned, they loll about in the streets like little lions, playing out their own dramas. They are lean and muscular, and people seem happy to feed their local clusters without giving much more thought to them – perhaps in the way one might water a street tree. Programs are in place to round up cats, desex them and return them to their territories. I told my host in Tel Aviv that given the realities of feline territoriality this was better than killing them. Animal rights groups, he replied, would not stand for the killing of cats. This, I thought, is a civillised society indeed.

One might find entertainment in a search to discover bad coffee in Tel Aviv, but would become utterly frazzled after a few tasting exercises of the very rich, strong and high quality stuff sold everywhere. Up in the northern suburbs, I took a mid-morning breakfast with some activist architects impassioned by the current housing crisis protests (I’ll get to that, though it does kill the utopian buzz a little). We met in Le Corbusier-style high-rise apartments, wherein each apartment is two storeys and has a balcony that doubles as an open extra room. Many jokes were made about Tel Aviv residents baffled by American coffee, particularly its Starbucks variant.

Yes, the housing crisis is an issue. In mid-2011 young people began revolting in Tel Aviv (and elsewhere in Israel) about the government’s inability or unwillingness to address housing affordability: the boulevards, identified as the place of privilege and leisured luxury, became a tent city. An attempt was made to hold a protest rally of a million Israelis: several hundred thousand showed up, no mean feat in a country this size.

Affordability has to be a part of liveability, and this of course is the catch-22; when a place becomes truly liveable, it doesn’t stay secret. Any urbanite who ever yearned to live in a city would want to live in Geddes' downtown Tel Aviv, and all the metal detectors and gun-toting teen soldiers in the world can’t change that.

Melbourne is consistently rated at the top of liveability surveys year in, year out. When Melbourne was rated number 1 in one such 2011 poll, we wondered, just what does liveability mean? We asked the peripatetic David Nichols to explore that question as he set out to travel the world at the end of last year. This week, we’re kicking off 2012 with our ‘Liveability’ series, beginning today with Hong Kong.

Last year, one of several liveability surveys ranked Melbourne the most liveable city in the world. As well as giggling and preening (as Sydney was somewhere inconsequential on the list, like number 2 or something), Melbournians everywhere greeted the news with shrieks and groans. This was the best life had to offer?

Image of a residential skyscraper in Hong Kong via Wikicommons

Liveability surveys score cities on such variables as stability, crime, health, culture, environment, education and infrastructure measures. It strikes me as I trudge through the streets of central Hong Kong that the liveability criteria might perhaps be a little staid. A day walking in Honkers (new boots and blisters rub up against an irrestistible urge to see, feel, smell and experience more of the city) has me wondering whether perhaps we can learn more about the liveability of a city from the way its people treat their pets. Boutique pet shops are ubiquitous and everywhere I turn, dogs and their owners pound the pavement. What about scoring liveability on the availability of tofu? I stumble across a 24-hour café called the Flying Pan – delightfully décored in ad hoc 50s style – where tofu is substituted for eggs in any dish. There’s got to be a good coffee score as well. In HK, order a double espresso and that’s what you get – strong and small.

A visit to the Hong Kong Planning and Infrastructure Exhibition Gallery reveals ‘the government’ (it’s always ‘the government’) has big plans for making the city even more liveable. For one thing, it plans to take care of the environment – no mention of global warming here – with umpteen (that’s the word they used) new railway lines, mountain and underwater tunnels, and some massive roads, all calibrated around the magic number 2030.

As it happened, when I visited there was little in the way of crowds for all this hi-tech propaganda. In fact, the security staff, for want of something better to do, helpfully followed me around, showing me how to interact with the displays. Where was everyone? Out in the humid, sunny street, traveling, walking and shopping. Or protesting. In fact, while I was gawking at Hong Kong’s future, “about 1,000” (the newspaper’s estimate, though it was probably more) people marched through Central “to demand the government… increase transport allowances for workers, speed up construction of public housing and restart the Home Ownership Scheme.” While ‘the government’ crows about its future-proofing of Hong Kong, thousands are demonstrating outside in the heat about the city’s present state.

Housing is extraordinary in Hong Kong. Indeed it’d be hard for many Australians to recognize it as actual housing. Many in the Australian press concluded that it was Melbourne’s low density which accounted for its high liveability scores. Hong Kong – brace yourself – might not score quite so well. Ridiculous (perilous?) skyscraper apartment buildings spring out all over the place like limbs of a cactus in need of pruning, there for no reason other than that more people have to be stored all the time.

There are, no doubt, other options for the privileged few. And there is an upside to living in central Hong Kong. The residents might live in a stacked shipping crate, but at least they can walk to work and the Flying Pan any day they wish. It’s the dogs I feel sorry for.