Dudley Square ~ Time for Neighborhood Revival...

In her Globe piece Developer reflects Dudley Square’s renaissance, Meghan Irons writes of long-time developer Kenneth Guscott who...

"Came of age when Dudley Square was still at its peak [...] At its prime, Dudley Square was the second-busiest commercial district in Boston, after downtown. And it was the epicenter of the black community. But as Guscott turned 15, the 1940s swept in a period of uncertainty, leaving Dudley’s residents clinging to a prosperity that would dissipate. Now, as Guscott enters his 90s, his deep connection to Dudley Square offers a glimpse of the triumphs, demise, and promised resurgence that consumed Roxbury’s main commercial district and the people living nearby."

Fascinating arc of transformation over time.

Changing Cities ~ Prototype New Urban Systems

I'm leading a module this Fall 2014 in the Changing Cities course taught by my MIT Media Lab colleagues Kent Larson and Ryan Chin, starting Wednesday, 3 September at 2pm, as part of our MIT Cities Initiative. We seek to move beyond so-called “Smart City” solutions that have focused on optimization rather than vital re-invention. This course will focus on how to design and prototype new urban systems to address the challenges of mobility, food, living & working, planning, and more through five “How to” modules:

1. How to prototype autonomous, shared, electric mobility systems 
2. How to prototype hyper-efficient, transformable spaces (robotic architecture) 
3. How to prototype controlled environment urban food systems 
4. How to realize computational urbanism using augmented tangible models 
5. How to quantify innovation, entrepreneurship, and creative vitality in cities

Together with colleagues Daan Archer, Jennifer Saura, and Dan Harple, we're keen on #5 -- Our overarching goal is to seek better indices (or rankings or scores) and analyses of vitality in the city by tapping into novel datasets and new analytic approaches. Ultimately we aspire to compare and contrast not only cities and neighborhoods, as they exist today, but simulate how they might become as new urban systems and solutions are deployed.

Gunkanjima ~ Japan's Ghost Battleship Island

WebUrbanist reminds me of Gunkanjima off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. In the American West there were mining Ghost Towns; this is an entire Ghost Island!

"This decrepit collection of concrete [...] Gunkanjima, or ‘Battleship Island,’ is the nickname for Hashima Island, a dense abandoned metropolis once packed with 5,259 people. It started as a small reef, but when coal was discovered there in the 1800s, it was quickly developed and expanded. It was used as a mine from 1887 to 1974 and its concrete architecture was designed to withstand typhoons. The switch from coal to petroleum in Japan led the mine to close."