Detroit’s vacant land — How success became a big problem

Cities for People, Not for Profit

Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City

The worldwide financial crisis has sent shock-waves of accelerated economic restructuring, regulatory reorganization and sociopolitical conflict through cities around the world. It has also given new impetus to the struggles of urban social movements emphasizing the injustice, destructiveness and unsustainability of capitalist forms of urbanization. This book contributes analyses intended to be useful for efforts to roll back contemporary profit-based forms of urbanization, and to promote alternative, radically democratic and sustainable forms of urbanism.

The Temporary City

The book questions the need for permanent uses and solutions for sites and argues that we need to increasingly look for short and medium term uses, rather than obsess about the long term; realistically it will take a long time for the economy to achieve stable and meaningful growth and for sites to become viable again – especially with what was paid for many sites at the market peak – and in the meantime these same sites will lie vacant for many years without an effective framework for their interim use.

designeconomics:

Shadows on the horizon: The rise and rise of skyscrapers

Super-tall skyscrapers are popping up all over the place. A sign of growing prosperity, presumably? Far from it, says a new report. Tom Bawden discovers why prestigious high-rises tend to presage economic doom

Reinventing Urbanism in a Time of Economic Crisis

Manuel Castells, University Professor and Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communications & Society, University of Southern California

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Real house prices (1970-2008)

Sustainability in Austerity

How Local Government Can Deliver During Times of Crisis

Bankrupt Britain
An atlas of social change

Bankrupt Britain is a unique atlas giving a comprehensive picture of the effect of the recession on Britain. In detailed colour maps, it shows how economic, social and environmental fortunes have been affected in different areas in the wake of the 2007 banking crisis, 2008 economic crash and 2009 credit crunch. It is essential reading for a broad audience with detailed local level data and a national snap-shot of Britain during this time.

The Gathering Clouds - Spanish post-crisis landscape

A visual route describes what has happened in Spain and how real estate boom and crisis shows an absurd legacy for decades.

More about spanish crisis:

6000km. Paisajes después de la batalla

Studies on the impact of the crisis in cities worldwide

Original in spanish, text via Google Translate

A compilation of the most interesting reports I have been finding these months on the impact of the crisis in urban environments.

United Cities and Local Governments , a network of cities in the world, recently published a report, The impact of global crisis on local governments rather complete. The document is based on research conducted through surveys of the member cities of the network, which binds a specific review of the major cities and other areas of analysis of regional and global results. In particular, we review the effects of the crisis on the ability of local authorities’ performance (decrease of own revenue, reduced government transfers of funds and assets losses, cuts in capital expenditures and currents.) And some economic measures that have been able to capture the cities surveyed.

The Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program with the center LSECities has also developed an extensive study, this time by way of comparison, when analyzing the behavior of 150 cities worldwide. The study, Global MetroMonitor , check urban indicators from 1993 to 2010 (basically, economic production and employment) and has produced a series of patterns which are the world’s geographic areas and cities that have had greater ability to withstand the economic crisis . Obviously, comparisons, in my opinion, there to take them with plenty of caveats, since the sample of indicators used is really poor. Only then can understand that in European cities with better resilience to the crisis are cities like Istanbul, Warsaw, Moscow and Bratislava. In return, as always, the simplicity of it displays is what you can handle easily the indicators to generate good headlines. In any case, the test is to have more arguments to confirm two things: that the thrust of the emerging countries is a drive that rides on the back of the new metropolitan areas and that many of the cities are better off today about the pre-crisis period are precisely in these countries (Istanbul, Shenzhen, Lima, Singapore, Santiago de Chile, Shanghai, Manila and Rio de Janeiro).

You can view the results of Valencia , Madrid and Barcelona , three cities in the list of the fifteen cities that have suffered from this crisis .

Both are recent reports. More time with the work of the OECD.On the one hand, we Coping with crisis at the local level in June 2009, on the other hand, Recession and Recovery: The Role of Local Economic leaders . Both documents, whose preparation has engaged The Work Foundation , have given rise to what is known as Principles of Barcelona, we find a good summary on the blog CIDEU . The OECD has also published a full report that contains the findings of previous reports and expands, entitled Recession, recovery and reinvestment: the role of local Economic crisis leadership in a global , by Greg Clark and offers a reading of has happened during the crisis in different local economies around the world in both large cities and medium-sized cities, reviewing the impacts of the crisis and the kind of answers short and long term that have occurred in some cities and others.

The Council of European Municipalities and Regions also conducted a survey process among its members and published its findings in a November 2009 report entitled The Economic and Financial Crisis. Impact on local and regional authorities . Impact on local and regional Authorities . This is a pretty weak report because it presents highly aggregated data for all member countries and mainly used to position some messages seeking support for supra-local institutions for structural reform of local role in European construction.

For its part, the program URBACT also conducted a survey process among the 221 cities participating in different projects, resulting from this study, Cities and the Economic Crisis. A survey on the impact of economic crisis and the responses of URBACT II cities in April 2010. The report reviews the impact of the crisis in European cities in different aspects such as the local economy and business, employment, social conditions or municipal budgets. Along with this, also analyzed the responses-type that have occurred in the cities studied related to entrepreneurship and support local businesses, reducing unemployment and job quality, attention to social support measures investment in infrastructure

I comment on other research is relevant in this case by Centre for Cities , an organization of urban policy reference in the UK. Project Tracker City aims to track a large enough panel of urban indicators in British cities. Through a good job of data visualization and statistics, the website provides access to information to identify changes over recent times in different cities.

Amazing Satellite Images Of Spanish Ghost Towns

Read more on Ciudades a Escala Humana about spanish real estate boom & crisis

Sobre las burbujas inmobiliarias que forman las universidades en sus campus. Aunque esto sucede en EEUU y sus universidades tienen unas características muy diferentes a las españolas, ¿no es posible que en España esté sucediendo algo similar cuando buena parte de los proyectos de “excelencia”, “internacionalización” … son en realidad proyectos arquitectónicos?

… university presidents are enamored with flashy construction projects which are much easier to justify to boards than equitably-paid faculty or low tuition for students (indeed, both of these are at odds with the sort of mentality that Ho observes on Wall Street: employees are always disposable and any university that keeps tuition down must be failing to charge apporpriately for its services).* After a few years at a university, the building-enamored president moves on to bigger and better digs, leaving faculty to struggle to get grants to fill buildings that shouldn’t have been built in the first place.

As a byproduct, universities issue bonds and, so long as endownments keep flowing in, can service them. It’s a giant ponzi scheme with little of value for students and, as Harper’s described in a notorious graphic about the consequeneces of overbuilding in Brandeis (Brandeis has threatened a lawsuit and has accused Harper’s of slander and libel over this piece), can collapse precipitously during times of economic crisis. But while bonds were hot, Wall Street couldn’t have enough of them, so universities eagerly complied.