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For our runner-up best city, we turn back to the Northwest to the nation’s spiritual home for coffee and personal computing: Seattle. Residents of Rain City will take the city’s famously prodigious rainfall in exchange for their high average median income, beautiful water-bound locale, and standout clean air. Microsoft (MSFT) and Boeing (BA) provide tens of thousands of jobs to the area, for those who can’t toss fish at the Pike Place Market.

"Klimt in Syria via Montana Wojczuk." Even if it's not real, it's still beautiful.

As the SHA video for the proposed redevelopment of Yesler Terrace clearly shows, standard market-driven urban thinking/planning will dominant this process...

In fact, we can now expect what we currently see in South Lake Union, a market paradise, to replace what remains of Seattle's socialist utopia.

Vulcan was tapped to be the Seattle Housing Authority’s partner on the bold $300 million redevelopment of Yesler Terrace, the city’s first public-housing project.

After interviewing and evaluating competing proposals from Vulcan and Forest City of Los Angeles, the Housing Authority board unanimously voted Tuesday to start negotiating with Vulcan.

If negotiations with Vulcan break down, the board would try to strike a deal with Forest City, as board members said they were impressed by proposals from both firms.

But a bold redevelopment of Yesler Terrace would, for one, drop all of this nonsense about "mixed-income" and focus on exploding density, increasing parks, planning safe streets for cyclists and children, and ignoring cars. How can we pack lots of people into this small area that has great access to a variety of public transportation networks, downtown, and the ID? That should be the ruling question. Instead of talking about improving the moral character of poor people by exposing them directly to the ownership values of the middle-class (the actual substance of the mixed-income discourse), we can develop a discourse of micro-living that sees something like this as one of its starting points:

Archdaily.com:

In an effort to bring the city closer to its goals for healthy communities and sustainable city planning Philadelphia rolled out a new Zoning Code in 2012 after a four-year process of updates and revisions to the outdated 50 year-old code on the books. The new code now recognizes urban agriculture as a legitimate land use designation. After tackling a few hiccups along the way, namely Bill 120917, that restricted gardening and farming in certain districts, the new code promises to protect and promote urban farming in its various forms whether they are animal husbandry, community gardening or market farming. The code also makes leaps in protecting communities adjacent to farms and making cultivators and farmers responsible for any disturbances to the neighborhood.

Inhabitat:

Photographer Menno Aden’s awesome Room Portraits capture small-space living like no other. Aden first got his start photographing the rooms of friends in Berlin — a city known for modest living, cheap rent, and often very tiny apartments. Inspired by the lives and sparse belongings of his fellow artists, he started the series as an extension of portraiture. With a bird’s eye view, Aden’s photographs capture the personality and essence of the small space dwellers, without ever showing their faces.

It’s reasonable to see the completion of The Bullitt Center (it officially opens in April) as the most important architectural event since the completion of the Olympic Sculpture Park in 2007, which in turn was the most important architectural event since the completion of the building that made Rem Koolhaas a star, the Central Library, in 2004. What the Bullitt Center wants to be is a breathing, self-regulating, self-sustained organism. It will have something like a brain and a digestive system, and it will process human waste. It will close a window if you leave it open. It will tell you exactly how it is working, how it is saving energy, how it is making your life and the world around it better. Enter the future, Seattle.

The Detroit we are now used to reading about in architectural and urban planning journals and websites is seen as a utopia of urban farming or as a city that, from the ruins of industrial capitalism, has the potential of realizing some progressive urban concept that would never see the light of day in a prosperous city. But we on the left are not the only dreamers. Some dreamers on the right see in the ruins of Detroit (the decaying Belle Isle park—a 982-acre island) a neoliberal utopia...

Here's the scenario for the Commonwealth of Belle Isle that Lockwood and others want to see: Private investors buy the island from a near-bankrupt Detroit for $1 billion. It then would secede from Michigan to become a semi-independent commonwealth like Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Under the plan, it would become an economic and social laboratory where government is limited in scope and taxation is far different than the current U.S. system. There is no personal or corporate income tax. Much of the tax base would be provided by a different property tax — one based on the value of the land and not the value of the property.

It would take $300,000 to become a "Belle Islander," though 20 percent of citizenships would be open for striving immigrants, starving artists and up-and-coming entrepreneurs who don't meet the financial requirement.

Among the citizenship requirements are a command of the English language, a good credit rating and no criminal record. Mogk adds that such a scenario would make the island "a drain of talent and resources" at the expense of Detroit.

Ever so softly, so quietly, the dead tower goes down...

Leave it to Japan to turn one of the dirtiest and noisiest processes of the urban lifecycle – the demolition of highrises – into a neat, quiet and almost cute affair.

As much fun as it sounds, demolition companies don't tackle most jobs with a heavy swinging ball. Taking down a largish building requires extensive crane work, temporary scaffolding and a fleet of heavy machines grinding around on the rooftop. But Japanese construction company Taisei, which is behind the world's tallest concept skyscraper, is pioneering a type of building butchery that seals all these messy elements into an adorable "big hat."

"It's kind of like having a disassembly factory on top of the building and putting a big hat there, and then the building shrinks," says one Taisei engineer, according to this report in the Japan Times.

This is a good rooftop...

This is a very bad one...

Several thousand shark fins laid out to dry were found on the rooftop of a building housing seafood suppliers in Kennedy Town in central Hong Kong. Photographer Gary Stokes from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society received a tip from an unnamed person on January 1 and took these pictures.

I wrote about this new and potentially revolutionary building, the Bullit Center, in the current A&P:

• ME

It does not look at all like a douglas-fir forest but it is like a douglas-fir forest. The impact it has on this site is pretty much the same as a douglas-fir forest had on this site 200 years ago. The douglas-fir got all of its energy from the sun through photosynthesis, it gets its energy from the sun through photovoltaics. The forest supported a complex ecosystem; there’s a complex ecosystem in the building. The forest got water and disposed it in the ground, this building does the same for the most part. It disposes most of its water not in the bay but in the ground.

Showing that developers are not immune to hate, one who shall remain unnamed, and who is also very much into the green thing, told me this during a party for some architectural event:

The Bullitt building? If Dorothy only knew what they were doing with her money, she would turn in her grave.

Density (13,051 people/sq mi), its main of energy source (90 percent hydro electricity), and recycling (55 percent of its waste is retained)...

All of this money that USPS is losing?

The financial outlook for the United States Postal Service (USPS) remains dim, with this week’s announcement that it incurred a record net loss of $15.9 billion for fiscal year 2012, compared to a $5.1 billion loss in fiscal year 2011.

The United States Postal Service stayed the sword hanging over thousands of rural post offices, opting instead to cut opening hours in a bid to stem devastating financial losses.

The glass bricks transform the facade into a movie screen...

The grave music, the profound sorrow of the critic, the terrific explosions, the fall of the unlovely buildings, the rise of the dust clouds, the sheer horror of it all: modernism...

For those in North Seattle who have never seen anything like it, this is architecture...

In the first series, we see the ghosts in a Detroit high school; in the next, in European cities. The first ghosts are from 1988; the second, near the end of World War II. This is the art of hauntology.

We are only three decades away from an America that is perfectly plural...

Within three decades, there will no longer be a majority racial or ethnic group in the Unites States according to new Census Bureau projections released this week. Among the other findings: the country is growing slower than expected.
Michael Cooper reports on the first set of projections issued by the Census Bureau based on the 2010 Census results. “The next half century marks key points in continuing trends — the U.S. will become a plurality nation, where the non-Hispanic white population remains the largest single group, but no group is in the majority,” the bureau’s acting director, Thomas L. Mesenbourg, said in a statement.

Planetizen:

After four years of negotiations with the city, and vocal public opposition, plans by Detroit to sell 1,500 city-owned plots for $520,000 to John Hantz for the creation of his ambitious "Hantz Woodlands" project were narrowly approved by the City Council this week, reports Steve Pardo. The first phases of the project will see the demolition of structures, removal of trash, and title work (at a cost of $3.2 million) and the planting of at least 15,000 trees that "would eventually be used for commercial purposes" once the city passes an urban agriculture ordinance.

This is music to my ears...

"Mannahatta” translates to “island of hills,” and the rocky wasteland to the north had to be surveyed to perfection, and private roads, farms, and pastures wrestled into order by a ruthless eminent domain.

Now we are here...

What you always find in the fridge of a home in the country is an astounding amount of food—the freezer is crammed, the shelves are overburdened, and the compartments are stuffed silly. There is a good reason for this, which is explained by David Harvey in one of his new lectures on the second volume of Capital. Harvey and hundreds of thousands of other people who live in Manhattan do not need big or packed refrigerators because the distance between their apartments and groceries stores is very small. In this way, the storage of perishable items can be shared. The store, as a consequence, provides a common refrigerator. And this sharing improves energy efficiency as a whole. Unlike people in the country and suburbs, a person in the city can pick up needed things easily and in small amounts. The virtues of living in a dense city are as numerous as they are wonderful.

The moments that make this video: the passing of the day's only cloud, the terror of the growing shadows, the rising of the moon...

Density is good for the economy, for human creativity, for the environment, and for this...

There is a long tradition in America dating back at least to Thomas Jefferson that suggests people will be happier in more pastoral, less congested settings with their own space. There is also a long line of thinking that sees crowded, dense urban centers as the source of anxiety, agitation, unhappiness, even pathology. But that is not at all what we find. Instead, happiness levels are modestly associated with density that is more concentrated at the center of the city.

This is what the world calls a living wall! This is what South Lake Union calls a living wall:

• Anne Jaworski

On one side of the Living Wall is a plaza - on weekdays full of well scrubbed professionals. Across the plaza is an old brick building, an historic landmark, now full of restaurants. So desirable that Tom Douglas has two! Amazon looks down on the plaza with love, love for the money that built this palace of programmers, love of the money that pays the shareholders. Behind the Living Wall is an old concrete building. Like the little old lady that wouldn’t sell her beach house surrounded by gleaming condos, this building sits towered over, glowered over, by Amazon. The Living Wall was built to mask the view of this old building next door. But the Living Wall they built will never do that. It will never be featured in a glossy magazine like the overpass at Pont Max Juvenal France, the Skyfarm in Toronto, the Oulu Bar in Brooklyn. This wall is a row of 24 metal cables, rising 40 feet high. Vines planted at the base. Some of the vines have struggled halfway up the cable, some only a few inches. On some, no sign of a vine at all. The vines are weak, straggly, forlorn. These vines will never be so full and lush that they can fill in the gaps, reach out and touch each other. They will always stand alone. It is a wall without wall-ness, without opacity, a green wall short on green. This Living Wall knows that is worse than what it was built to cover.

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Something to think about:

"I gleaned some interesting trivia from 'Finding Betty Crocker: the Secret Life of America's First Lady', by Susan Marks. Betty Crocker rolled out White cake mix in 1952. (The company also introduced Honey Spice and Chocolate Malt flavors in 1953 and 1955, respectively.)

"At this time, the company was still refining their approach to marketing. While they sought to promote a quick and easy product that still retained a "fresh, 'home-made'" quality, 'the market was slow to mature' (p. 168). The company called upon the market research of Dr. Burleigh Gardner and Dr. Ernet Dichter, both business psychologists:

"'The problem, according to psychologists, was eggs. Dichter, in particular, believed that powdered eggs, often used in cake mixes, should be left out, so women could add a few fresh eggs into the batter, giving them a sense of creative contribution.'

"As a result, General Mills (who own Betty Crocker) altered their product, abandoning the powdered egg in their mixes. The requirement to add eggs at home was marketed as a benefit, conferring the quality of 'home-made' authenticity upon the box cake mix...."

People who live in the city do not really need a kitchen (or a big one). It would make more sense for us to turn over the boring business of the kitchen to places outside the house, to places run by those who can actually cook for a living. Despite the problem of cooking having been solved by the city, in the same way the problem of baking was solved by Betty Crocker, we have these bad feelings, these lagging, nagging feelings for authenticity, for an egg in the mix. This is all our kitchens really are—fictions of authenticity.

From a lovely piece, "Swingset at Lincoln Park," Maggie Corrigan produced in the writing class, Writing the City, I taught this fall at Hugo House:

On sunny days, [my daughters and I would] run across a paved walkway to march along a driftwood beach on Puget Sound. During each venture through the expansive park grounds, we’d always stop at the swingset just beyond the baseball field.

The structure had dark silver posts that met at a sharp angle 12 feet up in the air. It was wide enough to hold three regular swings at slightly different heights. Each black seat, suspended in a U shape, was made of a 4 inch wide belt coated in polyethylene. The sling-style would conform to any body width. Children as young as three as well as teens and adults could fit on these swings. Next to them were two baby swings that sat even to each other but much higher off the ground.

...There’s a point in the long arc of the pendulum where centripetal force is overcome by gravity. On a swing, it’s the maximum height off the ground, often felt when your legs are below with feet pointing to the ground. It’s a tiny moment when you need your arms to hold you on the seat. There’s a stillness of suspension, and then falling as you reverse direction. This force hasn’t changed, but perhaps our awareness of it has, or maybe mom, or dad or the nanny stopped reminding the children to “hold on!” I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but park planners reconsidered how children should play, and our tall, beloved swingset in Lincoln Park was replaced.

The modern Seattle park swingset is now a very safe structure designed exclusively for children. It’s often less than 8 feet tall, and placed over pits of spongy bark, or on thick black rubber matting in a designated play area. The seats are molded plastic chairs shaped for small bodies, and while the sling-type seats remain, the chains are much shorter creating quick reversals for fast and frantic action. Even though a city may design for safety, the collective memory and image of a swing remains as an uncomplicated toy for playing outside.

• Swings in the CD

There's art in this parking garage. People are doing yoga in this parking garage. People are getting married in this parking garage. Welcome to the American dream...