“Words on the Street” highlights the best NewUrbs content we’ve encountered this week:
Superblocks to the Rescue: Barcelona’s Plan to Give Streets Back to Residents | Marta Bausells, Guardian
Private vehicles account for just 20% of total movements in the city today and yet they occupy 60% of roads. “We need to win the street back,” says Janet Sanz, city councillor for ecology, urbanism and mobility, who emphasised the need to encourage social cohesion, coexistence and human exchanges. Recently, she remembered the spirit of Jane Jacobs and her activism for the right to the city on the 100th anniversary of the writer and urbanist’s birth: “She proposed giving the street back to the neighbours. Today we work for that objective.”
Life in Ruins | Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement
That life cycle of buildings, from conception to death, with an occasional lucky, or unlucky, resurrection, is the theme of James Crawford’s Fallen Glory – twenty chapters telling the biography of twenty structures, from across the world, ancient and modern, real and imaginary (the first chapter is on the Tower of Babel, the last on the virtual world of the web hosting service GeoCities).
Why U.S. Cities Are Segregated by Race: New Evidence on the Role of ‘White Flight’ | Allison Shertzer and Randall Walsh, Center for Economic Policy Research
US cities became increasingly segregated by race over the 20th century. General consensus holds that most of this segregation was concentrated in the post-war period. This column uses neighbourhood-level data to find that racial segregation in cities began earlier; indeed, much of it had taken place by 1930. The column also examines the residential response of whites to black arrivals, suggesting that this contributed to segregation in addition to discrimination and institutional factors.
A Digital Dive Into Rio de Janeiro’s Past | Tanvi Misra, CityLab
Rio de Janeiro is “a city of multiple and contradictory layers, at once exposed and hidden by its beauty and complex topography,” writes Sandra Jovchelovitch, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. What she means is that, on one hand, this dense Brazilian city boasts some world’s most iconic architecture and monuments—it’s a cidade maravilhosa or “marvelous city,” as Uri Friedman notes. On the other, it’s home to a sea of favelas—urban shantytowns ridden with poverty and lawlessness that are the most visible evidence of the city’s acute inequalities.
But how did it come to be this way? That’s what a new mapping project by Rice University seeks to illustrate.
Why Jane Jacobs Is Missing From an Urbanism Classic | Molly McArdle, Next City
If you’ve read The Power Broker, you’ll already know there is no Jane Jacobs inside. Her absence was profoundly strange to me, both on a biographical level — she was an important figure in Moses’ legacy — but also on a literary one. What kind of writing could Caro have produced with these perfectly (if only briefly) matched antagonists? And despite the book taking over a significant part of my brain (there was not a road in New York City that didn’t inspire a Caro-sourced anecdote or fact from me for weeks after I finished), I felt a little cheated. Sure, it was one of the best books I had ever read. But I had signed up for Jane Jacobs.
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