The blog re:kuwait has written signficantly about the Kuwait Metro Project, a topic that picked up steam after the inauguration of the Dubai Metro system in the UAE rival city last year. Al-Watan Daily is reporting that Spanish companies show keen interest in the project (the design of the metro plan itself was done by a Spanish firm). The metro network would be part of an overall GCC railway linkage project. A Spanish-language report by INESCO TIFSA dating back to October 2007 also details the project. You can read it by click on this link.
Why is this most important? Besides the obvious factors for the Gulf, one of the biggest benefits is that this will give a chance for Gulf Youth to participate and be active. For each World Urban Forum, there is a World Urban Youth Assembly that precedes it. Here is the UN HABITAT press release, closing the 2010 World Urban Forum.
The Fifth Session of the World Urban Forum drew to a close in Rio de Janeiro on Friday with speakers hailing it as the most successful one ever staged.
According to available statistics, some 13,718 participants from 150 countries around the world attended the Session. Secretary of State Mrs. Hilary Clinton of the United States was full of praises for the Forum saying it was a unique venue where people from different backgrounds shared ideas on how to cope with the challenges of urbanization.
Mrs. Clinton who addressed the closing ceremony via a video message said the work of UN-HABITAT in addressing urbanization challenges was crucial adding that there was a greater need to foster private public partnerships in addressing those challenges.
In her speech, UN-HABITAT Executive Director Mrs. Anna Tibaijuka challenged the Forum participants to think long and hard on the kind of future they wanted to leave behind for the generations to come.
“How will our world look in just two generations to come when it is projected that 70 percent of humanity will be living in towns and cities? What percentage will continue to live in abject poverty? How much dirtier will cities make our planet? As we also learned this week, the means to bridge the urban divide are not lacking. We must, however, muster the political will to make our cities fit for our children, and the time to act is now!,” she said.
Mrs. Tibaijuka who leaves UN-HABITAT later this year at the end of a her second term at the helm, said she was walking away with her head high having managed to give the agency a footing, as requested of her by the former UN Secretary General Mr. Kofi Annan when he first appointed her to the post.
In his address, Brazil’s Minister for Cities Mr. Marcio Fortes said the success of the meeting could be gauged in the fact that most of the time, the meeting rooms were turning away some participants because of being fully packed.
During the occasion, the government of Bahrain, the hosts of the Sixth Session of the World Urban Forum in 2012, gave a presentation highlighting what delegates at the meeting are to be offered.
ATARA, West Bank -- Work crews have broken ground on what they hope will be the first modern, planned Palestinian city - a step officials say will help build an independent state in spite of the current deadlock in the peace process with Israel. But without Israeli approval of a short stretch of road, the $500-million project may never get off the ground. "We could build the whole city, but the question is, would people live in a city that doesn't have an access road?" said Bashar Masri, managing director of the company behind the project. "Obviously, the answer is no." Since last week, machine operators have been hard at work, taking chunks out of a rocky hillside near this West Bank village. If the project goes according to plan, it will provide 40,000 Palestinians with homes in an American-style development. Palestinians say Israel has not responded to their requests about the access road. The Israeli Defense Ministry, which is in charge of the area, did not return calls from The Associated Press about the issue. Israel's stated policy is to promote economic development in the West Bank, and construction of the new town would appear to fall within that goal. But two miles (three kilometers) of the road would have to be built through a part of the West Bank that Israel controls, within view of a Jewish settlement, raising possible complications. (For full link, click here)
UN HABITAT now has a facebook fanpage. Its a great place for people to meet and discuss urban issues in the city. Check out their discussion topics and updates.
World Habitat Day is October 5th, 2009, designated by the United Nations. According to the UN Programme on Human Settlements:
The United Nations has designated the first Monday of October every year as World Habitat Day. The idea is to reflect on the state of our towns and cities and the basic right of all to adequate shelter. It is also intended to remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of the human habitat.
The theme for this year’s World Habitat Day is Planning our urban future. Tell us what problems your city faces and how you would plan for a better urban future .
A new blog called "re: Kuwait, An Urban Analysis" put up an image of a proposed Kuwait Metrorail Map. Will we live to see the day? Check it out by clicking here. Very interesting blog dedicated to a sustainable built environment in Kuwait and greater urban renewal projects.
Here you can find the rankings for the quality of life measure. The link to the website is here where you can find the City Infrastructure rankings as well as a summary, region by region of the findings (click here).
215 cities were surveyed, using New York City as a baseline at 100 points.
Observations of Note:
-Switzerland holds three of the top ten cities with the best quality of life.
-The top ranking cities in the Middle East are in the United Arab Emirates
-The lowest ranking city in the entire survey is Baghdad, Iraq
-Canadian cities rank high among North American urban areas
-European cities dominate the top ten rankings
-Mumbai went down from 142 in 2008 to 148 in 2009
-Singapore ranked highest in the world for city infrastructure
Fellow blogger and director smArchitecture, Thomas Modeen, put forth the manifesto touched upon in his presentation at Pecha Kucha Night some weeks ago.
UN-HABITAT opens office in Kuwait
UN-HABITAT has opened a new office in Kuwait City aimed at supporting the agency’s activities in the region.A ceremony on 11 March was presided over by the UN-HABITAT Director of Regional and Technical Cooperation Division Mr. Daniel Biau and Mr. Ahmed Al-Adsani, Executive Director of the Arab Towns Organisation, on the occasion of the opening of UN-HABITAT Kuwait Office.
Top on the agenda of the office’s activities will be to offer support to local authorities and stakeholders to promote sustainable urban development and active implementation of the Habitat Agenda at the city level. In doing that, the office will closely cooperate with the Arab Towns Organisation and its subsidiaries. It will also partner with the Kuwaiti Government to respond to current and future urban development challenge when requested by the government...(for full press release, click here)
Yesterday I attended the first Pecha Kucha night here in Kuwait City. Pecha Kucha Night (click here), which I found out apparently means "chit chat" in Japanese, is a way for artists and anyone with ideas really, to present their thoughts and work to a public audience. Basically, each presentor is given the chance to show 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds each, for a total time of 6 minutes and 40 seconds. I think the format works really well, and obviously this is backed up by evidence, because there has been a Pecha Kucha Night in several cities around the world--I believe the organizers said more than 160.
Article about walkable urbanism from GreaterGreaterWashington.org"It takes a village: why walkable urbanism is good for adolescents"
by Cavan Wilk
The March edition of GQ features a 12-year-old budding food critic, David Fishman of New York, NY. One of Fishman's favorite activities is to visit local restaurants and write critiques. Due to his age, his parents limit him to restaurants within walking distance in his Upper West Side neighborhood. While such parental ground rules would amount to house arrest for children in car-dependent subdivisions, it provides David with a balance between safety and freedom while leaving plenty of restaurant options.
In conventional suburban neighborhoods, meanwhile, there is simply nowhere for a preteen or teenager can explore within walking distance. Fishman would While proponents of a car-dependent lifestyle often argue that the subdivision is a better environment for raising children, they forget that children's needs change when they become pre-teens and need to socialize and explore their surroundings. Quite simply, David would not be able to explore his passion for critiquing restaurants if he did not live in a vibrant walkable urban place.
David's story, while unique in its national magazine coverage, is not unique to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In downtown Wheaton, pre-teens and teenagers walk around, go to and from the Metro, eat at cafes, shop at the Westfield Wheaton mall, the local comic book store, or the grocery store. In neighboring Silver Spring or Bethesda, many pre-teens and carless teenagers shop at the stores and eat at the numerous restaurants. The same scene repeats itself in Tenleytown, Friendship Heights, Georgetown, and Ballston. In these walkable places, teens can learn valuable social skills and enjoy a measure of freedom.
I spent last Thanksgiving at a friend of a friend's house. The host's parents and their friends grew up in a walkable neighborhood in Norfolk. The boys could walk to the local ball field and see who was around for a pickup game. (At that time, I guess, girls weren't welcome in the boys' pickup games). If any of the kids made a misguided, immature decision, their neighbors would walk over and tell their parents. As much as they hated it then, they now wish they had raised their children in such an environment. Their raves about the old neighborhood sounded just like my dad and my aunts describing their old neighborhood on the South Side of Pittsburgh.
Now, the host's parents own their "dream house" in a subdivision in Upper Marlboro. They can't walk over to a local field for a pick-up game. It's much harder to get to know your neighbors without a sidewalk leading to a local park or other destination where you might run into each other. If they ever saw a neighbor's child doing something they shouldn't, would they even know whom to call? It takes a village to raise a child. What happens when there is no village?
The subdivision I grew up in had a couple other kids that were in my age range. I was lucky. Outside of the subdivision, there was nothing else in walking distance. The roads to get there had no shoulder, either. As much as I liked the other guys in the subdivision, they weren't my best friends. If I wanted to see friends from school, my parents had to drive. Once again, I was lucky that my parents had time for frequent trips to friends' houses, as long as I gave them ample notice and they talked to my friends' parents. However, that's a lot of big "ifs." It's silly that a parent must devote time, energy, and money from gasoline, insurance and car depreciation every time two kids want to play video games or kick a soccer ball together.
A pick-up soccer, football, or basketball game was even more complicated. We couldn't just go down to the local field and play with whatever kids were hanging around looking for a game. Instead, we had to call guys who lived in distant subdivisions and talk to their parents about car transportation. If anyone's parents weren't around, or were too busy to take an hour out of their day to drive their child to a pick-up football game, we couldn't play. Since organizing required effort, we'd only call our friends. This deprived us and other adolescents of a major social lesson: getting along with people other than your friends.
Between college and graduate school, I taught ninth grade math. Many of my students would go home after school, fire up the video game console, eat dinner, and then play more video games until they went to bed. Would I have been any different if there weren't other kids in the subdivision, I wasn't into playing sports, or my parents couldn't drive me to the games? Obviously, there are plenty of couch potatoes around the world who do live in walkable urban places. However, without other options, children have few alternatives to a sedentary lifestyle.
Car-dependent places design each area for one single land use. They also seem to design for single life stages, too. A large yard may make sense when a child is just learning to walk. However, what happens when children outgrow the yard and want to interact with their peers and explore the world around them? While it is clearly possible to raise children who become successful adults in car-dependent places, it clearly has its shortcomings for pre-teens and carless teenagers. Why does so much "conventional wisdom" claim that suburbia is inherently a better place to raise children? Suburbia has its advantages, but also more than its fair share of shortcomings.
I'm probably going to get a lot of negative feedback in the comments for this, but I suggest that the myth about suburbia being a better environment for children arose from a combination of suburban marketing and our collective attempt to rationalize the divestment and abandonment of our cities and towns. Amazingly, our society continues to collectively embrace the idea of car-dependent suburbia being best for children while, simultaneously, the baby boomer generation pines for the walkable towns and neighborhoods of their youth.
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