Intro

So I guess the point of this blog is to not only document my upcoming travels but record my thoughts and observations regarding the many cities I will be visiting. For those of you who don’t know I will be on coop in the Philippines for the month of May and will be spending the summer studying at DIS in Copenhagen Denmark. In case you’re interested I will go ahead and copy in the promo pitch for my coop in the Philippines:
 
This intensive 28-day design/build adventure will focus on building an entrance to a future international environmental learning center and tropical research campus in Puerto Princesa, Palawan. The class begins with students working individually and then moving towards a group design process. This design phase concludes with the Artistic Director, Jim Hubbell, spending one day creating the design that will be built. The design will come from the collective ideas of the class layered with the experience of the Artistic Director. The remainder of the course is an intensive sprint to build what has been designed, utilizing local, environmentally appropriate materials, while allowing the design and building processes to continually inform one another.
 
As you can imagine I am excited at the opportunity to travel and plan to take advantage of the opportunity as a basis for beginning some of my own research into the modern city. I am extremely fascinated with the urban forces and components that form a city and shape how it functions and is perceived. I have spent a large portion of my life trying to understand why my home town of Cincinnati is the way it is, how it is better or worse than other cities, and what can be done to improve it as a city. In the past few years, coop, and other opportunities has given me the opportunity to visit and see firsthand how other North American cities have approached the many urban problems I have noticed here in Cincinnati. I am really excited to compare our cities with those in Asia and Europe, and hope to find new ways of living that could greatly benefit our own cities. In the next week before I leave for the Philippines I hope to pick a couple North American cities that I feel I have a good grasp on, and begin to share my urban analysis of these cities as a means of comparison for the cities I will be visiting. In hope of some type of standardization I will break each city down into 5 categories: density, transportation, vibrancy, and quality of life.
 
Presently I believe that the two most important challenges that face a city are the needs of modern transportation, namely the automobile and the distribution of socio economic classes. I am most fascinated with the documented decline of almost every American city during the 1950’s and 60’s and its connection to the automobile and the institution of the Interstate Highway System. The construction of the highways destroyed the urban fabric of many American cities and displaced thousands. The system transformed the city from being a place to live, to a place to visit. This mentality leads to the so called “white flight”, glorifying suburban sprawl. This leads into my next point of the distribution of socio economic classes. Every city has rich, poor, and a middle class, but the location of each class will tell a great deal about not only how nice a city is, but how well it functions. If only poor live in the center of a city it is safe to say that such a city wouldn’t be very desirable to visit. Conversely it would be very hard to sustain a city where only the rich can afford to live, and most likely it would leave you feeling out of place. Therefore I believe that a well functioning city hinges on the integration of every social class living and functioning alongside each other.
 
I will also say that I have never done anything like this before and I am sorry if it is rambling at times. (That’s just the way I think.) I’m not sure how many people will actually read this but I’d love to hear anyone’s feedback. I guess in all of this I just hope to get some of my ideas out and on paper so that someday maybe I can take these thoughts and turn them into something.