Korean planners need more Gangnam Style

Submitted by cuz on Thu, 10/11/2012 - 14:22

The following is an adapted text of my discussant comments October 8th at the 4th Korea Land & City Design Forum & Competition, which sponsored by the Financial News and took place at 63 City.

First, I would like to thank the Ministry of Land, Transport, and Maritime Affairs, the Financial News, and the organizers of the event for the opportunity to speak to you today.

Rise of the Megacities

Submitted by cuz on Tue, 10/09/2012 - 09:32

The Guardian today has an interactive feature on the world's megacities. Simple, but a solid overview.

Sad week for Marx

Submitted by cuz on Tue, 10/02/2012 - 10:22

So this past week has been a bad one for a number of people I'm close to, but it's also been a sad one for Marxist theory and progressive activism. In the last week, we have lost Eric Hobsbawm and Barry Commoner. More personally, we have also lost Neil Smith, a geographer from CUNY Graduate School, whom I had the good fortune to become familiar with as a participant in the Right to the City reading group he and Peter Marcuse organized. Neil was a vivacious individual with boundless good will that should serve as an inspiration to me and to you. To see him in action, I offer you his rendition of the Socialist ABC. A truly unfortunate loss at a mere 58-years-old. Curiously, my current research paper looks at uneven development, a concept Neil theorized, in the course of Korean development.

Phoenix is hungry

Submitted by cuz on Sat, 09/29/2012 - 12:54

In my Global Poverty class I do an exercise in which the students have to develop a family budget based on minimum wage jobs with explicit goals to find an apartment and get their kids into a good college to break the cycle of poverty. It is never a pleasant discovering just how tough it can be.

One of my students sent a link to this brief article describing the current mayor of Phoenix's effort to live on a foodstamp budget for a week. He's hungry.

Advice for application essays

Submitted by cuz on Fri, 09/21/2012 - 09:30

James Lang in the Chronicle of Higher Education writes about an interview with Anthony Casgman at the College of Holy Cross in which Cashman explains that student need to make "three basic moves with their graduate-school applications". (Note: I have underlined a few points that I think are particularly pertinent to Korean students.)

1. Applicants have to tell their story, with an eye to the opportunity they are seeking. Most students achieve that to some degree in their applications but never move beyond it. And they aren't necessarily telling their story well, Cashman says. That's true especially of the personal essay, when students trot out and showcase every award they have ever won.

"The essay should not read as a list of every accomplishment that the student has achieved," Cashman says. "Think of the application from the selection committee's point of view. The committee members have about 10 or 15 minutes to become familiar with the candidate, and that's a very brief time for such a large task. Therefore, the job of the writer is to focus the readers on those elements that best relate to the opportunity at hand."

Industrial retention: A brief literature review

Submitted by cuz on Mon, 08/20/2012 - 09:57

(This summer I read a series of ten articles related to industrial retention in contemporary developed country cities. The intent was to see if there are lessons Korea can learn from the West as it proceeds through its phase of deindustrialization. The rough and short summary of my findings follow.)

Creationism in Korea

Submitted by cuz on Wed, 06/06/2012 - 10:05

I'm flabbergasted. Apparently a number of Korean high school textbooks will remove examples of evolution in order to appease creationists here. I guess idiocy does not respect national boundaries...or perhaps this is America's latest export to Korea.

Ladder of Young People's Participation

Submitted by cuz on Thu, 05/31/2012 - 12:37

One of my KOICA students (Emmanuel), who works for the Tanzanian government promoting child welfare, directed me to Hart's Ladder of Participation (also Freechild Project). His department has developed it and employed it to promote the interest of children in Tanzania. It's very closely related to Shelley Arnstein's Ladder of Participation in the planning literature (and is almost surely derived from it).

Subways converging

Submitted by cuz on Sun, 05/20/2012 - 15:56

Wired has an article on the convergence of subway systems around the globe.

Patterns emerged: The core-and-branch topology, of course, and patterns more fine-grained. Roughly half the stations in any subway will be found on its outer branches rather than the core. The distance from a city’s center to its farthest terminus station is twice the diameter of the subway system’s core. This happens again and again.

The findings are taken to indicate that there are underlying principles guiding urban form. This may not contradict their claims, but one must consider that cities have historically grown from a single core and are designed to sustain the value of that core. I also wonder if this isn't a case of cost-effective operation dictating the shape of the machine and urban development following. This, which I think is highly likely, would suggest that the pattern derived from technological design or capitalist concepts of efficiency.

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