Melbourne: Most Liveable City, But for Whom?

Melbourne, Australia has been ranked the Most Liveable City by the Economist for four years in a row, and having lived there for the greater part of the year in 2008, I am never surprised to see this city at the top of the list.  But this year, The Age had a bone to pick with the criteria that made this so, begging the question, for whom is the city most liveable?

Squatters move out of Venezuela’s ‘Tower of David’ super slum in Caracas

Thousands of squatters have started moving out of an abandoned skyscraper in Venezuela, dubbed the world’s tallest shanty-town.

Soldiers in Caracas have started moving out the more than 1,150 families living in the 45-storey ‘Tower of David’, which was taken over by squatters in the 1990s.

Originally intended to be a bank centre but left unfinished in 1994, the vast concrete skeleton was viewed by many Venezuelans as a focus for crime and symbol of property “invasions”. Police occasionally raided it, hunting kidnappers.

The squatters said the tower was a safe refuge from dangerous slums and something of a model community.

They built carefully divided apartments and established shops and services inside, bricking up holes to keep children safe.

The tower fascinated foreigners. An exhibition about it won a prize at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, and it even showed up as a backdrop to an episode of US TV drama Homeland, as the place where on-the-run terrorist suspect Nicholas Brody was captured.

Mr Maduro said it was an error to let people live so long in such a precarious structure, where some people died falling off ledges. The state is studying various options for the tower.

“Some are proposing its demolition, others are proposing turning it into an economic centre, some are proposing building homes there,” Mr Maduro told reporters.

“We’re going to open a debate … If we demolish it, it’s to build something new for the local community.”

Mr Maduro’s minister for the transformation of Caracas, Ernesto Villegas, said he leaned towards demolition of the building because it was a monument to a “bourgeois” past before the 1999-2013 rule of socialist leader Hugo Chavez.

In a second day of frenetic activity at the tower, residents hauled down couches, beds and other belongings, and soldiers helped them load trucks heading to their new homes.

The squatters said they were leaving voluntarily after advance meetings and guarantees of new apartments.

Local media have speculated the tower could be sold to Chinese investors and turned into a bank centre.

There was no reference to such a plan, however, during this week’s visit to Caracas by Chinese president Xi Jinping.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-24/venezuela-caracas-super-slum-tower-of-david/5620814

India Said to Seek Mumbai Airport Slum Removal on Terror

India’s federal government has asked officials in Mumbai for a plan to evict some 90,000 slum dwellers living around the airport after terrorist attacks on airfields in Pakistan, a person familiar with the proposal said.

India’s Civil Aviation Minister has written to the Maharashtra state government asking the state to relocate and rehouse those living around the airport, according to a senior aviation ministry official, who asked not to be identified as the information isn’t public. The security threat to the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport from the slum is grave, the official said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is looking at terror threats to aviation more closely after the Taliban attacked Karachi’s airport in early June killing 36 people and later that month gunmen fired on a plane coming to land in Peshawar, killing one passenger. Last week, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri said he is starting a wing in India.

Evicting slum-dwellers in India’s financial capital has always been contentious. Land encroachment and theft by those staying next to the airport wall have hampered expansion of the facility.

Encroachments into airport land means anyone with a gun can shoot an aircraft down or target civilians in the airport, the official said. The slums occupy about 309 acres (125 hectares) of land around the airport in India’s financial capital.

Uday Moray, a spokesman for India’s civil aviation ministry, did not respond to two calls to his mobile phone. Mumbai airport spokesman Vaibhav Tiwari also did not respond to calls seeking comment. Aniruddha Ashtaputre, a spokesman for the Maharashtra government, whose capital is Mumbai, did not have an immediate comment.

Taliban, Al-Qaeda

Taliban fighters killed 36 people at Karachi’s international airport in June and warned foreign investors, airlines and multinational companies to stop operating in Pakistan. A month later,Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine after being possibly hit by a missile, underlining threats to aviation safety around the world.

Al-Qaeda said last week it plans to conduct operations in India as well as work to end what al-Zawahiri called the suffering of Muslims throughout South Asia, including Kashmir, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Security has been tightened across Indian airports after al-Qaeda’s announcement, the person said. Indian officials held a meeting to review the security situation in airports this week, the person said.

Redevelopment

GVK and its partners took over running the Mumbai airport in 2006 as part of government plans to modernize India’s transportation networks. The company demolished about 100 buildings, including a police station, to construct a new passenger terminal that cost about 55 billion rupees ($904 million) and opened earlier this year.

Years of efforts to clear the tin-roofed shanties that surround the Mumbai aerodrome hit a road block last year when a company tasked with the job had its project terminated, prompting a court battle. A 17-year-old plan to build a second airport in Mumbai has gone nowhere.

The city itself is home to some 6.5 million slum dwellers, or more than half its population, according to the Slum Rehabilitation Authority. They live without running water, private toilets and basic sanitation.

Air traffic to Mumbai, India’s busiest airport after New Delhi, will more than triple to 100 million passengers a year by 2030, according to estimates by the Maharashtra government. Unless the airport can expand using the land where slums exist now, the airport will become saturated in “very near future,” Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju wrote in a July letter to the Mahrashtra government. Bloomberg News obtained has a copy of the letter.

India ranks 61 in quality of air transport infrastructure, behind Ethiopia, and 62 in efficiency of legal framework in settling disputes, behind Ghana, according to Global Competitiveness Report released by the World Economic Forum last week.

Does the Evolution of Smartphones Come at the Expense of ‘Spatial Thinking’?

Are smartphones supplementing the capacity of humans to think spatially, such that future generations might lose fundamental cognitive abilities?

“The rise in mobile navigation technology has, in just a few years, transformed the way we get around cities,” writes Henry Gabar. “In 2011, 35 percent of Americans had smartphones; by 2013, that had grown to 61 percent.” Moreover, “[three]-quarters of those people now use their phones for directions and location-based services. One in five Americans used the Google Maps app in June; one in eight used Apple Maps. Tens of millions more rely on car-based modules hitched to the satellites of the Global Positioning System.”

The question pondered by Gabar is whether humans stand to lose very valuable brainpower in letting their phones take over so much navigation work. “Experts who study the issue are concerned that spatial thinking might be the next casualty of technological progress, another cognitive ability surpassed and then supplanted by the cerebral annex of the Internet….They worry we may become, as a society, what the Japanese call hōkō onchi—deaf to direction.”

The longish-read article includes comparisons to the advancements in 19th century cartography that inspired similar fears at the time, as well as the counter argument that the rich data and context-filling capabilities of contemporary maps could actually increase spatial consciousness.

 

 

http://www.planetizen.com/node/71160