World's cities step up pace of life in fast lane
Wed May 2, 2007 9:31 AM ET
By Kate Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) - A study of cities across the world shows pedestrians are upping their pace at an alarming rate as they scurry from place to place, determined to cram as much as possible into each day.
Scientists say it is symptomatic of a modern life driven by e-mail, text messages and a need to be available 24 hours a day.
The most dramatic increases were found in Asia among the fast-growing "tiger" economies.
Pedestrians in Singapore were crowned the world's fastest movers, walking 30 percent faster than they did in the early 1990s, and in China, the pace of life in Guangzhou has increased by more than 20 percent.
Copenhagen and Madrid were the fastest European cities, beating Paris and London. And despite its reputation as "the city that never sleeps," New York ranked only eighth in the pace race, behind Dublin and Berlin.
Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire who helped conduct the research, used a 1994 study of pedestrians' speed as a comparison and found that on average city dwellers now move 10 percent faster.
"The pace of life in our major cities is now much quicker than before," he said. "This increase in speed will affect more people than ever, because for the first time in history the majority of the world's population are now living in urban centers."
Wiseman is worried by the rising need for speed.
"We just have this feeling that we should be producing and active all of the time," he said. "That is fuelled by the email, text, mobile phone culture."
"But there has to be an upper limit, because if this trend continues, we will arriving places before we have set off."
The study was carried out with the help of the British Council, which promotes British cultural links with countries around the world.
Researchers in each city found a busy street with a wide, flat pavement, free from obstacles and sufficiently uncrowded to allow people to walk at their maximum speed. They then timed how long it took 35 people to walk 60 feet.
They only monitored adults on their own, and ignored anyone on a mobile phone conversation or struggling with shopping bags.
The times, in seconds, recorded in 32 cities across the world are listed below:
1) Singapore (Singapore): 10.55
2) Copenhagen (Denmark): 10.82
3) Madrid (Spain): 10.89
4) Guangzhou (China): 10.94
5) Dublin (Ireland): 11.03
6) Curitiba (Brazil): 11.13
7) Berlin (Germany): 11.16
8) New York (United States of America): 12.00
9) Utrecht (Netherlands): 12.04
10) Vienna (Austria): 12.06
11) Warsaw (Poland): 12.07
12) London (United Kingdom): 12.17
13) Zagreb (Croatia): 12.20
14) Prague (Czech Republic): 12.35
15) Wellington (New Zealand): 12.62
16) Paris (France): 12.65
17) Stockholm (Sweden): 12.75
18) Ljubljana (Slovenia): 12.76
19) Tokyo (Japan): 12.83
20) Ottawa (Canada): 13.72
21) Harare (Zimbabwe): 13.92
22) Sofia (Bulgaria): 13.96
23) Taipei (Taiwan): 14.00
24) Cairo (Egypt): 14.18
25) Sana'a (Yemen): 14.29
26) Bucharest (Romania): 14.36
27) Dubai (United Arab Emirates): 14.64
28) Damascus (Syria): 14.94
29) Amman (Jordan): 15.95
30) Bern (Switzerland): 17.37
31) Manama (Bahrain): 17.69
32) Blantyre (Malawi): 31.60
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
WHAT MAKES A CITY GREAT? - Friday, Nov. 14, 1969
This article was originally printed in Time Magazine in 1969.
"IT is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London," wrote Henry James in 1881. "It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent." Were he alive today, James, a connoisseur of cities, might easily say the same thing about New York or Paris or Tokyo, for the great city is one of the paradoxes of history. In countless different ways, it has almost always been an unpleasant, disagreeable, cheerless, uneasy and reproachful place; in the end, it can only be described as magnificent.
Babylon, for example, was the first great city of the ancient world; according to the Bible, it was "the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth." Ancient Athens, for all its architectural and intellectual glory, was scarcely more than an overgrown slum; the grandeur of Rome was overshadowed by its ramshackle ghettos, crime rate and traffic jams. Sanitation was so bad in the Paris of Louis XIV that two miles from the city's gates a traveler's nose would tell him that he was drawing near. Scarcely anyone today needs to be told about how awful life is in nerve-jangling New York City, which resembles a mismanaged ant heap rather than a community fit for human habitation.
Indeed, the poet Juvenal's complaint about ancient Rome might be made against almost any modern city:
No matter how I hurry, I'm hampered by the crowds
Who almost crush my ribs from front and back; this one
Strikes me with his arm, another with a heavy board;
My head is brushed by a beam, then I have an encounter
With an oil-barrel. Mud clings to my legs in heavy clods,
Large feet step on mine, and my toes get painfully
Acquainted with a soldier's nailed boots.
Yet despite everything, including itself, the truly great city is the stuff of legends and stories and a place with an ineradicable fascination. After cataloguing the horrors of life in imperial Rome, Urban Historian Lewis Mumford adds, almost reluctantly, that "when the worst has been said about urban Rome, one further word must be added: to the end, men loved her."
Uncomfortable and Unbeautiful
What inspires such love and pulls people to the great cities? What indeed is a great city? It is almost easier to say what it is not. Except for its wealthy elites, great cities do not always provide easy or gracious living; lesser communities are almost always more comfortable. Juvenal could have walked peacefully in any number of attractive provincial cities. The average resident of one of Britain's planned new towns lives better than his counterpart in London. Yet London, notes Robert Ardrey, author of The Territorial Imperative, was a great city "even when the food was terrible, and you couldn't get a hot bath." Stockholm, Geneva and Johannesburg, by contrast, are three of the most comfortable cities in the world, but not one of them has even a shadowy claim to greatness.
The great city is not necessarily beautiful or well-planned. Venice and Florence are delights to the eye; yet neither has been a great city since the Renaissance. Brasilia, one of the most elaborately designed of modern cities, is also one of the deadliest. An impressive physical setting is essential to a city's greatness, but by itself that is not enough. Take Pittsburgh: its natural setting, at the junction of two rivers, is magnificent. Man botched the job of doing anything with it. Grand avenues and impressive architecture, though necessary to a great city, do not satisfy the equation. If the Third Reich had lasted another ten years, Berlin, which Hitler planned to rename Germania, would have become the world's most monumental city. It also would have been the most monumentally dull. In fact, it became second-rate on Jan. 30, 1933, when Hitler took power. A city cannot be both great and regimented. Blessed with culture, history and size, Moscow, Shanghai and Peking ought to be great cities, but they are not. They all lack the most important element: spontaneity of free human exchange. Without that, a city is as sterile as Aristophanes' Nephelococcygia, which was to be suspended between heaven and earth—and ruled by the birds.
Diversity and Growth
A city governed by birds might be more comfortable than a city governed by men. But it would not be human, nor would it be great; a city is great only in its human associations, confusing as they may be. The ancient Athenians, true urbanites, delighted in the everyday drama of human encounter. For them, the city was the supreme instrument of civilization, the tool that gave men common traditions and goals, even as it encouraged their diversity and growth. "The men who dwell in the city are my teachers," said Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus, "and not the trees or the country." In turn, the city transformed them into something they had not been previously ard could not have become without it—men who within a few generations produced more thought and works of beauty and value than the race had ever seen before.
Athens is a living memory of the Western world. Its great militaristic rival, Sparta, is all but forgotten as a center of human culture—and with reason. It is hard to classify as great a city that limits human contact, either through political repression, like Moscow, or through distance, like Los Angeles. It is also hard to imagine a city that is great only during the day. If too many of its occupants retreat to the suburbs to eat and sleep each evening, the place is, in fact, not so much a city as a collection of buildings—the unhappy truth about most American cities.
When nations were smaller than they are today, Athens could be great with 100,000 people, Renaissance Florence with 60,000, Alexandria with 700,000 and ancient Rome with something like 1,000,000—no more than live in metropolitan Indianapolis now. To represent all the diverse elements of much more populous societies—diversity is one essential of greatness—the city must now have a population of several millions. Cincinnati and Phoenix, to cite two typical American provincial cities, may be agreeable places to live in, but they are simply not large enough to contain, as does New York, the wide variety of types and temperaments that form the American character. Americans and foreigners alike call New York the least American of cities. In fact, it is the most American, reflecting as does no other all aspects of national life. Still, great is not synonymous with big. Calcutta and Bombay have more than enough people, but too many of them live in misery for the cities to be considered great.
It is doubtful that any one nation can claim more than one great city at any given time—great, after all, is a word that implies uniqueness. It is doubtful, too, that the world itself can contain more than half a dozen great cities at once. Indeed, a great city cannot exist in an unimportant country, which is why Urban Planner John Friedmann of U.C.L.A. prefers to call great cities "imperial cities." London and Paris are still great cities, but they lost some of their luster when world politics shifted to Washington, Moscow and Peking—all of which lack at least one ingredient of greatness. Washington may be the political center of the nation, but, except for its superb galleries, cultural life there is as provincial as that of Des Moines or Butte, Mont. Both Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro have an effervescent vitality that suggests the potential of great cities. They may yet fulfill that potential as Mexico and Brazil grow in wealth and influence. After Tokyo, an undeniably great city despite its pedestrian architecture, Hong Kong is the most vibrant metropolis in Asia. It is, however, a city without a country—and therefore lacks greatness. Cairo is the capital of the Moslem world; but it lacks vitality.
Almost by definition, a city can be great only at the expense of other cities that are less than great. If the power, money and creativity that are now centered in London were divided with Birmingham, Birmingham would not become great, but London would be irretrievably lessened. A delight to live in and a joy to behold, Rome has certain qualities of greatness. It is redolent with tradition; it is the center of a universal religion; it has a people with character and a lively sense of politics. But it does not quite make the first rank of cities today, if only because Milan—cold but confident—controls too much of Italy's wealth and industrial power. The U.S., which is rich in both money and people, ought to be able to support two great cities, perhaps one on either coast, but it does not. A half-century ago, San Francisco looked as if it might become the great city of the West. Instead, it has remained a charming, eccentric and physically beguiling minor metropolis. Los Angeles, in the unlikely event that it ever should overcome its centrifugal forces, may yet become the Western colossus. Though it has many parts of greatness, Chicago, on the other hand, has always thought of itself as the "second city"—and so it always will be, if not third or fourth. Even without the political power that resides in a national capital—one of the usual prerequisites for civic greatness—New York, the cultural, financial and commercial capital, is thus the only truly great city in the U.S.
Pleasures and Vices
A city does not have to be comfortable to be great, but it nonetheless must have the amenities to make life tolerable. Misery should not force thousands to live on the streets, as it does in the big cities of India; residents must be able to move from one place to another without undue strain or great delay; the conditions of life, ranging from prices to climate, cannot be totally oppressive. A great city also must have within its boundaries a large leisured class to pay for the culture and pleasure that are the outward signs of its preeminence. Money cannot buy a great city, but a great city must have money. The late Ian Fleming's definition of a "thrilling city," which emphasized girls and food, was adolescent, but he was not altogether wrong. A great city is always tolerant, even permissive, and provides outlets for a wide range of human pleasures and vices.
Whatever else it may possess or lack, a great city cannot be dull. It must have a sense of place and a feeling all its own, and its citizens must be different from and more vital than those who live elsewhere. The difference does not even have to be in their favor. The native Parisian, for instance, is born with an ineradicable hauteur that others define as rudeness, and the native New Yorker knows the meaning of avarice before he can spell the word. So strong is the trait that a century ago, Anthony Trollope waspishly noted that every New Yorker "worships the dollar and is down before his shrine from morning to night." To preserve the spirit of the place, he suggested, every man walking down Fifth Avenue should have affixed to his forehead a label declaring his net worth. No such label is really needed: a Parisian is a Parisian and a New Yorker a New Yorker, with no mistake possible. But a man who lives in Detroit or Cleveland is not necessarily identifiable as a Detroiter or a Clevelander.
First Wild Promise
The city was a place of worship before it was a fortress or trading center, with a magical attraction for men who had always lived in wandering groups or in villages. Prudence might have dictated other sites, but men returned, again and again, to the cities they remembered. Troy was destroyed and rebuilt so many times that archaeologists classify their discoveries as Troy I through IX; Troy VIIA was the "Ilios, city of magnificent houses," as Homer called it, that fell to the duplicity of Greeks. Leveled by the Romans, Carthage returned to life to become the third city of the Empire; in the Middle Ages, Frederick Barbarossa poured salt on the blackened ruins of Milan, but neither fire nor salt could stop the city's resurgence.
The great city retains the ancient magic even today. Men do not always love it; often, indeed, they hate it. More often still, they hate it and love it by turns. Yet once caught by it, they cannot forget or long leave it. "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who did love Paris, "then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." New York, wrote Thomas Wolfe, who did not always love it, "lays hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory; he feels that he can never die."
Like all magic, the attraction of the great city is, in the end, beyond analysis and beyond definition. Marshall McLuhan and the late Frank Lloyd Wright may have been right in arguing that the city should be replaced by smaller communities. But men, alas and thank God, are never strictly practical. Until people are known by numbers alone, the great city will continue to exist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was speaking of Manhattan, but he might just as well have been talking of London or Paris—or Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon or Justinian's Constantinople. Looking at it from afar, he said, was always to see it "in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world."
Title: WHAT MAKES A CITY GREAT?
Publication: TIME Magazine
Publisher: Time Inc.
Date: Nov 14, 1969
"IT is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London," wrote Henry James in 1881. "It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent." Were he alive today, James, a connoisseur of cities, might easily say the same thing about New York or Paris or Tokyo, for the great city is one of the paradoxes of history. In countless different ways, it has almost always been an unpleasant, disagreeable, cheerless, uneasy and reproachful place; in the end, it can only be described as magnificent.
Babylon, for example, was the first great city of the ancient world; according to the Bible, it was "the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth." Ancient Athens, for all its architectural and intellectual glory, was scarcely more than an overgrown slum; the grandeur of Rome was overshadowed by its ramshackle ghettos, crime rate and traffic jams. Sanitation was so bad in the Paris of Louis XIV that two miles from the city's gates a traveler's nose would tell him that he was drawing near. Scarcely anyone today needs to be told about how awful life is in nerve-jangling New York City, which resembles a mismanaged ant heap rather than a community fit for human habitation.
Indeed, the poet Juvenal's complaint about ancient Rome might be made against almost any modern city:
No matter how I hurry, I'm hampered by the crowds
Who almost crush my ribs from front and back; this one
Strikes me with his arm, another with a heavy board;
My head is brushed by a beam, then I have an encounter
With an oil-barrel. Mud clings to my legs in heavy clods,
Large feet step on mine, and my toes get painfully
Acquainted with a soldier's nailed boots.
Yet despite everything, including itself, the truly great city is the stuff of legends and stories and a place with an ineradicable fascination. After cataloguing the horrors of life in imperial Rome, Urban Historian Lewis Mumford adds, almost reluctantly, that "when the worst has been said about urban Rome, one further word must be added: to the end, men loved her."
Uncomfortable and Unbeautiful
What inspires such love and pulls people to the great cities? What indeed is a great city? It is almost easier to say what it is not. Except for its wealthy elites, great cities do not always provide easy or gracious living; lesser communities are almost always more comfortable. Juvenal could have walked peacefully in any number of attractive provincial cities. The average resident of one of Britain's planned new towns lives better than his counterpart in London. Yet London, notes Robert Ardrey, author of The Territorial Imperative, was a great city "even when the food was terrible, and you couldn't get a hot bath." Stockholm, Geneva and Johannesburg, by contrast, are three of the most comfortable cities in the world, but not one of them has even a shadowy claim to greatness.
The great city is not necessarily beautiful or well-planned. Venice and Florence are delights to the eye; yet neither has been a great city since the Renaissance. Brasilia, one of the most elaborately designed of modern cities, is also one of the deadliest. An impressive physical setting is essential to a city's greatness, but by itself that is not enough. Take Pittsburgh: its natural setting, at the junction of two rivers, is magnificent. Man botched the job of doing anything with it. Grand avenues and impressive architecture, though necessary to a great city, do not satisfy the equation. If the Third Reich had lasted another ten years, Berlin, which Hitler planned to rename Germania, would have become the world's most monumental city. It also would have been the most monumentally dull. In fact, it became second-rate on Jan. 30, 1933, when Hitler took power. A city cannot be both great and regimented. Blessed with culture, history and size, Moscow, Shanghai and Peking ought to be great cities, but they are not. They all lack the most important element: spontaneity of free human exchange. Without that, a city is as sterile as Aristophanes' Nephelococcygia, which was to be suspended between heaven and earth—and ruled by the birds.
Diversity and Growth
A city governed by birds might be more comfortable than a city governed by men. But it would not be human, nor would it be great; a city is great only in its human associations, confusing as they may be. The ancient Athenians, true urbanites, delighted in the everyday drama of human encounter. For them, the city was the supreme instrument of civilization, the tool that gave men common traditions and goals, even as it encouraged their diversity and growth. "The men who dwell in the city are my teachers," said Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus, "and not the trees or the country." In turn, the city transformed them into something they had not been previously ard could not have become without it—men who within a few generations produced more thought and works of beauty and value than the race had ever seen before.
Athens is a living memory of the Western world. Its great militaristic rival, Sparta, is all but forgotten as a center of human culture—and with reason. It is hard to classify as great a city that limits human contact, either through political repression, like Moscow, or through distance, like Los Angeles. It is also hard to imagine a city that is great only during the day. If too many of its occupants retreat to the suburbs to eat and sleep each evening, the place is, in fact, not so much a city as a collection of buildings—the unhappy truth about most American cities.
When nations were smaller than they are today, Athens could be great with 100,000 people, Renaissance Florence with 60,000, Alexandria with 700,000 and ancient Rome with something like 1,000,000—no more than live in metropolitan Indianapolis now. To represent all the diverse elements of much more populous societies—diversity is one essential of greatness—the city must now have a population of several millions. Cincinnati and Phoenix, to cite two typical American provincial cities, may be agreeable places to live in, but they are simply not large enough to contain, as does New York, the wide variety of types and temperaments that form the American character. Americans and foreigners alike call New York the least American of cities. In fact, it is the most American, reflecting as does no other all aspects of national life. Still, great is not synonymous with big. Calcutta and Bombay have more than enough people, but too many of them live in misery for the cities to be considered great.
It is doubtful that any one nation can claim more than one great city at any given time—great, after all, is a word that implies uniqueness. It is doubtful, too, that the world itself can contain more than half a dozen great cities at once. Indeed, a great city cannot exist in an unimportant country, which is why Urban Planner John Friedmann of U.C.L.A. prefers to call great cities "imperial cities." London and Paris are still great cities, but they lost some of their luster when world politics shifted to Washington, Moscow and Peking—all of which lack at least one ingredient of greatness. Washington may be the political center of the nation, but, except for its superb galleries, cultural life there is as provincial as that of Des Moines or Butte, Mont. Both Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro have an effervescent vitality that suggests the potential of great cities. They may yet fulfill that potential as Mexico and Brazil grow in wealth and influence. After Tokyo, an undeniably great city despite its pedestrian architecture, Hong Kong is the most vibrant metropolis in Asia. It is, however, a city without a country—and therefore lacks greatness. Cairo is the capital of the Moslem world; but it lacks vitality.
Almost by definition, a city can be great only at the expense of other cities that are less than great. If the power, money and creativity that are now centered in London were divided with Birmingham, Birmingham would not become great, but London would be irretrievably lessened. A delight to live in and a joy to behold, Rome has certain qualities of greatness. It is redolent with tradition; it is the center of a universal religion; it has a people with character and a lively sense of politics. But it does not quite make the first rank of cities today, if only because Milan—cold but confident—controls too much of Italy's wealth and industrial power. The U.S., which is rich in both money and people, ought to be able to support two great cities, perhaps one on either coast, but it does not. A half-century ago, San Francisco looked as if it might become the great city of the West. Instead, it has remained a charming, eccentric and physically beguiling minor metropolis. Los Angeles, in the unlikely event that it ever should overcome its centrifugal forces, may yet become the Western colossus. Though it has many parts of greatness, Chicago, on the other hand, has always thought of itself as the "second city"—and so it always will be, if not third or fourth. Even without the political power that resides in a national capital—one of the usual prerequisites for civic greatness—New York, the cultural, financial and commercial capital, is thus the only truly great city in the U.S.
Pleasures and Vices
A city does not have to be comfortable to be great, but it nonetheless must have the amenities to make life tolerable. Misery should not force thousands to live on the streets, as it does in the big cities of India; residents must be able to move from one place to another without undue strain or great delay; the conditions of life, ranging from prices to climate, cannot be totally oppressive. A great city also must have within its boundaries a large leisured class to pay for the culture and pleasure that are the outward signs of its preeminence. Money cannot buy a great city, but a great city must have money. The late Ian Fleming's definition of a "thrilling city," which emphasized girls and food, was adolescent, but he was not altogether wrong. A great city is always tolerant, even permissive, and provides outlets for a wide range of human pleasures and vices.
Whatever else it may possess or lack, a great city cannot be dull. It must have a sense of place and a feeling all its own, and its citizens must be different from and more vital than those who live elsewhere. The difference does not even have to be in their favor. The native Parisian, for instance, is born with an ineradicable hauteur that others define as rudeness, and the native New Yorker knows the meaning of avarice before he can spell the word. So strong is the trait that a century ago, Anthony Trollope waspishly noted that every New Yorker "worships the dollar and is down before his shrine from morning to night." To preserve the spirit of the place, he suggested, every man walking down Fifth Avenue should have affixed to his forehead a label declaring his net worth. No such label is really needed: a Parisian is a Parisian and a New Yorker a New Yorker, with no mistake possible. But a man who lives in Detroit or Cleveland is not necessarily identifiable as a Detroiter or a Clevelander.
First Wild Promise
The city was a place of worship before it was a fortress or trading center, with a magical attraction for men who had always lived in wandering groups or in villages. Prudence might have dictated other sites, but men returned, again and again, to the cities they remembered. Troy was destroyed and rebuilt so many times that archaeologists classify their discoveries as Troy I through IX; Troy VIIA was the "Ilios, city of magnificent houses," as Homer called it, that fell to the duplicity of Greeks. Leveled by the Romans, Carthage returned to life to become the third city of the Empire; in the Middle Ages, Frederick Barbarossa poured salt on the blackened ruins of Milan, but neither fire nor salt could stop the city's resurgence.
The great city retains the ancient magic even today. Men do not always love it; often, indeed, they hate it. More often still, they hate it and love it by turns. Yet once caught by it, they cannot forget or long leave it. "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who did love Paris, "then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." New York, wrote Thomas Wolfe, who did not always love it, "lays hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory; he feels that he can never die."
Like all magic, the attraction of the great city is, in the end, beyond analysis and beyond definition. Marshall McLuhan and the late Frank Lloyd Wright may have been right in arguing that the city should be replaced by smaller communities. But men, alas and thank God, are never strictly practical. Until people are known by numbers alone, the great city will continue to exist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was speaking of Manhattan, but he might just as well have been talking of London or Paris—or Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon or Justinian's Constantinople. Looking at it from afar, he said, was always to see it "in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world."
Title: WHAT MAKES A CITY GREAT?
Publication: TIME Magazine
Publisher: Time Inc.
Date: Nov 14, 1969
Monday, February 12, 2007
A Brief Tutorial for Contrbutors
Hey,
Welcome to the City Ideal Project.
This is a brief tutorial for contributors about how to use this blog.
Posting
You have to first accept the invitation sent to the e-mail to join the City Ideal blog.
After you have chosen a blogID and a password, you can pretty much add by going to Post and writing stuff down.
The Title Field is the title of that post, in this case "A Brief Tutorial for Contributors" is the title.
The Link Feild is the link that the title will follow. Be Sure to Include the Whole Link Address! Including http:// or else there will be trouble.
Publishing posts will mean that it will be accessible to everyone who sees this site.
Saving a Draft means that it will not be seen on the blog page, and only accessible to you and the Host.
Comments and Backlinks Parameters are pretty much set as they ought to be.
Links
If you want to include a hyperlink in your post, it should look like this:
<a href="http://cityideal.blogspot.com" target="sl" title="City Ideal Project">City Ideal Project</a>
If you do this correctly, it will look like this City Ideal Project in the blog body.
href="link" -> where link is the entire link Including http:// that you want to link to.
target="new" -> where new is the page that this link will open into (if you put a target, a new page will open - generally a good things)
title="blurb" -> Where the blurb is shown in the yellow box when you hover your mouse icon over the link.
The portion between the <a> and the </a> is what will show up as the link name on your post, in this case Smart League Blog
Labels
As you may have noticed, there are some labels on the sidebar. These categories are added during contribution writing. If we keep them clean and clear, they can be very useful. If we don't - they will be messy and gross.
If you want to add a link to the sidebar, or you have any other questions simply email me at thesmaj@gmail.com.
=)
Welcome to the City Ideal Project.
This is a brief tutorial for contributors about how to use this blog.
Posting
You have to first accept the invitation sent to the e-mail to join the City Ideal blog.
After you have chosen a blogID and a password, you can pretty much add by going to Post and writing stuff down.
The Title Field is the title of that post, in this case "A Brief Tutorial for Contributors" is the title.
The Link Feild is the link that the title will follow. Be Sure to Include the Whole Link Address! Including http:// or else there will be trouble.
Publishing posts will mean that it will be accessible to everyone who sees this site.
Saving a Draft means that it will not be seen on the blog page, and only accessible to you and the Host.
Comments and Backlinks Parameters are pretty much set as they ought to be.
Links
If you want to include a hyperlink in your post, it should look like this:
<a href="http://cityideal.blogspot.com" target="sl" title="City Ideal Project">City Ideal Project</a>
If you do this correctly, it will look like this City Ideal Project in the blog body.
href="link" -> where link is the entire link Including http:// that you want to link to.
target="new" -> where new is the page that this link will open into (if you put a target, a new page will open - generally a good things)
title="blurb" -> Where the blurb is shown in the yellow box when you hover your mouse icon over the link.
The portion between the <a> and the </a> is what will show up as the link name on your post, in this case Smart League Blog
Labels
As you may have noticed, there are some labels on the sidebar. These categories are added during contribution writing. If we keep them clean and clear, they can be very useful. If we don't - they will be messy and gross.
If you want to add a link to the sidebar, or you have any other questions simply email me at thesmaj@gmail.com.
=)
Monday, November 27, 2006
Explanation
The City Ideal Project is an exploration of the Ideal City - the concept and the pursuit thereof. We hope to use every forms of media available to us to present our findings, and to get people thinking about their surroundings - namely the City and the Built Environment.
We will consider, examine and discuss various issues, themes and concepts such as:
Our purpose is to consider these as a process - we have no clear goal or end in mind.
Thank you for reading, we hope you find it interesting.
We will consider, examine and discuss various issues, themes and concepts such as:
- Utopia/Distopia
- the Build Environment, the Urban Landscape, Planning & Design
- Environmentalism
- Cost/Benefit Analyses, Economics & Finance
- Getting Around: Transportation & Movement
- Thinkers and Doers
- The Arts (media, film, 'fine arts', poetry, language, sport, music, noise, intellect & academia...)
- Décor
- Boundaries (real and imagined)
- 'The Interactive City'
- Urban Dynamics
- People: Citizens, Police, Authority, Visitors, Children, Seniors, Adults, Teens, Groups, Scouts, Students, Teachers, etc.
- 'Community', 'Society', 'the Neighbourhood' etc.
- Recreation
- Character
- Engineering & Technology
- Citizen Input & Citizen Output
- Politics & Social Issues
- the Future, the Past & the Present
- The 'Geography of Nowhere'
Our purpose is to consider these as a process - we have no clear goal or end in mind.
Thank you for reading, we hope you find it interesting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
