- Via Volume - Unbuilt and Think Tank (by Studio Beirut)

“Beirut is an exclusive city. Driving around Solidaire, downtown Beirut, in your airconditioned SUV, gently rolling past the sidewalks, windowshopping from behind your dark-tainted car windows, from behind your expensive sun glasses, you will probably indulge in feeling rather special. Not too many people get the chance of driving around the carefully reconstructed streets of Solidaire, or shopping in its many exclusive boutiques. Then, if you happen to live in the suburbs down south you might feel equally special; Israel’s relentless bombing campaigns on Beirut almost exclusively targeted Haret Hreik, the mostly illegal sprawl of high-rise settlements home to Lebanon’s large Shi’a community. And if you happen to run a kiosk in the middle of Sassine Square, the hilltop crossroads in eastern Beirut, you will again be experiencing exclusivity; especially since the Pierre Gemayel assassination, the area once again is the heartland of the red-crossed Phalangists. Solidaire, Haret Hreik, Sassine; all are very much exclusive places. Exclusive on the basis of class, and identity politics….” Volume-Unbuilt

Watch A sneak preview (courtesy of Studio Beirut Think Tank) of The Public Space Invaders….

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QER6-RQOpx4

Popularity: 8% [?]

- Via International Herald Tribune

Scott Dalton for The New York Times
Mr. Fajardo greets residents in Santo Domingo Savio, where he has built a structure with a library, an auditorium, a day care center and an art gallery. Mr. Fajardo is the country’s most popular mayor, with approval ratings above 80 percent.

MEDELLÍN, Colombia: Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, sporting three days’ growth of beard and unruly hair nearly down to his shoulders, Sergio Fajardo looks every bit the nonconformist mathematician who spent years attaining a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.

But that was a past life for Fajardo, the mayor of this city and the son of one of its most famous architects. Now he presses forward with an unconventional political philosophy that has turned swaths of Medellín into dust-choked construction sites.

“Our most beautiful buildings,” Fajardo, 51, said, “must be in our poorest areas.”

With that simple idea, Fajardo hired renowned architects to design an assemblage of luxurious libraries and other public buildings in the most desperate slums of this city. Their eccentric shapes - one resembles an immense blackened loaf of bread sliced in half - occupy areas where foot soldiers in the Colombian cocaine wars once died by the thousands each year. But several years ago, residents here say, a tenuous peace was imposed by paramilitary drug traffickers who outfought their rivals.

Now, Medellín is no longer stymied by being described as the deadliest city in the world.

Scott Dalton for The New York Times
Passengers ride the new Metro Cable, which carries people to and from Santo Domingo Savio, a hillside slum that is home to 170,000 people. The cable car system is part of Mayor Sergio Fajardo’s push to improve infrastructure in Medellín, Colombia.

This city of about two million had 29 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2006, down from 381 per 100,000 when killings peaked in 1991.

Read the full story

Popularity: 4% [?]