99 Percent Invisible: Blood, Sweat & Tears (City of the Future, Part 2)

The Bijlmermeer (or Bijlmer, for short) was built just outside of Amsterdam in the 1960s. It was designed by modernist architects to be a “city of the future” with its functions separated into distinct zones. To Modernists, it represented a vision of the city as a well-oiled machine. Upon completion, it was a massive expanse of 31 concrete towers. There were 13,000 apartments, many of them unoccupied. Just sitting there, totally empty.

The Bijlmermeer is noisy, thanks in part to planes constantly flying in and out of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport nearby. And in the 1970s, many of those planes carried residents from Suriname, a small nation on the northern coast of South America.

Suriname, and a handful of islands in the Caribbean, had been Dutch colonies since the 1600s, serving as a lucrative source of revenue from slave labor. Slavery was abolished in Suriname in 1863, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that its predominantly black population become citizens of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

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99 Percent Invisible: Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1)

In 1933, a group of architects boarded a ship and set sail from Marseille, France to Athens, Greece. On board were several of the world’s most famous modernist architects and artists, including Erno Goldfinger, Le Corbusier, Alvar Alto, and dozens of others.

There was a silent film made of the voyage that shows the architects on the deck in short-sleeved white shirts and sunglasses. The cruise was the setting for the International Congress of Modern Architecture, commonly known by its French acronym, CIAM.

The subject of this particular congress was city-planning. The members of CIAM thought that cities were too congested, noisy, polluted and chaotic. And they believed some of these problems could be solved by separating out the functions of a city into distinct zones for housing, working, recreation, and traffic.

Zoning wasn’t a new idea, but the architects from CIAM wanted to take it farther. The living spaces would be in high-rise apartments so that the ground-level was open for recreation and collective spaces— live in the sky, play on the ground. Cars would even drive on elevated roads so that pedestrians could have the space below all to themselves. There would also be separate districts for industry and shopping. Where old European cities were winding, cluttered and polluted, this new one would be linear, open, and clean, with everything in its proper place.

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The Calvert Journal: Empire state of mind: projecting power in post-Soviet architecture

The 12-storey house with a tower of 18 stories connects seamlessly to the monumental buildings of the Stalin era. “It is terrible to say it” — Belov hesitates for a moment — “but it is still true: Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, simply had good taste.” Belov also has at the ready the politically correct superstructure for his empire project. He says it is about “de-Stalinising neoclassicism.” In lieu of the enormous Imperial Palace, a playful “House of the Avant-Garde” had originally been planned, with individual wings conceived according to motifs from the painters Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko. It would have been Moscow’s version of the Friedensreich Hundertwasser House. [...]

On the other hand, the photographs include futuristic-looking structures, like the government ministry buildings in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan; the “Zeppelin” high-rise in Moscow; the headquarters of the Russian Railways, also in Moscow; or the chess centre in the oil town of Khanty-Mansiysk in far northern Russia. The point is always to shine with a particular geometric form. [...]

In Moscow City, the symbol of Russian turbo-capitalism, communism seems light-years away. But capitalism and communism have one thing in common: the human being is small, and always just an object. Herfort’s photographs illustrate this as well. When people can be seen at all, they are tiny in comparison to the buildings photographed.

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openDemocracy: Radical democracy and municipal movements

Jeremy Gilbert (JG): That’s a good question and arguably it depends on what you mean by ‘traditional notion’. If by this we really mean ‘mainstream liberal-democratic notions’ then obviously, these are being challenged. But in many ways, the demands of these movements, and the basic desires and assumptions informing them are nor particularly new. There isn’t much in the ‘new’ radical municipal politics that the Barcelona anarchists of the 1930s, or the Paris Communards, would not have recognised. Internationalism was always a part of their ideology as well. [...]

JG: The answer here is pretty simple. We don’t live in city-states. Even in the most urbanised country in Europe, the UK, more people live in small-to-medium-sized towns than in large towns and cities. We live in essentially suburban societies. How to scale up and extend practices of radical democracy beyond specific urban locations is a key question. In the age of instant horizontal communication, it ought to be easier to resolve this question than ever before, at least technically and organisationally. Ideologically, culturally and politically, it may be more difficult. [...]

I am very happy to say that at the present time, the Labour Party leadership in the UK is moving strongly in the direction of advocating forms of collective ownership of businesses and services that are distributed, democratic and co-operative in nature rather than being centralised, technocratic, bureaucratic or paternalistic. They have recently promoted a ground-breaking document on ‘Alternative Models of Ownership’, as well as calling a national conference to discuss it, which is quite inspirational in its vision. [...]

Secondly, it’s often difficult to persuade people (organisational comrades, local communities or political constituencies, trade unionists, whoever) that radical democratic objectives are necessary or desirable, or are more than pleasant diversions from the ‘real’ business of protecting their material interests. I think it’s almost always crucial to make the case for radical democratic practices and demands by emphasizing how necessary they are to the realisation of many basic material objectives.

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The Observer view on Theresa May’s calamitous Brexit strategy | Observer editorial

It is certainly the case that Donald Tusk, president of the council of ministers, caught Mrs May unawares with his blunt declaration that her Chequers plan was unworkable. For the past two years, Mr Tusk has played good cop to bad cop Michel Barnier, the chief EU negotiator. But while Mr Tusk is an anglophile, he is also an ardent believer in the European project, as befits a former Polish prime minister. He has been a candid friend to Mrs May, but he could not force her to listen, so in the end he mockingly cast her adrift. [...]

From the start, EU leaders insisted no cherrypicking of withdrawal terms would be allowed. But Mrs May ignored them. The complex issues raised by the Northern Ireland border were flagged up early on. But only in recent months, to the profound frustration of the Irish government, have Mrs May and her cabinet taken this question seriously – and she still lacks a solution. EU officials complain, with justice, that her inflexible negotiating stance revealed an ignorant disregard, or lack of understanding, of the basic principles upon which the EU is based, namely the single market, free movement of people and goods and a common regulatory and legal framework. [...]

Perhaps the most startling aspect of Mrs May’s performance last week was that the EU leaders’ multiple rebuffs clearly took her by surprise. Why so? They were merely reiterating positions they have maintained for the past two years or more. Does she now, finally, grasp the evidence of her own eyes and ears? Does she understand her Chequers plan, rejected at home and abroad, is doomed? And does she really still believe a no-deal outcome could be anything other than a catastrophe? Judging by Friday’s negative, aggressive Downing Street statement, she remains in denial. She has learned nothing – and has absolutely nothing new to offer. Mrs May is in a very deep hole, but she will not stop digging.

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Haaretz: Putin Now Has Leverage Over Israel, and No Reason to Give It Up

The Defense Ministry, which issued a statement threatening Israel the day after the incident, is taking a hard line. Putin himself spoke softly, almost forgivingly, about a series of tragic mistakes. And Russian officers in contact with Israeli colleagues dealt mainly with professional issues – what caused the incident and what should be fixed to prevent a recurrence. [...]

New bilateral understandings apparently haven’t yet been finalized and probably won’t be publicized. But at least in the short term, Russia will presumably try to put some restrictions on Israel’s freedom of action, either by distancing Israeli planes from Russian bases in northern Syria or by demanding greater advance notice of every strike. [...]

A third country was notably absent from the Russian-Israeli tensions caused by the downed plane – the United States. Until a few years ago, Washington was involved in almost every important Mideast development. A good example is UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War. The United States and France were heavily involved in drafting it, but Russia, which also has a permanent Security Council seat, was almost completely uninvolved.

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The Guardian: UK faces darker hours before Brexit agreement is reached

Brussels is well acquainted with being cast as the baddy by grandstanding prime ministers and ministers. Ruling out one Brussels-led policy in bellicose terms lets governments accept quietly something else that may only be slightly less toxic to the voters and domestic political alliances that give them power. [...]

If there are any doubts in Brussels that May has now accepted a Canada-style free trade deal as the likely landing zone, albeit with some bells and whistles to make it look like a compromise, Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, was able to assuage them on the BBC’s Today show on Saturday. Asked twice to rule out such a deal, with the regulatory barriers on imports this involves, he did not do so.

But there’s a bigger, and intractable, row to come. May says she has ruled out a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK for constitutional reasons. She may also have done this because the UK’s manufacturing sector is reliant on an absence of customs checks between Britain, Ireland and the continent. Yet the UK’s continued membership in a customs union has also been ruled out. The Brexiters see many of the Leave benefits as coming from the ability of global Britain to set its own tariff schedule on imports. Something has to give. Brussels is preparing for things to get much darker.

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Vox: We know ocean plastic is a problem. We can’t fix it until we answer these 5 questions.

Garbage patches the size of small countries floating on the surface of the ocean have become another powerful image of the problem, as have photos and videos of marine life choking on and filled with plastic. In the past couple of months, we’ve also seen a major mobilization around keeping plastic out of the ocean.

“Beat Plastic Pollution” was the focus of UN World Environmental Day on June 5, inspiring hundreds of beach cleanup events around the world and a remarkable commitment from India to ban single-use plastics by 2022. [...]

Since this initial report, researchers at the Santa Barbara Marine Conservancy discovered that the plastic at the ocean surface only accounts for about 1 percent of all ocean plastic. Although others have found that a large percent is absorbed into the ocean floor, it’s still not clear where all the plastic is in the ocean.

We are also not really sure what objects are the biggest component of ocean plastic. Until recently, most research into ocean plastic sources came from beach cleanups; as a result, the most common objects found were items that humans use near beaches, like cigarettes, straws, and cups. [...]

It did not refer to regulation of fishing equipment, which is believed to be the largest source of ocean plastic. It did not demand reduction of plastic production. And notably missing from the charter were the United States and Japan. Greenpeace called the proposals “tepid,” saying they were mostly voluntary and “must be met with significant legislative action.”

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CityLab: The Fight for LGBT Rights Has Moved to the Suburbs

But same-sex couples and transgender people are increasingly living outside of these traditional “gayborhoods.” Many of the national battles over lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights have grown out of everyday conflicts between these new suburbanites and their straight-identified neighbors.

The movement of openly gay couples away from older cities defied the perceived connection between heterosexual family life and the suburbs that dates at least to the 1940s. [...]

At the time, local businesses and homeowners worried about attempts by neighboring communities, including Denver, to annex new land. Many middle-class residents of Jefferson County saw themselves as defenders of a particularly suburban way of life that was threatened by annexation from the central city. They identified that lifestyle with low taxes, good schools, racial homogeneity, happy marriages and, above all, the well-being of children.

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