CityLab: The Golden Age of Gondolas Might Be Just Around the Corner

The gondola renaissance began, more or less, with Medellín. In 2004, the Colombian city built a gondola to connect one of its sprawling hillside neighborhoods to the trunk line of the Metro, which runs along the fold of the valley. The success of that project inspired the construction of two more lines, which in turn helped make the city an international destination for mayors and urban thinkers, and the winner of the Urban Land Institute’s Innovation City of the Year last month.

Medellín had imitators. In 2007, Portland, Oregon, built a tramway to connect a university campus to downtown. New York City renovated its Roosevelt Island Tram in 2010. In 2009, Manizales, Colombia, installed a gondola system in imitation of Medellin. The next year, Caracas built one; the year after, Rio de Janeiro did too.

Last year, London built an aerial cable crossing the Thames, and in the fall, La Paz announced it will build the world's largest gondola transit network, with eleven stations and over seven miles of cable. The French cities of Brest and Toulouse will complete cable transport in 2015 and 2017, respectively. [...]

And beyond that, according to Assman Ekkehard, a marketing director for Doppelmayr, there was an image problem. "Most people — politicians, the public itself, architects, the people who are doing the plans for cities, traffic specialists — they also had, and still sometimes have this association: ropeways are good for tourists, they're good for bringing people up the mountain, but they're not a good means of transport."

That's beginning to change, Ekkehard believes. "People see cities with ropeways and they see it works," he says. "It’s a very reasonable means of transit – you don’t need a lot of infrastructure. They need very little space. They're very environmentally friendly."

But perhaps more importantly in an era of diminished public funds, they can be built quickly and cheaply.

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Deutsche Welle: Gauck: German president's faith 'irrelevant'

Membership in a Christian church is not a requirement for Germany's head of state, current President Joachim Gauck said in an interview published Friday. The religious affiliation of his successor is "irrelevant," Gauck told Germany's Protestant news agency EPD.

Germany's next head of state could have another religious affiliation - or none at all, Gauck said. Specifically, the outgoing president remarked he did not want to rule out the possibility of a Muslim president for Germany.

One possible choice for the post being discussed is Navid Kermani, a Muslim scholar and writer of Iranian descent. Other possible candidates include the former Protestant Church leaders Wolfgang Huber and Margo Käßmann. The majority of Germany's previous presidents were Protestant, the news agency noted. Käßmann, however, announced Wednesday that she has no intention of running for the presidential post.

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CityLab: Egypt's Government Wants Out of Its Ancient Capital

When the Egyptian government announced plans last year to build a new capital in the desert 28 miles east of Cairo, analysts were skeptical. Not only were the components of the city extravagant—a green space twice the size of Central Park, an airport larger than Heathrow—but the basic idea seemed ludicrous. The Cairo-based urban planner David Sims told the site Africa-Middle East, “Egypt needs a new capital like a hole in the head.” [...]

Sisi is not only aiming to boost Egypt’s flagging economy through the new capital—the government has said, for instance, that the city will generate almost two million jobs—but also to enhance his own legitimacy.

At first, the plan didn’t seem likely to come to fruition, particularly with funding in doubt, despite some pledges from Arab Gulf investors. But now large-scale construction is looking more probable due to a different funding source: China. [...]

China’s financing bolsters its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which seeks to increase investment and infrastructure along both the land and maritime routes of the old Silk Road, on whose western end Cairo sat. Today, China has become Egypt’s largest trade partner. In addition to the new capital, China is investing in such projects as Egypt’s Suez Canal industrial zone as a way to encourage more Chinese business in the region. Such investment thus serves China’s interests by giving it a stronger foothold in an area in which it aims to expand economically.

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Quartz: Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories are making his supporters paranoid—and dangerous

This is not the first time Trump fans have threatened to take action if their candidate loses in November. Such threats date back to the primaries, when some Trump supporters began telling reporters that they would take up arms and form militias should their racist, sexist hero face defeat. The calls continued into the general election, when they were echoed by Trump advisors like Roger Stone, who proclaimed that there would be a “bloodbath” if Trump loses. On August 1, following a crash in the polls, Trump himself proclaimed that the election was rigged, a claim he has repeated constantly since. [...]

Scholars of authoritarian states have seen this pattern before. Paranoia is not only a trademark of an authoritarian leader, it is a method of movement building—one that is playing out at Trump rallies across the nation. As scholar Jonathan Bach writes, “The more paranoid a ruler becomes, the more essential it is that others share the ruler’s system of delusions and conspiracies … The successful paranoid ruler will make the people share his paranoia, and they will feed on it together.” [...]

What distinguishes Trump from his similarly paranoid predecessors, however, is the changing demography of the United States. As the country becomes less white, an incredible demographic gap has opened up between Trump supporters and everyone else in the US. White men are the only demographic category in which Trump still leads. Non-whites have largely rejected him, and women, especially after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, have largely turned on him as well. In Trump’s view, this is not a natural outcome of a campaign that has consistently insulted non-whites, non-Christians, and women, but a conspiratorial plot. [...]

Trump’s base already believes that a cadre of elites—not only Democrats, but GOP “traitors” as well – is out to get them. Calling for Trump to step down weeks before the election does nothing to counteract that suspicion. Trump dropping out would likely cause more chaos than him staying in (which means, of course, that he may do it.)

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The Atlantic: Trump May Be Finished—But Trumpism Is Just Getting Started

But, ironically, if that sequence of events proves the fatal blow to Trump’s tumultuous candidacy, it may help the ideas and animosities powering his campaign to live on inside the GOP. In other words, the manner of Trump’s political demise may extend the life of Trumpism. [...]

So there’s no question Trump is facing unprecedented friendly fire. But he faced dim odds of victory even before that opposition peaked. In general-election polls all year, Trump has almost never pushed his support past 42 percent. Though he has generated a visceral connection with voters who feel economically and culturally marginalized—particularly non-college-educated, non-urban, and evangelical whites—he has provoked intense antipathy from voters of color and millennials, and is underperforming any previous Republican nominee among college-educated whites, especially women. Even if Trump’s dismal polling this week is a temporary trough, that wall of resistance still looms.

Minorities, millennials, and white-collar whites have been the most likely groups of voters to reject Trump personally as unqualified and temperamentally unfit for the presidency. But in polls they are also most resistant to his insular agenda. Those voters display particular opposition to Trump’s most racially barbed proposals—including his plans for a Mexican border wall and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and his evolving proposals to bar Muslims from entering the United States—and are most inclined to view Trump as biased against women and minorities. As a new national survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows, they are also the most dubious about his protectionism on trade—and most likely to view greater global economic integration as benefiting both the country overall and their own living standards.

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