The best city stories we’ve collected this week include temporary public transport initiatives in Italian cities hoping to counter increasing air pollution, and the Japanese town on course to become the country’s first “zero-waste” community. We’d love to hear your responses to these stories: share your thoughts in the comments below.
Transport trials in Turin
Delhi is not the only city this week to respond to hazardous levels of air pollution with a transport initiative. As The Local Italy reports, Turin’s atmospheric pollution forecasts for the end of this week were set to reach dangerously toxic levels – so the city offered residents free bus and metro rides over Thursday and Friday in a bid to get people out of their cars and on to public transport.
Milan’s city government, also responding to predicted high levels of air pollution, made its public bike-sharing service free of charge today in order to encourage emission-free transport. But will these initiatives promote increased public transport use – and achieve cleaner air – in the long term?
Rubbish-free
The Japanese town of Kamikatsu is hoping to become the country’s first “zero-waste” community by 2020 (they already recycle 80% of their rubbish and have 34 different categories of recycling). CityLab shares a video introducing us to the town and how its community participates in this initiative: there are no recycling lorries to help collect your waste, so each resident has to wash, sort and bring their rubbish to the recycling centre – before separating it into the 34 different bins ...
Viva light rail
We don’t tend to think of Las Vegas as the home of sustainable public transport – but as the Las Vegas Sun reports, in response to growing road congestion, the Regional Transportation Commission this week proposed a light-rail network for the city. If implemented, the system could reduce pressure on roads, although only in Las Vegas would a light rail network be presented as a “horizontal elevator”.
Regenerating Toxteth
This week architecture collective Assemble won the Turner Prize for their work in Liverpool, carefully restoring houses in the Granby Four Streets neighbourhood, Toxteth, into beautifully-designed homes for the local community. Despite the growing relationship between art and urban regeneration, a debate still raged about whether their work constitutes “art”. Whatever your view, it is heartening to see attention being given to a project which sustainably and collaboratively improves a city neighbourhood, helping to restore its former vibrancy without gentrifying. This video from Newsnight takes us inside the community of Granby Four Streets and the people whose lives the project has impacted. It’s got a pretty great soundtrack too:
Gotham rising
We’re used to bizarre proposals for skyscrapers, but this new design put forward for “billionaires’ row” in New York City looks like it came straight out of a video game set in a fantasy universe. (It also looks a bit like a gothic totem pole.) The designs are simply proposals, but it would certainly be an interesting – and contentious – addition to the Manhattan skyline were the tower actually constructed.
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