The best city stories from around the web this week include a ranking of the most and least emotionally stable places in the US and UK, a peek inside a bizarre Canadian ghost town, noise maps of busy US cities and a look at a traditional German city in the heart of southern Brazil. We’d love to hear your responses to these stories: just share your thoughts in the comments below.
Is your city emotionally stable?
Next City shares a ranking of the most “emotionally stable” cities in the US, based on assessments of the personality traits of over 1.3 million people, including resilience, agreeableness and neuroticism. Jackson, TN, is the winner here – in case you wanted to move somewhere famous for its emotional stability – but I have to admit I don’t recognise many place names on the list. Perhaps the larger and more well known the city, the more unstable its residents! Entrepreneurial spirit has also been assessed, with the Californian city of San Luis Obispo coming out on top.
And if you’re interested in how regions in the UK fared: check out the original study findings here, published in the peer-reviewed journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. Right, I’m off to the Orkney Islands.
Keeping tradition alive
Home to about 25,000 people, 90% of whom speak German, Pomerode boasts a wealth of traditional German vernacular architecture. Only, it’s not in Germany. Situated in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, the city was founded in 1861 by Pomeranian Germans and remains as a thriving German centre in Latin America’s largest country. Failed Architecture shares a great photo gallery by Erik van der Weijde immersing us in the surprising style of the city’s buildings – set against palm trees.
Can cities win?
Adam Gopnik writes something of an opus on cities in the New Yorker: how they thrive, stumble and continuously evolve. He opens with sharp reflections on how we perceive cities:
Cities can’t win. When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness ... The reason that perceptions of cities switch so radically is twofold. Cities are the contradictions of capitalism, spelled out in crowds. They are engines of prosperity and inequality in equal measure, and when the inequality tips poor they look unsavable; when it tips rich, they look unjust. And then cities enfold a subtler contradiction—they shine by bringing like-minded people in from the hinterland (gays, geeks, Jews, artists, bohemians), but they thrive by asking unlike-minded people to live together in the enveloping metropolis.
Who left the lights on?
We tend to think of “ghost towns” as crumbling, long-abandoned places or new cities that are still waiting for people to move in. But as this SlipTalk gallery details, the Canadian town of Kitsault, BC – which was only lived in for 18 months – now lies vacant but perfectly preserved, as if the people suddenly just disappeared. The reality is that they were forced to leave 30 years ago, but the photos of the remaining library and supermarket (lights still on) are strikingly eerie.
Noise maps
CityLab shares shimmering gifs mapping noise over five years in the cities of Seattle, New York and San Francisco. The maps, generated according to noise complaints filed, show where the loudest and quietest neighbourhoods can be found, in case you’re looking for a good night’s sleep (or a good night out).
How would you rate the emotional stability of your city? Share your thoughts in the comments below
