This week’s best city stories from around the world explore if you’re contributing to gentrification, examine freeway war in Milwaukee and discover why gummy bears are taking over the Maltese capital.
We’d love to hear your responses to these stories, and any others you’ve read recently, both on Guardian Cities and elsewhere. Just share your thoughts in the comments below.
Gentrifier calculator
Expensive coffee shops, organic food stores, bicycles everywhere: all signs of gentrifiers, right? Well, not necessarily. As Chris Kirk attempts to define it in Slate, “gentrifiers are people with medium or high incomes moving into low-income neighbourhoods, attracting new business but raising rents, and often contributing to tensions between new and long-term residents”. It’s certainly an issue that many of us are familiar with, but how do you know if you’re actually part of the problem?
With the help of an urban policy expert, Slate has devised a calculator for American residents that allows you to determine if you are, in fact, a gentrifier, based on your income and neighbourhood.
Growing opportunity
Good magazine shares a story about a homeless shelter in Atlanta that has created a large rooftop vegetable garden. The goal is to increase access to healthy food while building horticultural and marketing skills among the residents.
The Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless runs the gardening programme, in which residents cultivate 80 garden beds, producing kale, carrots, chard and squash, among others. A full, healthy meal is available on site every day.
Overpasses: not so over
“Today, we spend more than five times as many federal dollars on roads as we spend on public transit,” writes Michael Grunwald about the US in Politico, as part of an investigation of Milwaukee’s addiction to “megahighways”. The Wisconsin city already boasts the taxpayer-funded $800m Marquette Interchange; now three larger freeway projects in the metropolitan area are being built or planned, as part of a $7bn effort to widen and modernise interstates around the city.
Grunwald laments that these big projects come at the expense of basic repairs and public transport. The lack of public transportation connecting Milwaukee to its suburbs intensifies divisions in an already racially, economically and politically segregated city. “It’s an all-out war on urbanism,” says former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist, who has fought against new freeways. “Cities are seen as obstacles to getting cars and trucks to move faster.”
Selfie safety first
Taking a photograph of yourself is a dangerous urban sport – or at least that’s what Russian authorities think, having launched their “safe selfie” campaign earlier this month to reduce injuries resulting from absent-minded selfie-taking in urban spaces. Now Moscow officials are proposing an app to make it even safer: the app would sync a user’s phone with Moscow’s street monitoring cameras, showing safe spots for good selfies on a GPS map.
Cycle motorway
Between the cities of Daejeon and Sejong in South Korea runs a 20-mile, six-lane motorway. But along the middle of it is something more unusual: a protected bike highway covered with a roof of solar panels. As Fast Co Exist explains, access to the shaded, electricity-generating cycling route, which was opened earlier this year, is via underground tunnels.
Sweet sidewalk
Finally to Valetta, the Maltese capital, where giant gummy bears can be found setting up camp on the pavements. Or at least that what it looks like, in Leon Keer’s new public art installation as part of the Malta Street Art Festival. The bears are meant to be seen from above: up close they’re just large, only slightly raised blobs on the pavement ... but from 100m up it looks for all the world like a gummy bear crime scene.
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