T.U.A Part 4 and What I've Been Reading

Lets get to the finals...

In my New Years haze I realize I forgot to attach the latest round of the Tournament of Urban Animals to my last post!

If you’re new to my Substack and want to catch-up on the very official tournament to find the best urban animal you can read part 1 and the explainer here, and re-live the quarter finals here.

We’ve narrowed the field down to four. Let’s take a look at our semifinalists

Couple of thoughts. I’m glad to see the rat getting the respect it deserves. The Rat vs Squirrel is the type of heavy weight match-up we expect at this stage. However, to be honest, the fox and hawk don’t exactly feel like deserving semi-finalists. They’re relatively uncommon in global cities, and haven’t had nearly the planning impact of some of the other animals in the tournament. I suppose a weakness of a tournament voted on by humans is it will end up prefacing animals that humans like, regardless of if they’re deserving or not (I’m still upset about the Fox defeating the Pigeon in round 2, and now we see it take-down another charismatic bird in the Parakeet).

Anyway, vote away:

---

While I have you, here are a couple of articles and things that have caught my eye over the holidays.

• RIVERS: This Washington Post piece on the preparations Paris is making for the Olympics around the Seine River. This is surly the most ambitious singular urban river project in the world right now (read my post on urban rivers if you missed it). I’m hopelessly in love with the idea of swimming in the Seine, although the terrible legacy of most Olympic projects and the question of if the investment in the touristic, wealthy core of Paris is the best use of public funds are all valid reasons to keep a critical eye.

• HOUSING: This excellent visualization form the Times of how we can fit one million New Yorkers into the city without substantially changing its character, showing just how under-built large swaths of the city actually are.

• STREETSCAPES: The book Emergent Tokyo by Jorge Almazán. A highly visual exploration of how one of the world’s great mega cities remains so livable and intimate.

• DEVELOPMENT: This one is nerdy, but I’ve been really enjoying Norman Oder’s Learning from Atlantic Yards Substack. Oder is a journalist and writer who’s been tracking Atlantic Yards (which many of you will know for the Barclays Center NBA arena) since it was in the planning phase. He’s been unpacking and commenting on the twists and turns of the development… Spoiler alert, its a poster child for everything that is wrong with development in New York City.

• HOMELESSNESS: From earlier this year, UCSF has done an amazing study of the homeless in the Bay Area, a population who for obvious reasons is difficult to research. The report destroys one of the most pernicious myths about homelessness in California — That homeless people “flock” to the state because it’s liberal and has good weather. 90% of the thousands of homeless people surveyed had housing in California before becoming homeless. SF Gate has an excellent summary of the findings, among them that 82% said a payment of just 5-10k would have prevented their homelessness.