Cities Of Death 40k Pdf Free
Christal Rasband
Jacobs was a critic of "rationalist" planners of the 1950s and 1960s, especially Robert Moses, as well as the earlier work of Le Corbusier. She argued that modernist urban planning overlooked and oversimplified the complexity of human lives in diverse communities. She opposed large-scale urban renewal programs that affected entire neighborhoods and built freeways through inner cities. She instead advocated for dense mixed-use development and walkable streets, with the "eyes on the street" of passers-by helping to maintain public order.
Jacobs begins the work with the blunt statement that: "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." She describes a trip to Boston's North End neighborhood in 1959, finding it friendly, safe, vibrant and healthy, and contrasting her experience against her conversations with elite planners and financiers in the area, who lament it as a "terrible slum" in need of renewal. Branding the mainstream theory of cities as an "elaborately learned superstition" that had now penetrated the thinking of planners, bureaucrats, and bankers in equal measure, she briefly traces the origins of this "orthodox urbanism."
Jacobs tracks Howard's influence through American luminaries Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and Catherine Bauer, a collection of thinkers that Bauer referred to as "Decentrists." The Decentrists proposed to use regional planning as a means to ameliorate the woes of congested cities, attracting residents to a new life in lower-density fringes and suburbs and thereby thinning out the crowded urban core. Jacobs highlights the anti-urban biases of the Garden City advocates and the Decentrists, especially their shared intuitions that communities should be self-contained units; that commingled land use created a chaotic, unpredictable, and negative environment; that the street was a bad locus for human interactions; that houses should be turned away from the street toward sheltered green spaces; that super-blocks fed by arterial roads were superior to small blocks with overlapping cross-roads; that any significant details should be dictated by permanent plan rather than shaped by organic dynamism; and that population density should be discouraged, or at least disguised to create a sense of isolation.
Jacobs admits that the ideas of the Garden City and the Decentrists made sense on their own terms: a suburban town appealing to privacy-oriented, automobile-loving personalities should tout its green space and low-density housing. Jacobs' anti-orthodox frustration stems from the fact that their anti-urban biases somehow became an inextricable part of the mainstream academic and political consensus on how to design cities themselves, enshrined in course curricula and federal and state legislation affecting, inter alia, housing, mortgage financing, urban renewal, and zoning decisions. "This is the most amazing event in the whole sorry tale: that finally people who sincerely wanted to strengthen great cities should adopt recipes frankly devised for undermining their economies and killing them."
She is less sympathetic toward Le Corbusier, noting with dismay that the dream city, however impractical and detached from the actual context of existing cities, "was hailed deliriously by architects, and has gradually been embodied in scores of projects, ranging from low-income public housing to office building projects." She expresses further concern that, in seeking to avoid becoming contaminated by "the workaday city," isolated City Beautiful efforts dismally failed to attract visitors, were prone to unsavory loitering and dispirited decay, and ironically hastened the pace of urban demise.
Jacobs posits cities as fundamentally different from towns and suburbs principally because they are full of strangers. More precisely, the ratio of strangers to acquaintances is necessarily lopsided everywhere one goes in the city, even outside their doorstep, "because of the sheer number of people in small geographical compass." A central challenge of the city, therefore, is to make its inhabitants feel safe, secure, and socially integrated in the midst of an overwhelming volume of rotating strangers. The healthy sidewalk is a critical mechanism for achieving these ends, given its role in preventing crime and facilitating contact with others.
Orthodox urbanism defines parks as "boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities." Jacobs challenges the reader to invert this relationship, and "consider city parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them." Parks become lively and successful for the same reason as sidewalks: "because of functional physical diversity among adjacent uses, and hence diversity among users and their schedules." Jacobs offers four tenets of good park design: intricacy (stimulating a variety of uses and repeat users), centering (a main crossroads, pausing point, or climax), access to sunlight, and enclosure (the presence of buildings and a diversity of surroundings).
The Environmental Impact of Cities assesses the environmental impact that comes from cities and their inhabitants, demonstrating that our current political and economic systems are not environmentally sustainable because they are designed for endless growth in a system which is finite.
It is already well documented that political, economic and social forces are capable of shaping cities and their expansion, retraction, gentrification, re-population, industrialisation or de-industrialisation. However, the links between these political and economic forces and the environmental impact they have on urban areas have yet to be numerically presented. As a result, it is not clear how our cities are affecting the environment, meaning it is currently impossible to relate their economic, political and social systems to their environmental performance. This book examines a broad selection of cities covering a wide range of political systems, geography, cultural backgrounds and population size. The environmental impact of the selected cities is calculated using both ecological footprint and carbon emissions, two of the most extensively available indices for measuring environmental impact. The results are then considered in terms of political, economic and social factors to ascertain the degree to which these factors are helping or hindering the reduction of the environmental impact of humans.
He predicted that the mix of in-office and home-working will allow most major cities to continue to draw wealthy workers: High-tech and knowledge-intensive services are likely to remain in order to at least partially retain the face-to-face contact that spurs creativity.
In 2020, total drug overdose deaths ranged from 14 to 120 deaths per 100,000 population. The average death rate across BCHC cities (37.1 per 100,000) was much higher than the national rate (21.6 per 100,000).
Between 2010 and 2020, drug overdose deaths in BCHC cities nearly tripled with the largest increase between 2019 and 2020. Recent increases in overdose deaths can be attributed to replacement of prescription opioids and heroin with highly potent illicit synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, as well as increases in polysubstance use (use of opioids along with stimulant drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine).
In 2010, white persons had the highest drug overdose death rate yet by 2020 Black persons had the highest rate (see Figure 4). The rise in overdose deaths among Black persons is thought to be rooted in three inter-related factors: 1) racism in healthcare where Black patients were not prescribed opioids for similar levels of pain that white patients experienced, 2) the rapid rise in illicit synthetic street opioids (and mix of drugs) which are more lethal than heroin, and 3) systematically lower access to health care treatment options for Black persons.In 2010, white persons had the highest drug overdose death rate, yet by 2020 Black persons had the highest rate. The rise in overdose deaths among Black persons relative to white persons is thought to be rooted in inter-related factors that implicate structural racism in healthcare access and treatment. The first factors relate to racism in opioid prescribing practices namely, that for similar levels of pain, Black patients have been prescribed opioids at much lower doses (or not at all). Lower opioid prescriptions to Black patients partially protected them during the early period of the opioid epidemic that was fueled by over-prescribing; however, it also contributed to Black persons being disproportionately reliant on street drug supplies. In recent years, drugs that are more lethal than heroin (e.g., illicit synthetic opioids and mixtures of drugs) have dominated the street drug supply, thereby particularly affecting Black drug users. Finally, Black drug users have systematically lower access to early intervention and health care treatment for addiction.
Since 2019, the Big Cities Health Inventory (BCHI) data platform has been maintained by the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) at the Dornsife School of Public Health in partnership with Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC). Visitorsto the data platform can explore metrics, view data charts by city, select multiple cities for comparison, and download charts and data. Visit the BCHI data platform (bigcitieshealthdata.org) to learn more.
Importance: In 2020, homicides in the United States saw a record single-year increase, with firearm injuries becoming the leading cause of death for children, adolescents, and young adults. It is critical to understand the magnitude of this crisis to formulate an effective response.
Objective: To evaluate whether young adult males living in parts of 4 major US cities faced a firearm-related death and injury risk comparable with risks encountered during recent wartime service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Design, setting, and participants: In this cross-sectional study of young adult males aged 18 to 29 years living in the top 10% most violent zip codes in each domestic setting (as measured by fatal shooting rates), fatal and nonfatal shooting data for 2020 and 2021 were aggregated at the zip code level for 4 of the largest US cities (Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California; New York, New York; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Wartime mortality and combat injury rates for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were used to assess relative risk.
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