A magnitude 8.8 earthquake brought down buildings, bridges, and highway overpasses in Chile on February 27th. Early estimates set the death toll at 214 but this rose to over 700 on Sunday. Tsunami warnings have been issued across the Pacific as a result of the earthquake. The Boston Globe “Big Picture” features 45 photographs of the devastation in Chile. Listen to the NPR report on the quake, “Chile Quake Far Stronger than that of Haiti.” New York Times reports that Tsunami warning canceled in Hawaii and for the rest of the Pacific.
If you haven’t watched TED Talks before, try out this demo of augmented reality maps. The speaker, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, is the architect of Bing Maps at Microsoft–an exciting alternative to Google Maps. The talk is only 7 minutes long and takes you flying through Seattle, Washington. Enjoy!
Written in 2008, this is a short take on the growth and decline of the city of Dayton from urban land use specialist and 4th generation Daytonian, Dan Staley, PhD. Staley teaches urban economics at the University of Dayton.
A New Yorker magazine article profiling Nadia Francois and her efforts to help provide for her neighbors after the earthquake. They lived precariously in makeshift homes in a ravine.
Now that you are all veterans of YouTube and Google Maps, if you would like to do more with digital media projects please consider signing up for my Spring Quarter class HST 488 History and New (DIGITAL) Media. This will be a hybrid class meeting once a week, Thursdays, 6:05-7:55 PM, at most with much of the course work online. It is also a project-based learning experience so that students will have more opportunities to try out digital tools and resources. The course provides an opportunity to explore careers in digital and public humanities. We will explore the use of flickr, Omeka, Zotero, twitter, digital storytelling, wikis, facebook, Second Life, games, interactive maps and blogs by a variety of museums and organizations including the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress.
Watch “I See” a very short film about looking at modern art from the Museum of Modern Art and think about looking around you. This has nothing to do with cities but I wanted to share it with you anyway.
On Tuesday, we will begin hearing from about cities and regions of the world, starting with the students researching cities of the Americas (South America, Central America, and the Caribbean). I thought you might be interested in perspectives on 20th century North American cities as well. In this interview, author Anthony Flint looks at the tensions between building highway transportation systems and creating livable cities that pitted two influential figures in urban planning–Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs–against each other.
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City
You can view a 1977 interview with Robert Moses, “the Master Builder,” and other great video resources about cities on the PBS website, Blueprint for America.
There are now many different uses of interactive, digital maps (google and others) for news, historical landscapes, etc. Here’s a map that uses Bureau of Labor Statistics figures to show the changing levels of unemployment across the United States since January, 2007.
There is much commentary comparing the response of the Obama administration in Haiti to the Bush administration response to Katrina. This comparison also came up in class discussions about the U.S. sending troops to Haiti. Both disasters caused massive suffering and destruction. A quick search online yielded some data for comparison. Estimates vary but between close to 1,500 and 2,000 people died as a result of Hurricane Katrina; estimates for Haiti seem to be around 150,000 deaths from the January 2010 earthquake. At its height, about 46,000 National Guard troops were sent to assist in 2005 Gulf Coast hurricane recovery. I welcome more precise figures and more detailed comparison but this may help set the disaster in Haiti in some perspective. Last summer, New Orleans’ Executive Director for Recovery Management, Edward Blakely estimated, with some optimism, that it would take “at least 20 years for the city to fully recover — if there is no serious disaster.”
When the 3,000 inmates of the central prison in Port-au-Prince unexpectedly gained their freedom, courtesy of the earthquake, everybody knew where they would be headed: Cité Soleil, the poorest area of this poorest city, in whose maze of streets they could vanish.
