Book - Cities of Change

A truly nice book worth having. Well, yes I know it is odd to start the review with the conclusion, but there is not much more needed to be said. A Birkhauser publication usually would not let you down and this one is no exception. But however, a good publication also needs some good substance to it and only if the two meet up it will be a truly nice book. Probably the only thing irritating is the preface, which you'd better skip because this puts you definitely in the wrong mind set.
'Cities of Change Addis Ababa - Transformation Strategies for Urban Territories in the 21st Century' by Marc Angelil and Dirk Hebel is, as mentioned above by Birkhauser. The book reports on the progress of an ongoing research at the ETH under Professor Marc Angelil (His practice is AGPS). The work published here is the result of three years of student work dating from the years 2006/07, 2007/08 and 2008/09. The introduction summarizes: "The research investigates the performance of cities in view of resource fluxes - the interplay and transformation of stocks and flows of recourses according to changing parameters in time." The reoccurring 'awareness' here really is "...that the only constant is change, ..."


Image by single-blogs / Cities of Change Addis Ababa book cover.

Since this is research conducted in the learning environment with students it has adopted a rather strict and structured approach. This makes perfect sense, in the light of changing groups of students over the duration of the investigation, but especially to allow for a structured leaning environment, while still keeping an open mind for the research. This is a very challenging setup, but I believe this publication demonstrates that any academic research short comings are definitely made up by the quality of the students learning output. It is to some extend a catalogue of student work produced, but the integration as research work is so clever that you wont necessarily notice.
The investigation is structured in two trajectories: "The first ... follows the principle of conducting in-depht academic work in specific fields of inquiry, highlighting particular themes and integrating input from supporting disciplines. THe second trajectory, on questions of urban design, situates the work in the context of design research studio, a workshop setting in which concepts are tested through specific design propositions, aiming for the synthesis of findings from an array of fields." Clearly the publication explores the intersection of the two trajectories. This is organised in seven topics called the 'flux model'. These areas of change are: Stocks and flow of 'people', 'space', 'material', 'capital', 'information' and 'energy'. Each chapter is introduced with a theoretical text, outlining and extending on the explanations given in the introduction part. Mixed with the design projects each chapter also contains theoretical, subject or contextual text pieces.
The surprising element here probably is that the publication does not close with a summary or conclusion. But probably this has to be looked for in the introduction, like in this review, the important things can be said up front without sliming away any of the interest for the further content.
To open the debate here, one of the points I believe to be important to discuss is the structure chosen for such a research project. As outlined before, the context of design studio work clearly has its requirements, but for a truly 'in flux' practice the static outline of the seven chapters can probably not sustain itself over a longer period, since "...that the only constant is change, ..."


Image taken from Google Maps / Addis Ababa aerial view of the city centre.


Angelil, M.M. & Hebel, D., 2009. Cities of Change: Addis Ababa: Transformation Strategies for Urban Territories in the 21st Century, Birkhauser Verlag AG.

Shah Rukh Khan:"My Name is Khan is a flawless work" - Subhash K Jha

Mumbai-He repairs almost anything, including irreparably damaged relationships. But this film about damaged lives needs no repairing. My Name Is Khan is a flawless work, as perfect in content, tone and treatment as any film can get. The ‘message’ of humanism doesn’t comes across in long pedantic speeches.

The film’s longest monologue has our damaged but exceptionally coherent hero Rizwan telling a congregation of Black American church-goers about his dead son.

And if that moment moves us to tears it’s because the emotions are neither manipulative nor flamboyant. It isn’t because Rizwan’s son Sameer perished in a racial attack. It isn’t even because Shah Rukh Khan delivers his life’s best performance in that moment of reckoning. Rizwan’s heartfelt rhetorics are not about changing the world with words. Born with a physical disability this is a man on the move. And boy, does he move!

In what is possibly the most touching testament on film to the spirit of world peace and humanism (lofty ideals to achieve in the massy-masala format but see how pitch-perfect Johar gets it), Rizwan takes off on a picaresque journey to meet the US President with a message that initially strikes us as being too naïve for reiteration.

But look closer. Some of life’s basic values have been lost in recent times. Writer Shibani Bathija’s seamless screenplay, arguably the best piece of writing since Rakeysh Mehra’s Rang De Basanti, recovers that long-lost message of loving your fellow human being unconditionally without getting trite around the edges.

Sex and politics have nothing to do with it. It’s okay to hug your neighbour.

First and foremost, My Name Is Khan is a wonderful story told with a flair and flourish that leave a lingering impact on the viewer. Almost every frame is composed with a mix of mind and heart creating an irresistible progression of moments so tender and forcible we’re simply swept away in the tides of the tale about a very special man who undertakes a very special journey.

My Name Is Khan opens with Rizwan boarding an American flight being frisked after a suspicious co-passenger hears him chanting religious passages. Before we begin to suspect this to be one more film on the persecution of the innocent Muslim, Karan Johar, doing a smart and slick spin away from his trademark content and style, takes his hero on a journey that crosses several emotional, political and geographical borders before stopping with breathless integrity to say, life doesn’t go on…it changes colours and textures with the moral values that the individual chooses to confer on the life given to him.

Superbly scripted by Bathija with pithy outstanding dialogues by Niranjan Iyenger, the film is edited by Deepa Bhatia with just that much amount of time allotted to the character’s and their thought processes to make them appear warm humane and tangible without over-punctuating their presence.

To take one example, when Rizwan's brother (Jimmy Shergil, making the best of his brief but comprehensive role) quietly tells his lovely wife (Sonia Jehan) to not wear her veil to work in the US because God would understand, the scene with beautiful economy conveys the couple’s mutual empathy and determination to override the hatred outside their home.

Karan Johar, always a master of overstatement, for once holds back. The silences in My Name Is Khan often speak far more eloquently than the spoken words. The relationships that the inarticulate Rizwan forms during the course of his life from child to husband to father to a political individual are contoured with a luminous lack of laboriousness. Whether it’s young Rizwan (played sensitively by Tanay Cheda) and his mother (Zarina Wahab, memorable in her brief appearance) or much later, Rizwan and his step-son (brilliant young discovery Yuvaan Makar), the traditional relationships are done-up in striking but subtle shades. We look at every moment in the film (even the clumsily-done flood sequences) as special because they are part of vision that goes far beyond the real of hop-in-hop-out entertainment.

The director swerves out of his comfort zone without the sound of screechy wheels. Karan Johar’s unconventional take on modern marital mores in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna faltered due to over-statement. In Khan, he doesn’t try hard. The characters and their predicament, as America gets increasingly suspicious and hostile about the Muslim presence, are portrayed with a lightness of touch that lights up almost every sequence.

Then there is Kajol to provide the kind of natural light to every frame that no amount of artificial light can supplement. As Rizwan’s Hindu wife Mandira, with a smart intelligent son, she has a distinctly secondary role to Shah Rukh Khan. She leaves a lasting impact as a divorcee and later an angry wife and grieving mother, as only Kajol can.

The scenes of courtship between Mandira and Rizwan work so beautifully because of the exceptional chemistry between the two actors. More than a strong political statement and moving message of peace My Name Is A Khan is a love story of a man who can’t express his love through words, only deeds. This is a film that Frank Capra would’ve made if he had lived long enough to see 9/11 happen.

The narration is carpeted with virtues, both invisible and visible. Ravi K Chandran’s cinematography captures the incandescent soul of the pure-hearted protagonist as effectively as the stubbornly unbroken spirit of unknown passersby on the streets of America.

Rizwan, we are told, is petrified of the yellow colour. The offending colour recurs with just a hint of insistence. Rizwan wears shocking pink because he hears Mandira’s buddy (Navneet Nishan) say it suits her. He proposes marriage and sex (in that order) at the most inopportune moments. He suggests Mandira have her dinner when she’s traumatized by grief. He wears his dead son’s shoes as he takes off to meet the President. Rizwan moves by his clock. But his tale is timeless.

Shah Rukh Khan doesn’t PLAY Rizwan. He becomes one with the character’s subconscious, portraying the man and his spirit with strokes of an invisible paintbrush until what we see is what we cannot forget. Undoubtedly this is Shah Rukh’s best performance ever.

This is no ordinary hero. And My Name Is Khan is no ordinary film. Long after the wary-of-physical-touch, Rizwan has finally shaken hands with President Obama, long after the heat and dust of racial and communal hatred has settled down the core of humanism that the film secretes stays with you.

Yes, we finally know what they mean by a feelgood film.

‘M.N.I.K.’ premieres in Abu Dhabi

Mumbai-The 1,000-odd people crammed into the foyer of the Emirates Palace auditorium greeted the star cast of “My Name Is Khan” with screams and claps, as the movie had its world premiere in Abu Dhabi last night (Feb 10).

Walking the narrow strip of the red carpet first were sponsors, studio bosses and the crew. The crowd grew restless, chanting ‘Shah Rukh, Shah Rukh’, as the wait lengthened. The chants subsided only when Karan Johar and Kajol walked in.

“We’re thrilled to be here, to be showing our movie in Abu Dhabi for the first time. Hope you like it as much as we enjoyed making it,” Karan Johar told the media lining the rope.

K-Jo was wearing his own collection, while Kajol glowed in a red and black Manish Malhotra sari. “Thank you so much for having us here,” she said, again and again.

The director and the heroine of “My Name Is Khan” shook hands and signed autographs with their fans, before moving into the auditorium.

A few minutes of silence and then a roar from the crowd. We knew Shah Rukh was on the red carpet. Very smart in a Karan Johar creation, he stopped at every media cluster to talk and shake hands. “I feel sorry that my movie may not get the opening it deserves in my own city. But I hope and pray it all works out,” he said.

Shah Rukh bent down to hug a little girl right in front of me and then the frenzy began. The fans flooded into the area reserved for the media and begged him for autographs and pictures. He obliged, for as long as he could, before he was ushered into the imposing auditorium.

Inside the theatre

Once inside, the same fans greeted K-Jo, SRK and Kajol with roars of approval as they went up on stage to say a few words ahead of the screening of “My Name Is Khan”.

“I may sound shaky and scattered because I am really nervous. This is the first official screening of my film,” Karan Johar said. “It is a part of my heart. A part of the heart of every team member… I’m proud to have the film flagged off in Abu Dhabi.”

“This is the finest piece of role, character, that anyone has written for us,” said Shah Rukh Khan, thanking K-Jo for letting him and Kajol be a part of “My Name Is Khan”.

“I hope you like the film. And even if you don’t we’re not returning the money,” he said, triggering laughter and claps among his fans.

The movie

As the reviews have said repeatedly, “My Name Is Khan” is a deeply moving and powerful film. Director Karan Johar has gone on record to say he has stepped out of his comfort zone in this movie. And that is evident.

There are no songs and dances; there is no colour-co-ordinated world and there are no overly-emotive scenes. A taut story of alienation, isolation, deep grief and ultimate triumph, “My Name Is Khan” uses the background of 9/11 brilliantly to tell the very personal story of Rizwan Khan, a Muslim man with autism in America.

SRK, as expected, is brilliant, under emoting instead of over emoting, as he usually does. Kajol actually outshines him in certain scenes. The support cast, particularly Zarina Wahab and Pravin Dabbas, were excellent as well. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s music, subtly used, helped convey emotions the way words couldn’t have.

The movie could have been half an hour shorter though, and it is definitely not a watch for children.

Super star Shah Rukh Khan copied Salman Khan!

The audiences were left asking for more when Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan took off his shirt a la Salman Khan while shooting for a special episode of a music reality show.

Shah Rukh, who went to the reality show with filmmaker Karan Johar to promote their forthcoming movie My Name Is Khan, surprised everyone when he climbed up on a table and danced to the tune of Deewangi deewangi from his hit movie Om Shanti Om.

He then took off his shirt and flaunted his abs, said a source from the sets.

On the show all the songs sung by the contestants were from Shah Rukh's movies and the superstar shook a leg with all of them.

Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra visits Twitter headquarters

Super star Priyanka Chopra, who is set to cross the 200,000 mark in Twitter followers, visited the headquarter of the micro-blogging website in San Francisco after being especially invited there.

Priyanka tweeted about her visit to the headquarter where she met Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder.

"My day was really interesting because I was invited to Twitter headquarter in San Francisco! Had a great time. Thanks Biz and team for the wonderful hospitality," she posted.

The 27-year-old, who has been shooting in US for Sajid Nadiadwala's Anjaana Anjaani, is going to cross the 200,000 mark as far as her followers on Twitter are concerned. At present, she leads the Bollywood bandwagon on the site with 196,903 followers and has left stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Preity Zinta, Shahid Kapoor far behind.

"Priyanka was in the US for her movie shoot. She had to drop by at a studio for the NDTV Indian of the Year programme and there she met theTwitter team. She was invited to the headquarter office in San Francisco since she is so popular among the Bollywood celebs on Twitter," a source close to the actress said.

London Twitter Cloud

Together with the tweet-O-meter project run at CASA as part of the NeISS research project we have collected location tagged tweets around London (M25). As described in an earlier post on this HERE, the idea is to capture the urban narrative. The current data covers a whole weekend from Friday evening to Monday morning and the set holds some 380'000 individual tweets. However this brakes down to 60'000 truly geo referenced tweets, by 5'500 individual users. The thing is, that these are only the mobile tweets and they are captured only if the locations sharing is activated in the twitter profile. Still this makes an average of 10.6 tweets per mobile user over the weekend. Overall we have 39'222 individual users witch makes some 9.7 tweets. So the mobile users seem to message slightly more, but not significantly as one could maybe expect.
In terms of density per location as one could expect the focus is in the centre. There are local hotspots as the weekend progresses, such as Kings Cross and Old Street. But then there seems to be a accumulation of density along the transport lines into and out of the centre.
To visualise the temporality of the data tweets are in the below clip output as a message cloud rising and hovering above London. It is a simple time-space aquarium were the time is plotted as the hight information. The later in the weekend the tweet is sent the higher above the city it floats. As the density develops the low times can be clearly spotted, when it thins out the lines and London sleeps. The animation is rendered in Google Earth, with the KML file brought in through a VB script from Excel. Once set up this is quite a flexible combination. However, the KML file can get quite big, since there is a lot of information contained with all the messages.

Book - Asia Beyond Growth

A heavy book about a heavy topic and in this case size matters. Since the book is a bout size and its content celebrates the vast extend of the land area covered or better involved one might understand the motivation behind the physical extension of this publication. However other factors might also play a part.
We are talking about Asia Beyond Growth - Urbanization in the World's Fastest-changing Continent by AECOM former EDAW is published by Thames & Hudson.
The book starts with what has been leading the debate about the future of urban design and urban planning for now three years: "Today, for the first time in history, more than half the world's population lives in cities ..." and it adds quite rightly, and this is then also what the books really celebrates on the following 484 pages: "... and most of these cities are in Asia."
It is sort of a monograph as the books author is AECOM former EDAW, a single planning and design firm. It is, however, not a documentation of their projects only, it is more sort of an extended report of experience and knowledge. It coincidently falls into place with the change of name. The company was formerly known as EDAW (all the projects and most of the experience dates back to the EDAW times) and has recently, late 2009 changed its name to AECOM, a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: ACM). They are proudly presenting themselves on the website as: "Today, listed on the Fortune 500 list as one of America’s largest companies, AECOM has approximately 45,000 employees located in 100 countries."
The book however is about the companies work in asia an documents the drastic change, the massive amount of work done as well as the vast extend of individual projects. For this the authors make extensive use of photo documentation and graphs. And the publication seems to follows in the footsteps of well known publications that introduced this sort of graphical language, for example S,M,L,XL or Massive Change. This language seems to be at the moment very popular, i.e EndlessCity and I pointed this out recently in connection with the book Comeback Cities - Transformation Strategies for Former Industrial Cities published by NAi Publishers.
In twelv chapters the Authors discuss the challenges of planning in the Asian context and chare their experinces. THe photographs used to illustrate are a really big part of the book and there is also an online blog thatextends this and documents the photographers work for the publication work. You can find it HERE.
The problems faced by planners are very often similar. It is described in many examples through out the book. For example in the case of Shanghai: "These developments are often the scale of new towns, requiring comprehensive planning and amenities, but lacking the cultural or historical background that might lend the place a distinct identity." Surprisingly still a lot of examples are then developed in reference back to the European city which is in turn stylized as an ideal type. We have all heard these stories of groups of Chinese investigators being sent to Europe to measure and document villages or entire town to replicate them back home in Asia. An we have all hoped this might be a single case or an exemption, but this might be more often the case than hoped. This really fuels the important debate about creation of identity which, to a large extend urban design is about, is an ongoing process. Probably especially in the Asian context, the role of foreign practices, mainly western offices, probably is more important than usually discussed. In fact the discussion about cultural export and 'international style' is not extensive enough in most cases. It is primarily about size and money and recently about work and jobs and less about the culture clash, export of values, believes,f culture and knowledge. The burning question here is, how interactive and emancipated this collaboration is. Probably one could argue that it is not the role of the international practice to lead this debate, but it should be left to other to do so. On the other hand who could this be, architectural critics, academic sociologists or even publishers? I believe it has to be part of each and every project and it is to a large extend part of the role and responsibility of the planner to be involved in an ongoing discussion around the impact and extend of the project in progress. And of course all the other disciplines have to be involved too, and in the case here especially when it comes to a publication. The book represents a clear position whether it is explicitly discussed or equally explicitly absent. And for me this is the main week point of this publication. It is a documentation of multiple facets of the Asian growth, a nice picture book, a heavy weight in your bag and definitely a document of its time of a certain subject, but it is lacking this discussion of a wider context for not to ask for an explicit standpoint.
This includes other areas of discussion and is not limited to the debate about westernization of Asia through planning firms. It continues in through the trend topics put forward. What I mean for example is that often topics are presented very shallow and with an sort of innocent view. Take for example the topic 'It's all About People', already the topic is suggestive enough, there is no need for explanations, so the authors decide to illustrate it with photographs and minimal text. This text says:"In Asian cities, it is common for people to use the spaces between the buildings as outdoor living rooms. ... In many places, it seems, all pieces of the city are used for and by people." This is then illustrated for example with a fish market or a street with small mobile fast food stands. Not enough, it leads in directly the topic of the slums. Which is a bit odd in the context of what has been said about the topic: "In many places, it seems, all pieces of the city are used for and by people." and showing a photograph of lots of these slum hutches crammed into a tiny space between high-rise buildings and streets. Another example is the photograph of the little boy, shown full front, as he urinates onto the street to illustrate that people in Asia do not use the public toilets. This sort of, by the authors, pretended innocence, while showing material left open for interpretation in multiple contexts (one of them might be a wrong one) gives the book a strange taste, which is definitely not intended.
So to conclude, this is a book in a tradition of thick and heavy architecture books (if such a category exists) on a subject that has been dominating urban design practice and planning for the past decade (not clear at this point in time how it continues). It is rich on illustration through photographs, graphs of illustrative and sometimes suggestive character and text essays on certain subjects. It does, however, at times have this character of uncertain shallowness or unidentified innocence that can leave the reader in the dark about the real aim.


Image taken from webster.it / it shows the initial cover, where it still says edited by EDAW and Denise Scott Brown. I don't know what happened to this collaboration , since her name does not come up in the publication I have here. Only some of the chapter titles that start with 'Learning from ...' suggest a connection, but could be a reference.


For an alternative view read Adrian Hornsby's review of the book.


AECOM, 2010. Asia Beyond Growth: Urbanization in the World's Fastest-changing Continent, Thames & Hudson.