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Bird's Nest: 6 years later

10/28/2014

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During our "aerial overflight" of Beijing in class on Monday, we discussed the “Bird’s Nest” and other venues built for the 2008 Olympic Games. A great article from NPR explores what's happened at this former landmark, which has seen various failed schemes and dwindling numbers of visitors:

China's Post-Olympic Woe: How To Fill An Empty Nest (NPR)

Our class also considered the investment into this single building. The stadium's management estimates it will take 30 years to pay back the construction costs of 3 billion yuan ($480 million). To this day, the Bird's Nest has no regular tenant, requires $11 million each year to maintain (The Atlantic), and suffers from air pollution damage as well. These types of vanity projects are often called "white elephants" which The Los Angeles Times defines as "a big, expensive building that no longer serves a purpose."
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Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium (Source: David Gray / Reuters)
The rest of the Olympic venues are suffering far more. There's a sharply-worded photo series here that shows the contrast between the various Olympic buildings at their height of glory  in 2008 and the state of disrepair they've fallen into today. (The original Reuters album of "abandoned venues" photos has more detailed captions, with less snark.)
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The former kayak competition venue now sits dry (Source: David Gray / Reuters)
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Olympic baseball field (Source: David Gray / Reuters)
Caixin, an investigative publication in China, also has a good synopsis on Empty Nest Syndrome for Post-Olympics Beijing (Caixin), which delves into the financial structure of running the Bird's Nest today, which only sporadically hosts events. Some visitors may think it was worth it to build a landmark, but others are annoyed at the resources expended on the effort, which continues to drain coffers today.
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Beach volleyball stadium (Source: David Gray / Reuters)
Finally, we covered national investment into Olympic Games infrastructure and mentioned why paying for the whole shebang usually isn’t a good deal. Most examples in recent history show this as a poor investment for cities—see another article from an economics professor at Smith for the key "promises" of Olympics that almost never materialize—yet cities keep lining up to host these global events. One reason why is that they are popular with the public, despite their cost. (On the other hand, the World Cup provoked significant protests this year by people upset at lavish spending on stadiums while public services, especially for the poor and marginalized, remained underfunded.)

While there may be symbolic value in "coming out" to the world, particularly for China in 2008, the hollow shells that litter Beijing take on their own symbolism in today's urbanizing environment. For whom were these built, and what is left over after the rest of the world moves on?


As a bonus, here are some photos I took of the Bird's Nest under construction in 2007—a time when Facebook was not yet blocked in China.

—KH
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Paris is a Go!

10/27/2014

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Today, we celebrated our newest international collaboration! Caroline Nowacki, an alum of the International Urbanization Seminar, introduced us to her alma mater ESSEC—also known as the École Supérieure des Sciences Économiques et Commerciales. It is one of France's top business schools, located some 30 kilometers west of Paris.

For this project exploring social inequity in urban areas, we are collaborating with Patrice Noisette, the Academic Director of the Advanced Master's degree in Urban, Environmental and Services Management. The students in his class this fall are studying "Strategic and Operational Urban Development," including a set of lessons focusing on deprived urban areas, and social and economic renewal.
We are very proud to have Caroline return to our classroom as a guest lecturer. She oriented everyone to ESSEC as an institution and Paris as the city of study. We then watched a set of videos the ESSEC students created, based on their observations of Paris and the twin phenomena of "Gentrification" and "Urban Deprivation." The Stanford students will be making similar mind maps and videos explaining manifestations of social inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Some questions the ESSEC videos address include:
  • "How does it happen?" Some districts witness a multi-factor process of decay, whereas others encounter uncontrollable gentrification
  • "How can we design a strategy to counter these tendencies?"
  • "What kind of tools should be used?"
As soon as the first video played, featuring a handsome French student, the delighted giggles from the Stanford side rang out. Ah ... this will be an interesting exchange!

— Posted by Kevin Hsu

UPDATE: The content of the ESSEC-Stanford exchange can be found here: france.internationalurbanization.org
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Where are we From? (Fall 2014)

10/18/2014

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We have created a map showing the many different hometowns of the International Urbanization Seminar participants. This quarter, students come from five different countries, including China, the US, UK, Mexico and Singapore. The smallest town? 1.6 square miles. The most populous city? That depends if you're looking at the Urban core or the Metropolitan area.
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Stanford students are represented by a blue icon, while the Tsinghua students are demarcated by a green icon. Click on the image above to explore in more detail.

—KH
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LunchTime with Urban BeyonD Measure

10/15/2014

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This week, Deland and I participated in the Urban Beyond Measure luncheon for Stanford Global Studies (SGS) grant recipients. Thanks to the grant we received from Urban Beyond Measure, we were able to host the first Urban Sustainability Symposium this past June. We are excited to continue growing the "Urban Sustainability" series at Stanford.
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We greatly enjoyed meeting faculty from different disciplines—anthropology, political science, history, civil & environmental engineering, and performing arts were all represented—and forming a cadre of folks interested in tackling urban challenges together. It was also inspiring to hear about the diverse research and pedagogical approaches being taken in these disparate fields. Some people were digging through archives in London for resources about Afghanistan's cities; others were pulling together art projects and galleries related to India, or mapping incidences of crime in Egypt before and after the Arab Spring movement.

One anthropologist talked about investigating "civility" in the urban context, and it made me think of the Confucian ideal of a "harmonious" city and the promotion of li 禮 or "etiquette." This concept later evolved in Republican China, both through efforts of individual intellectuals, and by the Nationalist government's New Life Movement (新生活運動), which attempted to inspire greater community feeling and public spiritedness (公德心), as well as reaffirming basic etiquette in the streets and the public sphere.

I look forward to growing the Urban Sustainability initiative at Stanford, and the next step will be hosting the Urban Sustainability Design Expo on December 3, which will include our Tsinghua University partners and projects from the International Urbanization Seminar.

— Posted by Kevin Hsu
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