Starter kit for a city
Take 16 hogs, a lot of bottled water, and the Belt and Road Initiative
The quality of New York’s tap water is the stuff of fable: some bakers import it across the country for that “authentic” Big Apple taste in their bagels. The communitarian experiment Llano del Rio sprang out of the Mojave desert and grew into the longest surviving socialist colony in US history. And the backing of China’s Belt and Road Initiative helped Kenya build its Standard Gauge Railway, the country’s largest infrastructure project since independence. So why isn’t everyone happy?
This week at Public Seminar, Liviu Chelcea, Joscelyn Jurich, and Keren Zhu explore how the success of city infrastructure is complicated by the diverse needs of the people it has to please.
Testing the Waters in Gotham
Liviu Chelcea
Only a minority—some 20–21 percent—of New Yorkers drink straight tap at home. Manhattanites drink more tap water than the other boroughs. Most New Yorkers drink filtered water (30–31 percent), followed by bottled water (22–23 percent). About three-quarters of New Yorkers are “purists” who feel strongly about one type of water. The remaining quarter are flexible, using different combinations of tap, filtered and bottled, thus challenging the either-or characterizations of water drinkers. The choices are even more complex if one considers out-of-home habits. As one interviewee explained, “I drink tap water when I am at home, I get a bottle with me to get to my job, and there I drink from the water cooler.”
The New Silk Road
Keren Zhu
In 2019, I was one of three Chinese researchers who attended an Africa-China relations conference in Nairobi. The conference focused, in part, on the Chinese-financed Kenyan Standard Gauge Railway, which had become Kenya’s largest infrastructure project following independence. Since the railway has been successfully built, I was surprised by how conversations at the academic conference escalated into a heated debate between proponents of the project’s economic benefits and those concerned with its socio-environmental risks.
During one exchange, a local researcher stepped to the podium, pointed a finger at me, and exclaimed: “All Chinese should leave the country.”
Threshold Dwelling in the Ruins of Llano del Rio
Joscelyn Jurich
The Llano del Rio colony imagined an alternative to this modern city most concretely in the vision of Alice Constance Austin, a self-taught, upper-class radical feminist and socialist architect from Santa Barbara, who Harriman hired to create the plan for the colony’s circular city, one that was only partially realized. The daughter of a railroad and mining executive, she first became inspired by the model industrial city of Pullman, Illinois, and by workers’ housing she saw in Europe. Her vision for Llano del Rio was for a radial city with kitchen-less houses, underground delivery systems for hot meals and linens, communal daycare areas and laundries, built-in furniture, and heated tile floors to reduce the time of domestic work for women, which she conceived of as “the thankless and unending drudgery of an inconceivably stupid and inefficient system, by which her labors are confiscated.” Patios would allow for people to care for children communally.