What Makes A City Perfect?

In his recent book about Leonardo Da Vinci, Walter Isaacson listed what, to Benedetto Dei in 1472, made Florence, Italy, perfect. See if you would apply these criteria to judge what cities have to have to be perfect today. What would you add to or subtract from Benedetto's list?

A Perfect City Would Have

1. Complete liberty

2. A large, rich, and elegantly dressed population

3. A river with clear, pure water and mills within its walls

4. Jurisdiction over castles, towns, lands and people

5. A university that teaches both Greek and accounting

6. Masters in every art: architecture, art, weaving, wood carving, literature, philosophy

7. Banks and business agents all over the world

In what order would you list the qualities that Benedetto used? And what order would you use for your list?

Priority: Eliminate generating electricity from fossil fuels

Not only Disneyland and China design model cities for the future, schoolgirls and young boys also use cereal boxes, LEGOs, and every other sort of building toy to create their own visions of home. What the Visions and Pathways 2040 project at the University of Melbourne did, that was a bit different, was design a greener, cleaner city AND a path to get there from here.

A group of 250 experts from various disciplines collaborated to determine how to reach the year 2040 with cities that cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 80%. They realized they could work with many technologies, such as bladeless wind turbines, solar panels on skyscrapers, and roof and vertical gardens, that already exist. But future suburbs might look very different with less privacy because of clustered townhouses with solar roofs. At the same time, indiscriminate land clearing outside cities and for housing developments would be replaced by forest preservation and regeneration of shade trees used to capture and store carbon dioxide. Urban dwellers would get around through local forests by electric transport, bike trails, and walkways. A CSIRO-developed Australian Stocks and Flows Framework helped model these new cities and the path to them.

The Melbourne project also identified the direct and indirect emissions cities would need to reduce or eliminate. Transport, landfill waste, and buildings caused about 16% of direct carbon dioxide emissions in cities. While the energy used by the heavy industry and agricultural production needed to supply cities also caused indirect emissions, the need for electricity generated almost half of a city's indirect carbon footprint. That meant replacing the fossil fuel burned by power stations with clean technologies was a priority.

Experts saw the transition to ecocities initiated by: 1) city governments that used sanctions to discourage businesses and organizations from carbon-producing activities or 2) citizen movements that foster cooperatives and engage in cultural, political, and economic decisions. By visiting visionsandpathways.com/, you can get the entire Visions and Pathways 2040 report. The challenges it presents are something to think and talk about during the holidays and before making a New Year's Resolution to help your community create a positive climate change.

Picture the World

Big Ben, double deck red buses, and the green grass of Wimbledon come to mind, when we think of London, as we have been doing during the Olympics. Paris has the Eiffel Tower; Rome, the Coliseum; Pisa, the Leaning Tower; and Sydney has its Opera House. The Taj Majal is associated with India, if not Agra, and the pyramids conjure up Egypt, if not Giza and Luxor. Now consider Buenos Aires, Timbuktu, and Shanghai. What landmarks are associated with these cities and others around the globe? How do people in these cities live? Maps tell young people where countries are, but pictures help make the abstract real.

     Photos have the power to introduce children to the landmarks and lifestyles of people in any city of the world. Why do many Olympic skiers come from Canada, Norway, and Germany? Using Google's "google maps," children can look at snowy photos of Quebec, Oslo, and Hamburg. Pictures of mosques, Buddhist temples, and cathedrals help children realize religious beliefs are different in Samarkand, Uzbekistan; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; and Oporto, Portugal. Based on the bicycles jammed together in photos of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, children can make some assumptions about physical fitness in these cities. Likewise, photos of motorcycles, subways, boats, and cars, as well as outdoor cafes, beaches, sporting events, and parades provide clues to the way people live.

     Thanks to the pictures and descriptions of Czech illustrator and author, Miroslav Sasek, in his "This is" series, children have been on an armchair tour of the world since 1959. His books go to Paris, London, Edinburgh, Ireland, Rome, Venice, Munich, Greece, Israel, Hong Kong, and Australia. Now, all the individual books have been included in a single volume, This is the World. Kathleen Pohl also has written a series of country books that cover Argentina, the Congo, Germany, Iran, Israel, Russia, Mexico, and Japan. Japan also is the subject of one of the 20 pocket-sized, accordion fold out "Panorama Pops" in the Candlewick Press series that also covers the cities of Paris, Rome, Venice, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, and Dublin.

      A number of books entitled Wonders of the World use photographs and text to introduce children to outstanding buildings, monuments, and engineering feats. Kids seven and up can test what they learned about the "Wonders of the World" (and "Countries of the World") by asking each other 180 trivia, true/false, and multiple-choice questions in history card games from MindWare (mindware.com).

     Look for hands-on ways children can experience global cultures. In New York City, students visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see Egyptian mummies, statues, and burial objects, but kits from the museum's store (store.metmuseum.org) bring Egypt to children 8 and older everywhere. An archaeological kit and manual enable youngsters to uncover secrets of a pyramid; another kit includes a ready to paint pyramid and a variety of Egyptian artifacts; and one of the museum's best sellers provides a guidebook, hieroglyphic alphabet chart, and 24 hieroglyphic stamps and an ink pad for writing original messages.

      The Book of Cities  by Philip Dodd and Ben Donald takes children on a photographic tour of 250 cities in 108 countries. Page after page, youngsters discover the natural features that dominate many cities: the Sierra Nevada mountains looming over Granada, Spain; the Atlas mountains that shadow Marrakesh, Morocco; the Himalayan peaks that rise above Kathmandu, Nepal; and the Alps that cradle Salzberg, Austria, and Zurich, Switzerland. Along the way, children also visit the African river towns of Bamako in Mali, Khartoum in Sudan, and the Congo's Brazzaville.

     Urge kids to start scrapbooks filled with their own pictures of foreign places and people from a variety of sources: newspapers, magazines, travel brochures, corporate annual reports, and pamphlets prepared by foreign embassies and consulates. I found a picture of Machu Picchu, Peru's 15th century Inca site, in an alumni magazine. Back issues of National Geographic, staples in used book and thrift stores, can give children a jump start for finding photos that provide a sense of different places. Every other year, the summer and winter Olympics offer an excellent opportunity to find photos of the city where the games are held. After the winter Olympics in 2014, children will be familiar with the Russian city of Sochi in the Caucasus Mountains on the Black Sea, and when the summer Olympics are held in 2016, they will see what life is like in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.